The Terror of the Coast. Chris Arnett
been reported that some Indians had been troublesome there.” The British, as Lieutenant Mayne recalled, “found however, that the Indians had done nothing more than tell the settlers occasionally, as Indians do everywhere, that they (the whites) had no business there except as their guests, and that all the land belonged to them.” 76 Mayne was sympathetic to Hwulmuhw claims for compensation for alienated land on Salt Spring Island and he realized the difficulty of applying Hwunitum concepts of ownership against the ancient and complex indigenous system of land tenure.
It appeared to be most desirable here, as at other places, that the Indians should be duly paid for their land. This is not so simple as it may seem, however, even supposing the money necessary for such a purpose to be forthcoming. In New Zealand the Government spent many thousand pounds purchasing the land, appointing agents, commissioners, &c., and something of the same is no doubt as necessary here. Vancouver Island, however, has no revenue available or sufficient for such a purpose, and of course the revenue of British Columbia cannot, while the two colonies are distinct, be applied to it. Another difficulty would be found in the conflicting claims of the various tribes, arising from their habits of polygamy and inheritance from the female side, together with the absence of any documentary or satisfactory evidence of title.
If, therefore, any one chief or tribe were paid for a piece of land without the acknowledgement on the part of adjacent tribes of the vendor’s right to the land sold, five or six other claimants would in all probability come forward asserting the land to be theirs, and founding their title to it upon some intermarriage of its former possessors. The difficulty arising from the Indian custom of descent from the female side are most perplexing … Admiral Island, [Salt Spring Island] for instance, of which I am now speaking, would, in all probability, be claimed by no less than four tribes, viz., the Cowitchin, the Penalikutson [Penelakut], a small tribe living among these islands, the Nanaimos, and Saanitch Indians. On the occasion of our present visit, the settlers, in reference to this subject, said the Indians had never been there before, and that they had established a village there [at the head of Ganges Harbour] for the sole purpose of asserting their claim to compensation to the land. Upon our telling one of them this, he pointed to a small stump by which we were standing, and said it marked his father’s grave, where he had buried him three years ago [1857]—long before any white settler came to the place. 77
The unregulated mixing of transient Hwunitum and Hwulmuhw residents in the Gulf Islands led to more incidents of violence as Hwunitum, often in ignorance, transgressed Hwulmuhw laws and paid the penalty. Following the gold rush of 1858, an unknown number of Hwunitum were killed for trespass, insults, molestation of women or in retaliation for other wrongs, real or imagined. Some attacks had the acquisition of wealth as their objective. However, as one Hwunitum observed: “nine-tenths of the outrages perpetrated by natives upon the superior race, and supposed to be the result of insensate cruelty, can be traced to some wanton violation of the personal or domestic rights of the Indians on the part of the whites.” 78
Alcohol, a major feature of inter-racial contact, often served as a catalyst for violence. Oshiane Mitchell relates an incident that occurred in one of the houses at Penelakut:
The boat with the white people anchored off the big house. Like the big house down here at Chemainus. One man came in and wanted to sell. Nobody’s talking. Don’t understand what he say. “You guys drinkin’? I’d like to give you a drink,” that apple cider was in a can. “Here you are.” In the big house, this was the women [indicates a line], this was the man’s [another separate line]. Not drinking, the women. The men drink some more, they got very drunk. The whites want to give some of that to the women. No [said the men, indicating the line of women] this is the women. We want more, you got lots. We want some more, more. They try and dump it. Then they went out to the boat and got all the things. Some got the hatchets, some got the long knives. The white people, they died. 79
People from the village of Lamalcha at the south end of Kuper Island “did not like these white men coming.” 80 Because their lands on Salt Spring Island were being occupied and used, in most cases without their permission, certain individuals associated with the eight households of Lamalcha emerged as leading opponents of Hwunitum colonization. The preeminent Lamalcha si’em, Squ’acum, was described as “a powerful chief,” and is remembered today as a “war man” who was “mean to the whites.” 81
While the Lamalcha opposed Hwunitum occupation of their land, they embraced Hwunitum technology. They adopted Hwunitum clothes, used whaleboats as well as canoes, and practiced Hwunitum carpentry. At the centre of the village was a large blockhouse built of squared timbers “well-morticed and tennoned,” and loopholed on three sides for muskets and rifles. 82 Eight feet in height, it may have been modelled after Hwunitum blockhouses built the previous decade on Whidbey and San Juan Islands. Rifle pits surrounded the fort. In addition to these defences, Lamalcha was well-situated geographically, with the houses of the village at the head of a crescent-shaped bay, flanked by two points of land. On each point were “lookouts” where warriors kept watch. Lamalcha is “the look-out place.” 83
One incident took place between 1858 and 1860 when a Lamalcha warrior named Palluk, his Lamalcha wife Semallee, and a Nanaimo man named Skiloweet, killed a Hwunitum man at S’tayus (Pender Island). The unidentified victim was on the island to hunt, probably without permission, when the Hwulmuhw party saw him one morning as they passed by in a canoe and landed. The men conversed amiably for some time. According to a Hwulmuhw witness, the Hwunitum gave “no offence, and made use of no angry expressions whatever” when Palluk, without warning, “fired and wounded him in the arm while he was sitting by his tent at the fire … When the white man jumped up to get his gun, Palluk rushed upon him” and Skiloweet went to his aid. The Hwunitum hunter grabbed Palluk and Skiloweet by the hair and “was knocking their heads together,” when Semallee “seized an axe and struck him on the back.” 84 Skiloweet then cut the man “across the abdomen with a knife. He fell dead. His intestines came out. The body was left there and not buried or concealed.” 85
During these turbulent times, violence was not only directed against Hwunitum newcomers but continued within Hwulmuhw society as well. This “warfare” took the form of retaliatory violence whereby individual acts of violence drew response according to a principle “of a duty … to retaliate in kind for the killing of a member of the nation or kin group.” 86 As legal historian Hamar Foster elaborates, although “retaliatory violence is a form of social control … kinship and other relationships usually kept such violence—which was governed by customary expectations and principles of liability—within acceptable limits.” 87 Because of complex inter-village kinship, warfare amongst Hul’qumi’num First Nations was practically nonexistent. When it did occur, it was most often limited to quarrels “between nobles of different villages.” In general, these disputes between si’em of nearby villages were “patched up through the intervention of common kinsmen, and seldom resulted in open feuds.”
Where villages and kinship ties were more remote, feuds were more likely to occur but, as Hwulmuhw elders informed anthropologist Diamond Jenness:
… they were feuds between individual nobles, as a rule, in which the villages as a whole played the part of spectators only. One noble would challenge another to approach his village and settle their quarrel by single combat; or he would send word through a messenger that he would attack his enemy in his home. The principals then fought out their duel on the beach, while their retainers stood by to guard against treachery. 88
Around 1858, there was a feud between a Penelakut man named Acheewun and one Ashutstun, of Valdez Island, that was to have far-reaching consequences for Hul’qumi’num First Nations and the people of Lamalcha in particular.
Ashutstun, for some unknown reason, had killed a man who was making a canoe. 89 The victim was a friend or relation of Acheewun, who made plans to avenge his death. Sometime around 1858, Acheewun, accompanied by his brother Shenasaluk and two companions, arrived at “Swamuxum,” a “village” or “camp” in the vicinity of Porlier Pass, where Ashutstun was present with his son, Sewholatza, and others. Sewholatza claimed that Acheewun “came to the camp drunk.” 90 As