Camas Harvest
© 2005 Gordon Friesen. See more here.

The First Nations of the Northwest Coast are most often associated with the salmon fishery and shellfish gathering, but at James Bay the Songhees people, who called this area home, took part in what can only be described as agricultural activity.

In the late spring to early summer families would camp on the shores of James Bay, near the place where St. Ann’s Academy is today. The place was known as Whosaykum, or ‘muddy place,’ because the low tide would expose great muddy banks that were ideal for the harvesting of clams and mussels.

Camas Plant. They can still be found
throughout James Bay in the spring.
© 2005 Gordon Friesen. See more here.

But that’s not the only reason they came here. They also came because much of the land we now call James Bay was covered in a wide open field, which in spring would fill up with a pretty blue flower known as camas. It has an edible bulb, much like an onion, but with a taste similar to sweet chestnuts.

The land was divided into hereditary plots where each family would cultivate and harvest camas. They would select and replant the strongest plants with the largest bulbs and remove the poisonous white camas in favour of the edible blue camas. This work was probably conducted by the women and children while the men were engaged in other activities such as hunting and fishing.

The camas harvests were productive enough to provide an abundant food source for the families who grew them, with a surplus to trade with neighbouring peoples such as the Nuu-chah-nulth of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Camas bulb in the ground
© 2005 Gordon Friesen.
See more here.

As part of their agricultural practices these Songhees families regularly burned the camas fields to clear away shrubs and brush while renewing the soil. This practice maintained the beautiful grassy meadows interrupted by small stands of stately oaks that Douglas encountered when he arrived to inspect the site for Fort Victoria in the summer of 1842. It was an ideal landscape in the eyes of a 19th century British explorer and trader causing him to remark “The place itself appears a perfect ‘Eden’ in the midst of the dreary wilderness of the North...one might be pardoned for supposing it had dropped from the clouds into its present position.” (Glazebrook, ed. The Hargrave Correspondence, p. 420). Though Douglas assumed it was a natural park, it was in fact the result of countless generations of toil by the ancestors of the Songhees Nation.

We may regret that this ‘Eden’ has been removed from their care, and so much of it paved over and filled with the bustle and noise of modern urban life, but at least we can remember and be thankful for their hardwork. For without it, it is unlikely there would have been the inspiration to create and maintain Beacon Hill Park these past 125 years.

Further Reading:
Songhees Nation website, www.songheesnation.com/html/history
Janis Ringuette, Beacon Hill Park History, 1842 - 2007, www.islandnet.com/beaconhillpark
Camas Chronicles
Janis Ringuette, “Camas Country” http://www.islandnet.com/beaconhillpark/articles/120_camas_country.htm
Grant Kedie, Songhees Pictorial: A History of the Songhees People as Seen by Outsiders 1790 - 1920. Victoria: RBCM, 2003.

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Long ago, the land that has become known as James Bay was part of the territory of the Songhees people. Before the arrivial of European settlers the Songhees were not a concrete political entity, the name refers to a group of autonomous but interconnected family groups who spoke the same dialect of the Salish language family, known as Lekwungen, and who had hereditary ties to the land that has since become the municipalities of Langford, Colwood, Esquimalt, Oak Bay, and Victoria, as well as a good part of the San Juan Islands.

To see evidence of the Songhees’s ancient occupation of this land simply go for a walk on the South East side of Beacon Hill. You will be sure to notice several great piles of boulders sitting amongst the dense grasses and underbrush. These are the remains of a whole slew of native burial cairns that once covered most of the seaward side of Beacon Hill.

Aboriginal burial cairns on Beacon Hill.
© 2005 Gordon Friesen. See more here.

Very little is known about the origins of these burial cairns. One theory suggests that they were built in the late eighteenth century to bury victims of the smallpox epidemic. Another suggests they were built over a long period started up to 1,500 years ago and continuing, perhaps right up until the arrival of European settlers in the 1840s.

Because of the great effort involved in building the cairns it is likely that those buried in the cairns were of high status in their community. Each body was placed in a shallow grave, covered in dirt and small stones, and then boulders were piled up around and on top of the body. The graves stretched from one to ten metres on a side and were up to 2 metres tall. Some of the boulders weighed over a ton and had to be transported from another location.

The European settlers in Victoria did not understand or respect the significance of the graves and the cairns became victims of curiosity and vandalism. When Douglas arrived to set up a Hudson Bay Company trading post in 1843 there were at least 23 burial cairns on the hill. In 1858 the largest of the graves at the top of the hill was excavated and the body, covered in a cedar bark mat, was removed. Many of the boulders from the other cairns were moved, or taken from the hillside before the beginning of the twentieth century.

Boulders from native burial cairns on Beacon Hill,
Photo by Joel Legassie.

In 1986 a Parks crew, unaware of their significance, moved some of the boulders so they could mow the grass. Though the boulders were eventually replaced under the supervision of Royal BC Museum Anthropolgist Grant Keddie, their current position is only an approximation of their original placement. These are the cairns that you can easily find just a short distance from the flagpole on top of Beacon Hill. But if you are adventurous there are others lying hidden in the thick undergrowth of the hillside.

These cairns are not unique to the Beacon Hill Park area. There are actually thousands of sites that had, or still have, burial cairns, all across the Capital Region. In fact the Beacon Hill site is typical in that the cairns are built on a hillside overlooking the water and a defensive village site. In this case the site of the defensive village was Finlayson Point, where archeologists have found a shell midden dating back about 1,000 years, as well as evidence of a defensive trench and houses built on the point.

Aboriginal village and defensive site on Finlayson Point
(904 A.D. to 1689 A.D)
© 2005 Gordon Friesen. See more here.

The burial cairns and archeological evidence show that compared with the mere 165 years the descendants of European immigrants have called this land home, the Songhees’ association with this area is much longer and deeper. In my next post I’m going to explore one of the ways that the Songhees used the land, while leaving a legacy that lives with us even today.

Further Reading:
This post draws heavily on the work of Janis Ringuette in her extensively researched History of Beacon Hill Park. For more detailed information on this subject visit: www.islandnet.com/beaconhillpark/articles/119_cairns.htm

Also see:
Camas Historical Group, Camas Chronicles of James Bay. Victoria, BC, 1978.

Grant Keddie. Songhees Pictorial: A History of the Songhees People as Seen by Outsiders (1790-1912). Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003.

Want to add something? Did I make a mistake? Join the discussion of this topic in the JamesBay.org Forum

Except where otherwise noted, this content is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Wherever I’ve lived I’ve always found myself wondering how people lived in that place before I got there. It is hard to imagine what James Bay was like without all the asphalt, buildings, and tourists, but I have spent some time recently looking into the pre-history of this area. The further back you go the dimmer and less certain things become, but there are a few things we can say about the arrival of the first people in this part of the world.

J.V. Wright in A History of the Native People of Canada, says that archeologists believe the first people to settle in this part of the world were part of what is called the Southwestern Coastal Culture. They have found stone tools, dolphin and seal bones, and other artifacts left behind by this culture as long as 10,000 years ago at the Glenrose Cannery on the Fraser River Delta, at Milliken in the Fraser River Canyon, and in Bear Cove on the Northeast coast of Vancouver Island.

The presence of large sea mammal bones at the coastal sites suggests that these people possessed considerable technology and skill in sea faring and probably used tools, such as boats, nets and snares, which have not survived to be discovered by archeologists.

While these archeological sites show that there were people in Southern British Columbia as long ago as 10,000 years ago, there is some controversy about their origins. One hypothesis is that they migrated from Alaska and the Yukon into the rest of North America through a narrow ice-free corridor that existed to the East of the Rocky Mountains between 45,000 and 15,000 years ago. From there they spread throughout North and South America eventually reaching the Southwestern Coast of what is now British Columbia from the Southern interior. Another theory suggests that some groups of people may have developed sea-faring technology and spread South down the Pacific Coast at about the same time, or even earlier, and from there penetrated into the interior of the continent.

While both hypotheses are certainly possible, there is not enough archeological evidence to make a sound judgment either way. Much of the coastline of 10,000 years ago is now underwater effectively hiding the secrets that may be held in ancient settlement sites. During this time period the interior route alongside the Rocky Mountains would have had few resources to entice nomadic hunters to stay in one place for long. Archeologists believe that if they took this route they would have been moving constantly in small groups, so any evidence of their migration would have been spread thinly over a wide area, and is unlikely to have lasted so long.

Regardless of how they got here, the groups that made up the Southwestern Coastal Culture settled in and began to develop the advanced cultural forms that European traders and explorers encountered when they arrived on the Pacific coast in the 18th Century. Archeologists believe that this culture developed across a number of different language groups and interrelated, but independent, family bands with considerable local variation over a period of several thousand years.

As the glaciers continued to recede the coastline began to look more and more like it does today, and the great Red Cedar forests took root, First Nations people adopted a pattern of seasonal migrations to take advantage of the resources available in different places at different times of the year.

In the winter they concentrated in coastal villages where they lived off shellfish, and hunted sea mammals. In the summer they followed the rivers upstream in smaller groups to catch salmon in the rivers and gather roots and berries on the mountainsides. They developed ways to preserve and store these abundant food sources, creating a surplus to carry them through the winter, and leaving a lot of energy free to develop complex rituals, social hierarchies, and highly developed art forms.

Because the First Nations’ use and conception of the land is so different from 21st century concepts, it is difficult to talk about the prehistory of what has become James Bay in isolation from the surrounding regions. However, the area in and around what we call James Bay today is very significant to the Songhees people, who occupied the area when it was settled by the Hudson Bay Company in the 1840s, and whose ancestors still live nearby, at the Songhees Reserve in Esquimalt. In the coming weeks I want to learn as much as I can about what this place meant to its original inhabitants, and how they lived here. I will be sharing what I learn in this blog, and I hope that others might take an interest and share what they know as well.

Further Reading:

Carlson, Keith Thor, ed. A Stó:lô Coast Salish Historical Atlas. Chilliwack: Stó:lô Heritage Trust, 2001.

Wilson Duff. The Indian History of British Columbia: The Impact of the White Man. Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, 1997.

Woodcock, George. Peoples of the Coast: The Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Wright, J.V. A History of the Native People of Canada: Volume I (10,000 – 1,000 B.C.). Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1995.