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.