Jack Nylund's reading (letter, June 20 Citizen) of David Vogt and Alexander Gamble's excellent review of the dispossession of Lheidli from their lands in the early 20th century illustrates a familiar phenomenon: if one believes devoutly in a perspective - here the legitimacy of colonialism - you'll see only what you want to.
Far from showing that the forced relocation is a myth, Vogt and Gamble fully establish the complex manoeuvres used by an informal alliance of the Grand Trunk Railway, the Department of Indian Affairs, local entrepreneurs and the Roman Catholic Church to get their way: shipping the natives up the river to Shelley, thereby making way for the railway and urban development.
That, Mr. Nylund, is why the ironic and rhetorical title of the report is about cheating "the Indians!"
Because federal regulations required official concurrence of bands to relinquish reserve land, there were indeed several meetings and votes among the Lheildi on the land surrender.
The first of these meetings narrowly approved the land transfer; the second unanimously disapproved, and then later, with many, largely unfulfilled promises of money, new housing, good farmland etc., the vote again was to relocate.
Recall of course that these votes were all male, a white imposed rule that flew in the face of the pivotal role of the matriarchs in Dakelh political culture. And as was so often the tragic case across North America, agreements were not lived up to, which is precisely why a commissioner at the McKenna McBride Royal Commission wondered aloud about whether the feds had intended to cheat the Lheidli.
What Mr. Nylund also seems unaware of is the role of arson in "persuading" the Lheidli to move to Shelley. For sure, the entire village was razed only after the relocation had happened, done quite probably to eliminate any possibility that disgruntled Lheidli T'enneh might move back (a reflection made by Father Coccola, the Catholic priest, whom Voight and Gamble quote on this).
But that was not the by any means the first fire set: in a stunning memoir published nearly 40 years later, the Indian Agent at the time of the removal, William McAllan, blithely reports and reflects on having hired arsonists to burn down a village dwelling whose owners McAllan knew to be away hunting.
This so terrified the Lheidli villagers many of whom had been still refusing the relocation, that compliance with removal was immediate. You can almost hear McAllan chuckling as he mused, "I often wonder what the story of the 'Moving of the Fort George Indians' would have been had we not resorted to arson."
Voight and Gamble's paper closes in a spirit utterly opposite to what Mr. Nylund deduced: "The surrender of Fort George Reserve No. 1 in 1911 was one instance in a general pattern of aboriginal dispossession in British Columbia... the case illustrates the processes and influences present in a particular form of this dispossession, involving land acquisition for railway purposes."
I do agree with Mr. Nylund on one thing: the article - which is not, by the way 72 pages but rather 17 pages long - needs to closely studied by Citizen readers, indeed by all non-natives living in unceded Lheidli territory. It is essential reading if settler denial is to be reduced and reconciliation achieved.
Norman Dale
Prince George
