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Clayoquot Sound protest in 1993.
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British Columbia’s history is often told through a particular lens. Think Captain George Vancouver sailing triumphantly up the Northwest Coast; the excitement of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush; settlers celebrating the glory of Queen Victoria’s birthday in this new land.
“It’s kind of a fraud,” says Nlaka’pamux playwright Kevin Loring in a new documentary series, British Columbia: An Untold Story. It aims to tell a more diverse, inclusive and accurate history of B.C. – one that’s not always so exciting or glorious.
“It’s important to know that the history is way more nuanced than what we think we understand about what happened here,” says Mr. Loring, one of many people whose stories weave together to form the narrative.
“All of our lenses matter and equal up to the whole of history,” says series producer Leena Minifie, who is a member of the Gitxaala Nation, in the province’s North Coast region. “History is so compartmentalized and sometimes myopic if you’re just looking at one thing.”
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The first episode begins with the Fraser Canyon War, sparked in 1858 by tensions exploding between often armed wealth-seeking foreign miners (mainly American) and the Indigenous people who had lived there for millennia.
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In the four-part docuseries commissioned by the provincial broadcaster Knowledge Network, the endless beauty shots of the gorgeous terrain are set against sometimes horrifying history lessons.
The first episode begins with the Fraser Canyon War, sparked in 1858 by tensions exploding between often armed wealth-seeking foreign miners (mainly American) and the Indigenous people who had lived there for millennia. Events that followed were also fuelled by political interests: British colonizers were worried about the U.S. claiming what is now the province of British Columbia as their territory.
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Women in a munitions factory during the First World War.
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The opening episode also addresses the 1862 smallpox epidemic, the residential schools tragedy, the potlatch ban and the resulting imprisonment of several participants of Indigenous chief Dan Cranmer’s famous 1921 potlatch in the village of Memkumlis. “They were treated like criminals for being who they are,” says his granddaughter, Donna Cranmer.
When smallpox was introduced to the territory during the gold rush, as much as one-third of the Indigenous population died in a single winter. “It was a population catastrophe,” says John Belshaw, author of Becoming British Columbia: A Population History, in the documentary. “And there’s no memorial in the province at all to that.”
To stop the spread, Tsilhqot’in clans were asked to separate and live on their own for a full year. When the colony tried to build a highway through their territory to the goldfields north of Quesnel, the Tsilhqot’in resisted. As the documentary explains, the road-building crew, uncertain how to respond to this opposition, issued a threat: let us do our work, or we’ll bring back smallpox.
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While most of the series was shot before COVID-19 hit, some physically distanced shooting needed to be done in the summer of 2020.
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Not exactly the history lessons kids have been taught in the education system.
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“I’ve lived in British Columbia all my life and certainly the stories we ended up sharing are not the ones I was exposed to growing up or while in school … even in university,” says writer/director Kevin Eastwood. “I thought I knew about the history of this place.”
And that history has ongoing contemporary resonance, Mr. Eastwood adds. “These aren’t things in the rear-view mirror. This is stuff that’s still part of the fabric of conflicts – stories and issues that [are] still on the front page every day.”
The series also examines labour history; immigration and racism – including the internment of Japanese-Canadians and the Komagata Maru incident; and the tension between natural resources extraction and environmental concerns.
Early on in the project, when Ms. Minifie and Mr. Eastwood were looking for interview subjects, one person told them: “I’m not interested in participating unless you guys are actually going to be comfortable telling the fact that the history of British Columbia is the history of the construction of a white supremacist state,” Mr. Eastwood recalls. (They declined to identify who said this, but said this point of view was echoed by numerous people they approached.)
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The series examines labour history; immigration and racism – including the internment of Japanese-Canadians and the Komagata Maru incident.
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Although Mr. Eastwood is white, the four-year project was made by an almost entirely BIPOC crew and creative team – including stunning cinematography by Alfonso Chin and Michael Bourquin, and a hypnotic score composed by Cris Derkson. Indigenous protocols were followed and there was diversity, equity and inclusion training. After conducting interviews, Mr. Eastwood would ask the other crew members who were there if they had any questions to add.
While most of the series was shot before COVID-19 hit, some physically distanced shooting needed to be done in the summer of 2020. For interviews on Haida Gwaii, where they could not travel, the team hired a local, all-Haida crew, while Mr. Eastwood directed remotely through an iPad set-up.
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Three horse-drawn chuckwagons on the Tuckozap Indian Reserve.
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With the series being released Oct. 12, Ms. Minifie says she’s thinking a lot about the young people who will watch it. “I just am really excited about having kids and youth be able to potentially see themselves … reflected in history – like I was never able to see as a kid,” she says.
“If we can offer that to the next generation so they can see themselves and see that their history and their family stories and their cultural and nations’ stories matter, that’s the most important thing.”
The series premieres Oct. 12 at 9 p.m. Pacific on Knowledge Network and will stream across Canada on knowledge.ca.
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