Settling Vancouver: A (Very) Brief Overview
As a newcomer to Canada and to the Vancouver area, I wanted to find out more about how and when the area was settled and what happened to the people who were already here. Please note that I’m still learning, so I’ve likely missed things. It’s also illuminating to keep in mind that much of the action happened about 100 to 150 years ago aka great-grandparent years ago for many millennials. For some readers, these activities would have been contemporary for your parents or grandparents.
Time Immemorial to the 1850s
By all accounts, settlement of the people now known as Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh has been since time immemorial. For example, Musqueam people have been living continuously at their main winter village, Xwméthkwyiem, at the mouth of the Fraser River, for 4,000 years. The largest Musqueam village, c̓əsnaʔəm, with occupation going back 5000 years, is located in the area now commonly known as Marpole.
In the late 1700s, British explorers begin landing in Western Canada. Captain Cook arrived in BC in 1778, and the first recorded contact between George Vancouver and Nisga’a people occurred in 1793. For context, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was established in 1760 and had become the de facto government in the area we know today as Canada.
It’s important to note that settlement in the Americas brought disease that spread north and west. These new diseases killed an estimated 80–95% of Indigenous people in the areas surrounding what we now call the Strait of Georgia in the 1600s and 1700s. New settlements in the 1800s brought new diseases again, and the 1862 smallpox epidemic is estimated to have killed 1 in 3 people Indigenous to this area.
Settling the Lower Mainland
Despite unimaginable losses, Indigenous people lived in thriving communities at the turn of the 20th century in what’s today the Lower Mainland. For example, Squamish people lived until quite recently in places now named Stanley Park, Kitsilano and False Creek, and Burrard Inlet. Sen̓áḵw, the ancient village site what’s now known as Kitsilano, was home to about 150 Squamish people living in 20 houses in the early 1900s. This video shows Musqueam traditional territory and village sites, and here is a timeline.
Vancouver: A Visual History, by Bruce Macdonald, shows this on a map:
Settlers didn’t live on Burrard Inlet and English Bay before the early 1860s. Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people were actively living there. Plus, settlers instead wanted access to the BC interior via New Westminster and the Fraser River.
Until gold was discovered on the Thompson River in 1856 and Fraser River in 1858, settlers in BC were organized into two *small* fur trading districts (New Caledonia and Columbia) in British North America. Fort Langley, for example, was established with 25 men in 1827 to trade fur with Kwantlen people. In 1846, HBC moved their 150-man headquarters to Fort Victoria, Vancouver Island. HBC’s chief executive, James Douglas, governed Vancouver Island under a British charter to HBC. (The settlement of Vancouver Island would be a good write up for another time. The area is noted for the first Indigenous treaties in BC, but also egregious land and resource grants stemming from HBC’s vast powers vested in the Vancouver Island charter.)
Gold Rush Panic and the Land Title System
In 1858 settlers found gold on the Fraser River. News traveled quickly to California, and within weeks 30,000 or more American prospectors flooded into the Fraser Canyon, a significant influx compared to the existing population (in the 1860s and 1870s First Nations in British Columbia still largely outnumbered the European and other immigrants, with Cail estimating 10,000 white settlers in 1871 compared to 50,000 Indigenous people).
To manage land claims, an alarmed James Douglas asked UK Parliament to declare the Lower Mainland a British colony. The Crown established the colony in November 1858, and the first public auction of lands took place that same year in Fort Langley, Fort Hope, and Fort Yale (Cail, 11).
Lytton, as a representative from the colonial office, corresponded with Douglas on measures Douglas should take to control speculation (Cail, 10):
- Control price and credit: Sell land at auction and for at least $1/acre with prompt payment. Lytton said, “I cannot caution you too strongly against allowing it to be disposed of at too low a sum.” Land ended up being sold for half of that value with only a deposit required.
- Survey first: Open land for settlement gradually and only sell what has been surveyed. Surveying was very expensive and time-consuming, so pre-emption rights were granted instead.
- Require bona-fide settlement: Recognize the existing diversity of people in the colony and naturalize anyone who asks for it (and then the can be eligible to acquire land). A suggestion by Douglas to save 25% of the lots in New Westminster for British subjects was found by Lytton to be “entirely objectionable” and that it would “stimulate the acquisition of property by non-residents” (Cail, 20).
The colony was required to be financially self-supporting, and the only sources of revenue were land sales, a 10% customs duty, and liquor and mining licenses. So, from 1859 to 1864, Douglas sold large acreages at nominal prices to bring in revenue for the colony. Douglas hired police, judges, and engineers to survey towns, build roads, and regulate mining.
By 1861, selling land to raise money for the colony wasn’t working well enough. The colony had also learned about how land costs and parcel sizes slowed down alienation in Victoria, and didn’t want the same situation on the Mainland. So Douglas agreed with the colonial office to reduce the price of land, allow settlers to take 160-acre “vacant” unsurveyed Crown land parcels, add improvements, purchase it at a discount, and optionally purchase an additional 480 acres. This became the Pre-emption Act of 1860 and marks the beginnings of our Land Title system in BC.
Speculation
The Pre-emption Act was intended to stave off speculation by controlling who could get land — farmers for agricultural land, timber leases to saw mill operators, etc. The idea of “beneficial use” was intended to make sure that people who received land would use it.
From the 1871 Confederation to the early 1900s, the BC government considered land to be “plentiful and useless”, so no one should be hindered from buying it (Cail, 6).
Well, except for Indigenous people.
The first land survey around the Burrard Inlet was completed in 1863. It identified a few townsites, government and military reserve lands, and legitimized some private lots that had already been pre-empted (Macdonald, 14–17). Plus, the Colonial government began establishing Indian Reserves.
The Land Ordinance of 1870 restricted pre-emption further. Pre-emptors were forbidden to hold two claims at once, and improvements had to be made to the value of $2.50 an acre. After four years of bona fide and continuous use, and once the property had been surveyed, land could be bought at $1.00 per acre in four annual instalments.
However, the Pre-emption act did not specify conditions for distributing the land. So large parcels were snapped up by speculators, including 3,750 acres (1,517 hectares) by Moody himself. And, until the mid-1860s, there was no central land registry, either.
Further, no one enforced beneficial use until 1909. In other words, no one checked whether the land purchaser was developing and using the land. And, no one checked if the land was actually “vacant” in the first place. The sale of land continued in this way until the entire Department of Lands was reorganized in 1912. And, this doesn’t even count the 18.7+ million acres of land that were given away to railway companies before 1913 for both railway rights-of-way and grants-in-aid to finance the railway development through real estate development (Cail, 293).
Displacement
From 1858 to 1862, 254 pre-emptions were recorded on the Mainland, representing about 50,000 acres of land. You can see the dramatic change in 10 years in the Lower Mainland by comparing this Bruce Macdonald showing the 1860s to the previous one we saw above.
This time of pre-emptions in the early 1860s was also the same time when Richard Moody and the Royal Engineers started to define and mark out Indian Reserves in the Lower Mainland. For context, Indigenous people still vastly outnumbered settlers, and no land agreements had been made. But through surveying about 0.3% of the Province’s land area became Indian reserves, with the rest set aside for settlement (railways) and resource extraction (Harris, C., 261). As Harris writes, “The Indian reserve geography was imposed. It was not part of a discussion of Aboriginal title or negotiations leading toward treaties to establish the terms of co-existence between Indigenous people and a settler society” (Harris, D., 336).
Many Indian Reserves were originally set out as 1000+ acres, reduced to less than 100 acres, and then reduced even more through subsequent land acts that made it harder for Indigenous people to retain land. This happened in contravention of the Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763, which re-affirmed the allotment of reserves, recognized Aboriginal Title, and prohibited the sale or settlement of unceded land. Part of the purpose of the Pre-emption Act was to prevent Indigenous people from retaining land, based on the judgement of a Royal Engineer about whether the land was being “used” or not. In the 1860s and 1870s, many Indigenous families complained to the government about settlers pre-empting their lands, and even their burial grounds. But no surveyors were sent out to locate Indigenous lands until (Cail 348–352).
Looking at Sen̓áḵw as an example, under the 1876 Indian Act and the Joint Reserve Commission established by the Provincial and Federal Governments to deal with land allotments to indigenous people in B.C., the government allotted about 34 hectares (84 acres) to the Squamish Nation in 1877 and called it Kitsilano Indian Reserve №6. The same area was first identified on a surveyor’s map in 1869 (Harris, D., 334–5). Land (10.5 acres) was taken out of the reserve by CPR in the 1880s (Harris, D. 341–355). To be clear, CPR did not have the authority to alienate reserve land. Nevertheless, the land was taken, as shown in this 1936 map.
Another example is the Musqueam reserve at the mouth of the Fraser River north arm. Under 1873 policy, the BC government would allot twenty acres to each family of five, which would have been 1,197 more acres for the seventy families living there, on top of the reserve’s existing 314 acres (of which 114 acres were “quite useless”).
As Angela Sterritt writes, the 1911 amendment to the Indian Act made it legal to remove Indigenous people without their consent from reserves located within an incorporated town or city (see also: Harris, D., 361). So, 36 years after having been moved to Kitsilano Indian Reserve №6, the province intimidated residents into leaving, did not get federal consent (Indian Act didn’t require Squamish consent), and then torched their homes. Residents were barged to two other reserves. In the meantime, the City and Park Board aggressively tried to take this land for park land, and the City extracted rents from leaseholders. In 2000, members of the Squamish Nation voted in favour of a $92.5-million land-claims settlement, resulting from the 1977 legal case. In 2000, the BC Supreme Court ruled that 10.5 acres should revert to Canada in trust as Reserve land, and in 2002 4.7 hectares of the original 34 hectares of reserve land was returned (Harris, D. 381–2).
In short, not only did the province and the federal government change laws to make it legal to take land, but they also didn’t follow the laws they created to take land.
Land Use Law
Often settlers or their descendants justify the current land use system and property holdings by mentioning that land was taken legally. There are two issues with this statement:
- The legal basis for taking the land “legally” is questionable. Many legal scholars have looked into this. As UBC Law Professor Douglas Harris writes, “Canadian courts have not taken the preliminary step of interrogating the historical legitimacy of European and then Canadian claims to sovereignty. The SCC has gestured tentatively towards the issue, but has not addressed it directly, let alone resolved it, even in Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia where the Court for the first time recognized a specific territory as Aboriginal title lands (Harris, D., 329).
- Just because something is legal, does not mean it is moral, just, or right. The apartheid system created in Canada for the subjugation of Indigenous peoples was copied and then implemented in South Africa, with reserves, status cards, travel passes, etc.
Instead, what needs to be recognized is that colonial, BC, and federal leadership chose to make immoral actions legal in order to claim land and resources for themselves. Harris writes, “With few exceptions, these reserves were not the product of treaty-making or other agreement […], but instead were state-constructed property interests within a land policy designed to impose territorial constraints on the Indigenous presence” (Harris, D., 330).
Implications for Today
Today the BC government’s speculation tax is based on the same basic idea of “beneficial use” as the anti-speculation measures put in place 150 years ago. The speculation tax creates a financial cost for people who buy homes without living in them. Compare this to what Cail wrote in 1956:
“For fifty years the official documents, correspondence, and reports dealing with land were filled with innumerable references either to the existence — or to the fear of existence — of speculators. Starting with Douglas and continuing to present time, the Land Act tries to make it impossible for land to be taken up for any other purpose than that of beneficial use. Provided that the land was to be used in all good faith by the settler, almost unlimited quantities of it could be had for many years for practically nothing. For this reason, clauses inserted in every act stipulated that pre-emptors must begin occupation within a specified period and make certain improvements by a definite date after recording the pre-emption. Failure to do so would result in forfeiture of the pre-emption, whether agricultural, mineral, or timer lands were sought. But because no effective administrative machinery was provided until after 1900, such regulatory clauses were often disregarded completely.”
Further, there is a sort of collective amnesia on Vancouver’s westside as it comes to development of, say, the Jericho Lands, Arbutus Greenway, and Kitsilano IR №6, with calls from homeowner groups to be consulted on proposed development.
It would take a distinct lack of historical perspective to think that speculation and displacement is new to Vancouver. In fact, just a bit of historical perspective shows how land speculation, along with the lack of proactive policies/regulations to prevent it or enforcement to stall it, has existed since settlement began in the Lower Mainland.
More Reading
To learn more, check out these readings:
- Cail, R. E. 1956. Disposal of crown lands in British Columbia, 1871–1913 (T). University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0107138
- Harris, Cole. Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia. UBC Press, 2003. https://www.ubcpress.ca/making-native-space
- Harris, Douglas C. “Property and Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve and a Canadian City” (2017) 50:2 UBC L Rev 321 321. https://commons.allard.ubc.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1393&context=fac_pubs
- Macdonald, Bruce. Vancouver: A Visual History. Talonbooks, 1992. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2854230-vancouver
- Musqueam online mapping and storytelling website: https://www.musqueam.bc.ca/our-story/musqueam-territory/place-names-map/
- Roy, Susan. These Mysterious People: Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community. McGill-Queens University Press, 2016.
- Sterritt, Angela. “The little-known history of Squamish Nation land in Vancouver.” CBC News: 21 April, 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/little-known-history-of-squamish-nation-land-in-vancouver-1.5104584
