Victoria’s secrets
There’s much more to Victoria’s imperialist history
than its “little bit of Olde England” image suggests
By Joel Freedman
and Dr. John Lutz
 “There are no statues of Cheelathuk, the Lekwammen chief when the Europeans arrived. There are no plaques to honour the Chinese labourers, nor street names to mark the aboriginal places that have been paved over.”
One of the mixed blessings of living in Victoria is the tourists. Not so much tourists in general, but those, including relatives, who come to stay with us in our homes. These visitors propel us into ‘tour guide’ mode, and off we go to show them the sights. But what sights?
Victoria’s tourism is based in no small part on a image that reflects a very selective version of this place’s past. Typical tourist experiences of the city involve the Inner Harbour — including the Empress Hotel and Legislative Buildings — the shops of Government Street, Bastion Square, and the Eaton Centre. This narrow strip of the downtown core, part wishful re-enactment, part historical amnesia, is a celebration of colonization.
Victoria is sold as ‘more English than the English,’ packaged as ‘a little bit of Olde England’ at the western edge of North America. Named in honour of Empress Victoria, the city’s downtown streets, shops, buses, pubs, and hotel lobbies still revel in the faded light of her British Empire.
Of course, if you are concerned about the legacies of imperialism, there are far worse examples you could choose. You could do a lot worse than parliamentary democracy, common law, and Earl Grey tea. Our point is that there is another side to imperialism that is not commemorated, but one which is very much a part of our city’s history.
Official Victoria celebrates what UBC geographer Cole Harris terms “the resettlement of British Columbia.” By re-enacting the glory days of the ‘West Coast Raj’ with our visitors, we erase a part of our past that could help us come to grips with the collective colonial hangover.
The standard portrayal of Victoria’s colonial history contains three blind spots. First, it fails to mention how the establishment of the British colony generally, and Victoria especially, involved the displacement of aboriginal people.
Second, the celebration of ‘Empire’ neglects to point out that imperial dominion was achieved through violence or the threat of violence that hung over, and sometimes hanged, native people.
Third, the history and the historical landmarks celebrate the whiteness of empire, and overlook that the main industries and infrastructure in the colony/province depended on non-white labourers — Chinese, Japanese, Indo-Canadians, and aboriginals — who were denied full citizenship until 1949–1960. Many who lived here and built this community were not British, and their histories are similarly absent from official versions of Victoria’s story.
Moreover, a gentle probing of the tourist image highlights how Victoria is continually recreated as a quaint and remote outpost of the empire. Victoria was an aboriginal space, then a fur trade fort, then a gold rush town, and then an industrial port city. But we choose to commemorate little of these pasts.
So, what would an alternate tour of imperial Victoria look like? This challenge was faced by UVic’s history of racialization group (HORG) when it hosted 300 visitors at a conference on the history of racism and racialization some time ago. HORG (an interdisciplinary graduate student and faculty reading group) discovered that we can still take our visitors to the same old sites but look at them with new, critical eyes.
Start, perhaps, in Bastion Square, at the Wharf Street end, looking out over the water to the Songhees development. What is now the Ocean Pointe Resort and condominiums was, until 1910, a Lekwammen (Songhees) village. Although a treaty guaranteed them their village site, Victorians lobbied for 50 years to “get the Indians out of town.”
Bastion Square itself is named for the fortified bastion that held the British cannons which, if we can believe fur traders’ accounts, disciplined the Lekwammen and forced them to accept European domination. These guns protected the first meeting of the Legislative Council of the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1850, as the council proclaimed that a couple of hundred non-aboriginal people held dominion over some 30,000 aboriginal people.
As you wander up to Government Street you pass by the old Victoria courthouse, now the Maritime Museum. The museum occupies the site of the original court and jail. Along the pedestrian corridor, where today vendors’ stalls cater to visitors, gallows once stood, built to hang aboriginal people judged guilty of capital offences against British law. At least one accused was likely innocent of any crime. Others would never have been executed for their offences had they not been aboriginal. Step lightly here, as some of those executed are buried beneath your feet.
Returning to Government Street, notice the ‘Olde English style’ Elephant and Castle pub. What does the emblem of the elephant carrying a castle represent? India carrying the Raj? Dip into the Eaton Centre, and examine the clock in the atrium with its inscription: “Westward the Course of Empire goes forth.”
Once back outside, pass the British Imports clothing store, the Irish Sweater Shop and the Scotch Plaid shop, or stop for a tea at Murchies. Notice that aboriginal people are largely absent, although their arts and crafts are for sale in several stores.
At the southern end of the street, the Empress Hotel and the Legislature dominate the landscape. The architect of both buildings, Francis Rattenbury, publicly stated his intent to transform Victoria’s harbour into an “imperial garden of Eden.”
The CPR hotel, built on on an industrial garbage dump comprised largely of rendered animal offal, is imperial by name. Victoria, Canada’s queen, was India’s Empress. The Bengal Lounge evokes that bygone era, and Darjeeling tea is available at the hotel’s famous tea-time. Yet while India is the reference the Empress evokes, when it was built, Canada was excluding immigrants from India, despite the fact that they, like Canadians, were British subjects.
Then there is the statuary: James Cook on the causeway watching over the harbour; the Dowager herself on the legislative grounds; and, surveying them all, the golden explorer George Vancouver on his perch atop the Legislature. There are no statues of Cheelathuk, otherwise known as King Freezie, the Lekwammen chief when the Europeans arrived. There are no plaques to honour the Chinese labourers, nor street names to mark the aboriginal places that have been paved over.
These, of course, are just a few of the silences an alternative tour could break. One version of the tour HORG came up with is available online at <http://web. uvic.ca/~hist66>. We invite you to tour Victoria with “anti-imperial” eyes, and to send us your comments and suggestions at <horg@iname.com>.
Joel Freedman, when not touring about, is completing his MA on the history of masculinity and race in late 19th century Victoria. Dr. John Lutz studies and teaches B.C. history at UVic. Both are members of Victoria’s history of racialization group.
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