Bøker av Tom Swanky

Haida knowledge keepers often introduce their history of British Columbia with "The Story of Bones Bay." This "Story" teaches that Governor James Douglas executed an intentional mass killing during 1862 using smallpox as a tool for displacing native authority.This book explores the written record as it touches the Haida experience leading to the Crown's assumption of authority over the Haida and over Haida Gwaii from 1863. Beginning in 1860, Douglas answered the Haida's prior refusal to submit unconditionally for rule by the Crown with a program of increasing violence that culminated in spreading smallpox as a political tool.After colonists knowingly imported smallpox in 1862, the Douglas administration violated British law to pervert standard disease control measures while reducing the population underpinning native authority in numerous autonomous territories. Officials concealed their true intentions at each stage by supplying the public with misdirection.This book also documents the role of Francis Poole, a foot soldier employed to advance Douglas' smallpox program from Victoria to the Nuxalk, Tsilhqot'in and Haida territories. MLA Robert Burnaby coached Poole in the administration's preferred means of obscuring the public record concerning what Poole's memoir refers to as "a sorrowful trail of blood."

Based in part on its University of Victoria originated website "Klatsassin and the Chilcotin War," the Great Unsolved Mysteries project won the 2008 Governor General's Award for popularizing Canadian history and a MERLOT award from the California State University project on Multimedia Education Resources for Learning and Online Teaching. It is disappointing, then, to find that "Klatsassin and the Chilcotin War" makes no attempt at balance, objectivity or accuracy. Instead, it flagrantly disrespects the Tsilhqot'in perspective and buries its few Tsilhqot'in selections under a disproportionate barrage of unimportant detail. Just as astounding, as this Review documents at length, the website disregards any standard of care for accuracy from even the written record. Does the acclaim given this flawed production reflect a willingness of academics to abandon all discipline on the Internet, or does it reflect an anti-indigenous colonial legacy still alive and well at Canadian universities?

At the inception of colonial rule on Canada's Pacific Coast, natives "universally believed" Governor Douglas used smallpox as a weapon to kill them in lieu of treaties or paying for land. Yet Canadian historians routinely dismiss this profound allegation without mention. In Canada's greatest catastrophe, perhaps 100,000 B.C. natives died from smallpox during 1862/63. Before then, the First Nations were still sovereign. Afterward, British Columbia subjugated and dispossessed the depopulated First Nations through small wars billed as policing and by hanging several natives resisting colonialism. This is a detective story. It begins with the last action of the smallpox period, the hanging of five Tsilhqot'in Chiefs ambushed at a peace conference in 1864. The book then follows the smallpox trail back though the Tsilhqot'in War seeking its origin. It describes the smallpox carnage everywhere while seeking evidence of deliberate disease spreading. Does this trail lead to the Governor's office as alleged?