historical notes

The Texada land scandal was an actual event, and was the subject of the First Royal Commission in British Columbia. It was a circumstance that I felt revealed some of the underlying sentiments that existed then, among settlers and among the people of First Nations. These inclinations also reveal sentiments that underpinned the social and political structures that were in place during late colonial British Columbia. Whether overt or not, by their very nature, these sentiments had a hand in facilitating the calculated transfer of all land in the Province of British Columbia, from the collective First Nations, to the Crown. The form that the land policy eventually took, ultimately resulted in the smothering of First Nations culture – not one culture, viewed collectively, but many individual Nations, that were each unique unto themselves.