ROTHENBURGER – The Chilcotin War and the rewriting of Canada’s history
Recreation of attack on pack train during Chilcotin War. (Image: Royal B.C. Museum)
THE JUSTIN TRUDEAU government, assisted by all opposition parties, this week completed a masterful rewriting of history.
The prime minister joined with speakers for the Conservatives, NDP, Greens and even the Bloc in apologizing for the execution of six murderers who were hanged 154 years ago, after which he hugged representatives of the Tsilhqot’in Nation on the floor of the House.
The so-called Chilcotin War of 1864 makes for an intriguing story about the clash between British colonists and First Nations — so much so that I wrote a book about it — but the facts have been so twisted for political purposes as to become almost unrecognizable.
Drawing of chief believed to be Klatassine.
From childhood, today’s Tsilhqot’in are taught that the Chilcotin War was a war of honour fought by brave warriors protecting their people and their land.
The basis for this week’s exoneration, which follows not one but two B.C. apologies (one in 1999 by the NDP government and another in 2014 by the Liberal government), is based on that same interpretation.
Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops, former school board chair, former editor of The Kamloops Daily News, and a current director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He was awarded the Jack Webster Foundation’s lifetime achievement award in 2011. His editorials are published Monday through Thursdays, and Saturdays on CFJC Today, CFJC Midday and CFJC Evening News. Contact him at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
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What troubles me about this is how the Chilcotin people claim their chiefs were apprehended and subsequently executed because they were at war. If that is the case, then their chiefs would be considered war criminals in modern terms due to killing civilians. So, their chiefs were war criminals or murderers – which one is it? They were not innocent, that much is true. They even admitted so to Begbie during their trial, that in their culture the punishment for their actions was death.
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I wont argue any other point in this piece, as the facts not only sound more reasonable than the apologising, responsibility taking rhetoric from todays politicians … that said, there is one sentence you used that I will take issue with;
“Though their presence may have been seen by some Tsilhqot’ins as representative of past wrongs, they didn’t see themselves as invaders.”
History is stuffed full of examples of invaders attacking and destroying neighbours or entire civilisations, who actually saw themselves as liberators or more often than not as a means to bring the ‘heathens’ under the thumb of belief, be it lifestyle or religion.
Cortés and the Spanish destruction of the Aztecs as a means to introduce the christian religion, or Hitlers belief in his ‘better world’, or China’s invasion of Tibet, or even the U.S. invasion of Iraq in ’03, and many many more, including the belief behind the institution of our own residential schools. All were attempts to make change because ‘we are right and they are wrong’ … an automatic consequence of a singular belief fostered in a vacuum; the history and ideology of the defender is unseen and irrelevant.
This Tsilhqot’in example is a poor example of this, but the argument is worth suggesting as the use of the word invaders does not always mean by use of sword or gun. A shovel and pickaxe can also be seen as weapons of change from the view of those who prefer it to be as it always was.
Obviously a bunch of road builders do not see themselves as ‘invaders’, but in essence they were the front lines of unwanted change by the incumbent residents, following the ideology that all will be ‘better off’ … the calling card of the oppressor, from the perspective of the oppressed.
jes’ keepin’ ya honest.
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History with a feminist spin?
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I’m disappointed to hear the denialist tone of Mel’s invective about the war, as it’s his version I first learned back in the 70s and know parts of the story by heart. Notably the public meetings on the Coast where half the crowd were sympathetic to the Tsilhqot’in – like the newspapermen of those days, he’s seeking to overturn that sympathy by what amount to popaganda.
Here’s what I learned from his book, which he seems to have forgotten: I’m currently working on a substack to put the lie to the anti-indigenous propaganda campaign as if indigenous history were a ‘conspiracy theory” – when it’s the propaganda camapaing that’ mounting the conspiracy theory /theories:
Why did Klatsassan et al do it? they’d been conned into working on the road and asked “what’s a road??” Being told it was a path for wagons and people in droves they didn’t like the sound of it at all; They demanded to be paid and hadn’t even be fed, starving as they were; Brewster responded by saying if they didn’t shut up and get back to work, he had power to send in the smallpox and told them to go to sleep.
Well, needless to say they didn’t like the sound of that one bit and stayed up in their tent determining what to do. Two years earlier 90-95% of their tribe’s population had died in the Great Smallpox of 1862 leaving only them, warriors who had been hunting or from isolated villages where the pox never hit. Food caches had been eaten or the women who tended them were now dead – which is why they were starving and approached the work party seeking food.
So they determined to klll the work party to stop the progress of the road; inasmuch as Brewster had threatened them with smallpox, as if claiming magic powers, Kl;atsassan ripped out his heart an ate it, to take away that power and cancel any spell Brewsrer might have already laid.
Nasty but given the context of magic being threatened, entirely a natural response and part of the Tsilhqot’in way of war, and reminiscent of the tale of Fafnir the dragon and Sigurd the Volsung in the Eddas (Sigurd roasted the dragon’s but never had a chance to eat all of it, as a dripping had singed his hand and scuking off the dragon-grease, was able to understand the birds who were chattering about how he wasn’t paying attention to the spit he had the dragon’s heart on over the fire and it was burning to a crisp before he could get it off the fire…).
Two men escaped the battle, one made it to Quesnel, the other got back to Bute Inlet ; one of them was seriously wounded, I can’t remember which. The rest of the story I’ll tell in a substack I’ve just begun but to end this accont of the battle, Klatsassan was spursued for months all over the High Chlilcotin but messages reached him to come iin of a parley to forge a pece so he came in with a flag of truce – but was betrayed and shackled and taken to Quesnellemouthe (Quesnel) and hanged along with five others.
“I meant war, not murder” he told Judge Begbie but the jury demanded a hanging so death it was. Begbie imderstood what he meant – acts of war are not the same as murder even in British law….
I first read this story in high school 55 years ago and almost know it by heart… it’s not just native history it’s OUR history also – and too many today know little about BC’s past, native or indigenous…..and so we have this “property rights” bafflegab out to overturn the Royal Proc and the constitution and the courts so that realtors and mining companies have a free hand to make money wherever they want- even if they’ve never been to the spots they’re out to dig up and ship off to make themselves wealthy.
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Thanks for this article. Would like to get your book, The Chilcotin War to read
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