LITERARY LOCATION: Princeton & District Museum and Archives. 167 Vermilion Avenue, Princeton
Pause, if you will, to consider the value of your local archives. All over B.C. there are repositories of history that are used by researchers and authors such as long-time partners Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat who are board members of the Princeton & District Museum & Archives. As well as releasing seven albums by 2015, mostly of traditional Canadian heritage songs, they produced two books pertaining to Princeton and the Similkameen Valley. The first is a collection of vernacular verses from the pages of the local presses. The second is Soviet Princeton, recalling the most turbulent period of the town's history when aggrieved coal miners brought labour organizer Slim Evans to town to help them protest a 10% pay cut during the Great Depression.
ENTRY
Soon after they arrived to live in Princeton, cultural historians and musicians Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat mined the archives of Princeton, B.C. and Hedley for their unprecedented collection, Dead Horse on the Tulameen: Settler Verse from BC's Similkameen Valley (Canadian Folk Workshop: $25), a thorough follow-up to the pathfinding work of song-collector Phil Thomas. Complete with historical photos, this narrative and verse anthology is a rare reflection of pioneer life in B.C. The songs and poems of the Similkameen were subsequently featured on their CD entitled Now It's Called Princeton.
Their book Soviet Princeton revisits the volatile winter of 1932-34 when coal miners felt they had no other recourse other than to import labour organizer Arthur "Slim" Evans from the Workers Unity League to help them unionize. When miners from two of the three coal mines in the area responded to Evans' leadership, town fathers predictably denounced "outside agitators" and the "Communist menace." In fact, the most menacing force was the mounted police who charged into picket lines and some members of the Ku Klux Klan in British Columbia who assaulted and threatened workers, and a gang led by the Preside of the Board of Trade kidnapped Evans, bundling him onto a train out of town.
Evans soon returned. The labour strife was heightened by the federal government's creation of a Relief Camp north of town that had also attracted organizers from the Canadian Labour Defence League. The local newspaper, The Princeton Star, predictably sided with its advertising base, the business community. Bartlett and Ruebsaat gleaned the gist of the tense standoff between the town's establishment and the would-be unionists from the local archives that afforded access to the Depression-era issues of The Princeton Star. The strife served to strengthen the resolve of the undeniably heroic Slim Evans who led the On-to-Ottawa Trek of homeless and unemployed Canadians protesting the relief camps and their conditions. The book was shortlisted for a Roderick Haig-Brown regional prize.
The Princeton District Museum & Archives (PDMA) started from a log cabin in 1958. The town erected the existing building as a Centennial project in 1967 and the organization was incorporated under societies act as Princeton and District Pioneer Museum in 1970. It changed its name to the Princeton and District Museum and Archives Society in 1983. Livery Stables and a Farm Implement Shed were added in 1985. Its Joe Pollard Wing was built in 1999 to house 40,000 fossils and minerals.
As well as local pioneer items, the PDMA boasts a First Peoples basket display exhibiting various weaving styles and periods; the aforementioned fossil and mineral collection; a complete Princeton newspaper collection from 1900 through to the present; approximately 10,000 photographs from 1880 to present; more than 200 audiotape recordings (featuring pre-1980 interviews with Princeton pioneers); historic maps and mining reports from 1858 to present; a collection of 83 Notman Studios glass plate photographs (late 1800s--early 1900s); and an 1880s cabin which housed John Fall Allison's daughter Lily, her husband John Norman & their six children.
***
Hailed in their time as celebrated politicians, the legacy of white supremacists in BC’s past is under scrutiny in When Heroes Become Villains: Helmcken, Trutch, Bowser, and the Streets, Lakes, and Towns Named After Them.
BOOKS:
Dead Horse on the Tulameen: Settler Verse from BC's Similkameen Valley (Canadian Folk Workshop 2011) $25 978-0-9877255-0-9
Soviet Princeton (New Star 2015) $19 978-1-5542010-9-9
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2015]
Pause, if you will, to consider the value of your local archives. All over B.C. there are repositories of history that are used by researchers and authors such as long-time partners Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat who are board members of the Princeton & District Museum & Archives. As well as releasing seven albums by 2015, mostly of traditional Canadian heritage songs, they produced two books pertaining to Princeton and the Similkameen Valley. The first is a collection of vernacular verses from the pages of the local presses. The second is Soviet Princeton, recalling the most turbulent period of the town's history when aggrieved coal miners brought labour organizer Slim Evans to town to help them protest a 10% pay cut during the Great Depression.
ENTRY
Soon after they arrived to live in Princeton, cultural historians and musicians Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat mined the archives of Princeton, B.C. and Hedley for their unprecedented collection, Dead Horse on the Tulameen: Settler Verse from BC's Similkameen Valley (Canadian Folk Workshop: $25), a thorough follow-up to the pathfinding work of song-collector Phil Thomas. Complete with historical photos, this narrative and verse anthology is a rare reflection of pioneer life in B.C. The songs and poems of the Similkameen were subsequently featured on their CD entitled Now It's Called Princeton.
Their book Soviet Princeton revisits the volatile winter of 1932-34 when coal miners felt they had no other recourse other than to import labour organizer Arthur "Slim" Evans from the Workers Unity League to help them unionize. When miners from two of the three coal mines in the area responded to Evans' leadership, town fathers predictably denounced "outside agitators" and the "Communist menace." In fact, the most menacing force was the mounted police who charged into picket lines and some members of the Ku Klux Klan in British Columbia who assaulted and threatened workers, and a gang led by the Preside of the Board of Trade kidnapped Evans, bundling him onto a train out of town.
Evans soon returned. The labour strife was heightened by the federal government's creation of a Relief Camp north of town that had also attracted organizers from the Canadian Labour Defence League. The local newspaper, The Princeton Star, predictably sided with its advertising base, the business community. Bartlett and Ruebsaat gleaned the gist of the tense standoff between the town's establishment and the would-be unionists from the local archives that afforded access to the Depression-era issues of The Princeton Star. The strife served to strengthen the resolve of the undeniably heroic Slim Evans who led the On-to-Ottawa Trek of homeless and unemployed Canadians protesting the relief camps and their conditions. The book was shortlisted for a Roderick Haig-Brown regional prize.
The Princeton District Museum & Archives (PDMA) started from a log cabin in 1958. The town erected the existing building as a Centennial project in 1967 and the organization was incorporated under societies act as Princeton and District Pioneer Museum in 1970. It changed its name to the Princeton and District Museum and Archives Society in 1983. Livery Stables and a Farm Implement Shed were added in 1985. Its Joe Pollard Wing was built in 1999 to house 40,000 fossils and minerals.
As well as local pioneer items, the PDMA boasts a First Peoples basket display exhibiting various weaving styles and periods; the aforementioned fossil and mineral collection; a complete Princeton newspaper collection from 1900 through to the present; approximately 10,000 photographs from 1880 to present; more than 200 audiotape recordings (featuring pre-1980 interviews with Princeton pioneers); historic maps and mining reports from 1858 to present; a collection of 83 Notman Studios glass plate photographs (late 1800s--early 1900s); and an 1880s cabin which housed John Fall Allison's daughter Lily, her husband John Norman & their six children.
***
When Heroes Become Villains:
Helmcken, Trutch, Bowser, and the Streets, Lakes, and Towns Named After Them
by Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson (New Star Books $18)
Helmcken, Trutch, Bowser, and the Streets, Lakes, and Towns Named After Them
by Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson (New Star Books $18)
Review by Tom Hawthorn
Hailed in their time as celebrated politicians, the legacy of white supremacists in BC’s past is under scrutiny in When Heroes Become Villains: Helmcken, Trutch, Bowser, and the Streets, Lakes, and Towns Named After Them.
Two years ago, several blue signs on a leafy street in Victoria’s Fairfield neighbourhood were replaced. Gone was Trutch Street. The new name would be Su’it (pronounced say-EET) Street from a Lekwungen word meaning “truth.”
About 200 people gathered for the unveiling at a ceremony attended by the mayor, elders, chiefs, a linguist, neighbourhood residents and some university students who launched the renaming campaign as a contribution to reconciliation and decolonization.
The renamed two-block street once served as the western border of a large estate of several acres held by Sir Joseph Trutch, who served as the first lieutenant governor of British Columbia after the colony joined Confederation. Trutch was a popular and celebrated politician in his time and, eventually, streets in the capital, Vancouver, Richmond, Chilliwack and Clearwater would all carry his name as did an island, a creek, a hamlet in the Peace district and a peak in the Rocky Mountains.
While contemporaries and successors honoured Trutch, his poisonous legacy can be felt in British Columbia to this day. As chief commissioner of lands and works, Trutch was responsible for handling First Nations reserves. A cruel white supremacist, he sought to reverse the paternalistic approach of Governor James Douglas, who felt Indigenous peoples “should in all respects be treated as rational beings, capable of acting and thinking for themselves.” Trutch forced nations onto tiny reserves, seeking to deny them title to land and to thwart their connection to the natural world. “The Indians really have no right to the lands they claim,” he wrote in a report, “nor are they of any actual value or utility to them.”
More than a century later, the first of a series of court cases determined that Aboriginal title over ancestral territories remained unextinguished, compelling the provincial government to negotiate treaties and agreements, a process continuing today.
“These days,” note the authors Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson, “many of these ‘heroes’ now look more like racists and sociopaths.”
Bartlett and Robertson’s polemic, When Heroes Become Villains, which runs just 74 pages of text plus another 20 of notes and an index, confronts the commemoration of three British Columbians: Trutch, his colonial counterpart Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, and premier William John Bowser. Trutch and Helmcken were two of three representatives sent to Ottawa to negotiate the colony’s entry into Confederation, while Bowser was a long-serving Conservative politician who broke miners’ strikes and forced immigrants from Austria-Hungary into internment camps during the First World War. A community of about 2,000 people north of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island carries his name.
The authors accuse Dr. Helmcken of failing to do his duty during an outbreak of smallpox by not immunizing the Indigenous residents living near Victoria, especially those in temporary encampments. Many were forced away from the city to their home villages, where they spread the disease, devastating the Indigenous population.
The authors make a forceful case for renaming features commemorating those clearly seen as villains today. “Social justice movements have illuminated how questionable the complicated legacies of people like these are,” they write, “and have resulted in a swell of calls for such place names to be replaced with ones that more reflect values we all can support.”
Trutch is so clearly villainous a figure that streets bearing his name have already been renamed in Vancouver (Musqueamview Street, or šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓) and Richmond (Point Avenue, after Steven Point, the lawyer who served as Grand Chief of the Stó:Lo Tribal Council before becoming the province’s first Indigenous lieutenant general).
The authors suggest features named for the coal baron father-son duo of Robert and James Dunsmuir, as well as Dr. Israel Powell, who banned potlatch ceremonies and after whom the city of Powell River is named, might be deserving of a change. (The regional district surrounding the Sunshine Coast city has already taken the name qathet Regional District.)
In Canada and around the world, the renaming of places and the knocking down of statues have in many cases been met by reaction, sometimes violently so. The authors do not engage with the arguments or anxieties in opposition to altering commemorations in this short book.
As well, the authors mostly limit their scope to British Columbia, though other Canadian jurisdictions have over the years wrestled with the meaning of names. In 1916, as Canadians fought on the Western Front during the First World War, residents of the Ontario city of Berlin voted to change the name in response to anti-German sentiment. They chose Kitchener after a British admiral only recently killed in action when his battleship struck a German mine.
The following year, the venerable House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha also surrendered to popular prejudice. We know them today as the House of Windsor.
A name change, whether by popular demand or royal proclamation, often simply needs time for acceptance.
9781554202126
Tom Hawthorn’s most recent book is The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country: The Centennial of 1967 (D&M, 2017).
BOOKS:
Dead Horse on the Tulameen: Settler Verse from BC's Similkameen Valley (Canadian Folk Workshop 2011) $25 978-0-9877255-0-9
Soviet Princeton (New Star 2015) $19 978-1-5542010-9-9
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2015]