“This Is an Indigenous City”

From the first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, colonial systems have attempted to silence Indigenous histories and understandings of the world. Using an Indigenous studies lens, this chapter focuses on how nineteenth-century acts of firsting have influenced dominant societal imaginings of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The city of Vancouver occupies the territories of the Squamish First Nation, yet many Canadians remain unaware of Squamish histories and knowledge systems. Focusing on cartographic documents from Vancouver’s founding in 1886, this chapter demonstrates how these early colonial presentations of the city have asserted an enduring myth of firsting that has attempted to erase Indigenous presence from the area. The chapter then turns to Squamish oral histories documented by nineteenth-century Mohawk artist E. Pauline Johnson in Legends of Vancouver. These oral histories existed long before the province of British Columbia’s confederation in 1871. Through this study, this chapter uses the method of un-firsting to accomplish what traditional academic scholarship on Vancouver has largely neglected to do: to reclaim the area as Indigenous through demonstrating how Squamish oral histories dismantle early colonial mappings of Vancouver.