ABSTRACT
In direct response to the selectivity of these accounts, an alternative tour of Victoria has been created that alerts visitors to their “historical amnesia.” The re-enactment of the “glory days of the ‘West Coast Raj,’” it is claimed, serves to “erase a part of our past that could help us to come to grips with the collective colonial hangover.”4 Arguing that this erasure forgets the violent displacements of aboriginal people, tourists are asked to consider Victoria’s Bastion Square, the fortified site that held the cannons of the Hudson’s Bay Company, now replete with craft stores and cobbled walkways, as a site for the organized display of violence, directed at aboriginal people.5 Visitors are also invited to look over the Inner Harbor, to what is now the Ocean Pointe Resort, a five-star hotel and condo complex. This, we are told, was the land that was settled by Lekwammen Indians (known as the Songhees by white society) after Fort Victoria was established. Under a treaty, signed in 1850, they surrendered their traditional territories to the Hudson’s Bay Company on the condition that certain sites were assigned to them. Almost as soon as this and other treaties were signed, a concerted campaign was launched to physically remove the Lekwammen. Their lands had grown increasingly valuable, or were deemed an impediment to “orderly” urban development, and their presence offended
white sensibilities. “How much longer,” asked one letter writer, “are we to be inflicted with the intolerable nuisance of having hundreds upon hundreds of hideous, half-naked, drunken savages in our midst?”6 Finally, in 1910, the federal and provincial governments brokered a deal that finally “got the Indians out of town and out of sight.”7
