Things in Society Change Very Quickly Nowadays

BC had a slightly more exciting than ordinary election, in which the party which had the second most seats and formed government from 2002 to 2017 changed its name and dissolved itself, a party which got less than 2% of the vote and no Members of the Legislative Assembly in the last election came three seats short of a majority, the former head of the Green Party said he would vote for someone whose party is not sure that climate change is real and worth taking action to reduce, and there were bomb threats and hangings in effigy. Amidst that, party politician Kareem Allam is talking about why he changed parties, and he says:

we had MLAs that had been there for 15, 20 years, and we had staff that were 20 years old. All they had ever known were these MLAs, and things changed a lot, and things in society change very quickly nowadays. So it wasn’t reflective and there weren’t really debates of new ideas and new approaches, and there was a sense of stagnation that was occurring around that.

Now, its hard to be eloquent in an interview, especially when you are trying carefully not to offend former or current allies. But that makes me think about the history of the Salish Sea about 150 years ago.

In 1856 the area around the Salish Sea was home to dozens of nations speaking a babel of tongues, from the pit-house dwelling hunters of the interior to the longhouse salmon-fishers of the coast. There were also a few thousand Europeans, mostly connected with the Hudson’s Bay Company plus a few squatters who did business with Chief Seattle. The First Nations appreciated iron tools and guns and woolen blankets (not to mention potatoes), but they were clever enough and strong enough to make sure that trading was in their favour. The Hudson’s Bay Company wanted to buy furs not collect taxes and they suspected that if more Europeans came they would lose their monopoly on trade. News about what was happening in the area reached its Anglo ‘governors’ by sailing around Cape Horn or Tierra del Fuego. The Royal Navy was interested in Esquimalt Harbour and the coalfields of Nanaimo as a base for their Pacific Squadron, but they barely cared about the mainland or the rest of the islands.

Then word reached San Francisco that there was gold on the Fraser River. By 1858 there was a full-fledged gold rush with tens of thousands of newcomers waiting around Fort Victoria or making their way overland across the Medicine Line. These newcomers included Chinese and Hawaiians as well as Irish-Americans and failed filibusters from the American South via Nicaragua. Many of the gold miners were not good guests: they stole food caches, cut forests and blasted gravel into salmon spawning streams, spread disease, and committed the other crimes that heavily armed men commit among a population of foreigners with plenty of women and elders. The nations of the Fraser Valley were perfectly capable of mining gold now that they knew that the newcomers would pay for it, but they were being pushed out of their homes so a mob of strangers could plunder them. And so the Fraser Canyon War broke out and the British governor sent an embassy to make treaties with the Nlaka’pamux at Camchin (nowadays the charred ruins of Lytton, BC).¹ In the aftermath the governor declared 1 August Emancipation Day and invited several hundred American freedmen to settle in the colony in the belief that they would be reluctant to be annexed back into the United States (the West Indian policemen of Victoria are another story, as is McGowan’s War of 1858 and the Pig War of 1859).

Things might have settled down as the Americans started to fight amongst themselves in the east, but then smallpox returned in March of 1862. It was first recorded at Fort Victoria which was becoming a town and was still supposed to be the place for all newcomers to stop and be registered. The colonial government vaccinated the settlers but started to push the natives away from settlements as the disease began to spread faster and faster. Natives from every settlement on the coast had come to Victoria to sell goods or labour, and when they were forced to leave they brought smallpox with them. Nobody knows how many died but people spoke of half or more of many nations being wiped out. New diseases had spread around the Salish Sea before, but this was the worst pandemic yet at a time when strangers were pouring into the region with dreams of taking land and mining the rivers not just trading.

In the aftermath the British stopped negotiating treaties and began simply taking land by force (although people in remote inland areas like the Chilcotin could stop them from getting everything they wanted). By 1864, it was clearly the British who were the strongest nation in the Salish Sea: they had a mighty fleet at Esquimalt Harbour and a small force of Royal Engineers on the mainland, and the Russians and the Haida and the Americans could not match it alone or all together.

On 7 November 1885 the last spike was driven in the Canadian Pacific Railway at Craigellachie. The Americans already had railroads to the Pacific. Messages from the Fraser River could reach Ottawa or Washington in minutes over the telegraph wire, people could travel in days not months. Settlers were busy building fleets of sealing ships and setting up sawmills and taverns. Robber barons like Robert Dunsmuir were taking vacations in Europe and having castles built along the coast. In thirty years, the Salish Sea had been transmuted from the territory of dozens of indigenous nations who mostly negotiated with each other to an outpost of the global Anglo-American empire that was pulling in Welsh coal miners, Jewish shopkeepers, and Japanese fishermen to meet an insatiable demand for labour. The most intense changes had been concentrated in just five years.

So I don’t think that things in society have been changing especially fast lately. Many of the things we argue about are things we have been arguing about for my lifetime. But I think we are struggling with the impact of external events like the COVID pandemic or the North Atlantic housing crisis on our society, and with building agreement about how to act to make the world more like we want it to be. The changes in the outside world which we have unleashed may yet bring everything crashing down like at the end of the Bronze Age. That happened before everywhere in North America sometime after Europeans and their diseases came. But it has not happened again yet.

I think that a lot of the noisy arguments about social issues are because society is becoming more fragmented and many people feel like the people who present themselves as experts are just using authority like a hammer to smash resistance to doing whatever they or their patrons want to do. They don’t have direct experience of many parts of the world, and they don’t trust those experts to tell them how they work. I think that many of those people would have fewer concerns if they talked to a teacher or an election worker or a pharmacist, but I don’t know how to make that happen other than locally.

Further Reading

Phil Paine, “I see Day Like Smoke,” 18 March 2020

Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples (third edition Oxford University Press, 2002)

You can see some video of BC highways before WW I in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUo4ILcJf4E

(scheduled 18 November 2024)

1. Fun fact: according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, Camchin means the same as Thapsacus and Pesach: “crossing, passing over.” My article in Festschrift Rollinger has more about this place name on the Euphrates! ↩︎