Father August Brabant: Saviour or Scourge?

By Jim McDowell

Father August Brabant (1845 1912) was the first Roman Catholic missionary to live and work among aboriginal people on the west coast of Vancouver Island during the colonial period. He endured long periods of isolation, built a number of log churches and undertook extraordinarily difficult trips along the west coast in dugout canoes. His thirty-three-year-long effort to transform Nuu-chah-nulth culture gives us a provocative case study of the dynamics that shaped, and continue to define, the settler-colonial relationship between indigenous peoples and the state in Canada. Convinced he had a mission to save the indigenous people from being themselves, the zealous priest strove to instill alien spiritual beliefs. He served as a willing instrument for imposing colonial power by introducing new forms of justice, commerce, dress, housing, personal identity, and most devastating of all schooling. As the father of British Columbia s first residential school, Brabant precipitated the single institution that proved most destructive to the people he set out to rescue. Brabant s biography will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, political scientists, individuals engaged in First Nations Studies, and general readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronsdale Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781553801900

Jim McDowell

Jim McDowell is a veteran British Columbia historian. His first career was teaching, which took him into classrooms from northern California to Seattle, New York City, and Vancouver. He taught elementary school in California and Washington, worked as an inner-city education consultant in Harlem and Brooklyn, and educated teachers at Simon Fraser University. McDowell also worked for 20 years as a freelance writer and independent reporter; he wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles for Canadian and U.S. publications.

Book preview

OTHER BOOKS BY

JIM MCDOWELL

Peace Conspiracy: The Story of Warrior-Businessman

Yoshiro Fujimura (1993)

Hamatsa: The Enigma of Cannibalism on the

Pacific Northwest Coast (1997)

José Maria Narváez:

The Forgotten Explorer (1998)

FATHER AUGUST BRABANT: SAVIOUR OR SCOURGE?

Copyright © 2012 Jim McDowell

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency).

RONSDALE PRESS

3350 West 21st Avenue

Vancouver, B. C. Canada V6S 1G7

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Typesetting: Julie Cochrane, in Granjon 11.5 pt on 15

Cover Design: David Drummond

Front Cover: Hesquiaht Pole, by Tim Paul et al (Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1989, no. VII-F-93, image S92-4401). Included also on page 9. Photo of Father August Joseph Brabant, c. 1888 (Sisters of St. Ann Archives).

Photo for page 388: Hinkeet’sam-Heyatl’ik (Sea-Serpent) headdress mask, Hesquiaht: Seattle Art Museum, image no. 91.1.70, photo by Paul Macapia.

Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the following for their support of its publishing program: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Book Publishing Tax Credit program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McDowell, Jim, 1934–

Father August Brabant [electronic monograph]: saviour or scourge? / Jim McDowell.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic monograph.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55380-190-0 (HTML). — ISBN 978-1-55380-191-7 (PDF)

1. Brabant, Auguste Joseph, 1845–1912. 2. Missionaries — British Columbia — Vancouver Island — Biography. 3. Catholic Church — Missions — British Columbia — Vancouver Island — History. 4. Native Peoples — Missions — British Columbia — Vancouver Island — History. 5. Vancouver Island (B. C.) — History. I. Title.

BV2813. B69M33 2012 266'.2092 C2012-902668-9

At Ronsdale Press we are committed to protecting the environment. To this end we are working with Canopy (formerly Markets Initiative) and printers to phase out our use of paper produced from ancient forests. This book is one step towards that goal.

TO

SUZANNE ROSE,

WITH APPRECIATION

FOR INSPIRING THIS BOOK

AND

ALL SURVIVORS OF ABORIGINAL

RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the information and assistance provided by Chief Matlahoah (Dominic Andrews), recently deceased head hereditary Hesquiaht chief. I also appreciate the assistance of personnel at the following libraries, archives, museums, and institutions: Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria; Sisters of St. Ann Archives, Victoria; Diocese of Victoria Archives, Victoria; Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections; University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver; Richmond Public Library; University of Washington Library, Seattle; Seattle Public Library; Seattle Art Museum; Carroll College Library, Helena, Montana; American College Archives, Leuven; Catholic University of Leuven Library, Leuven; Archives of Kortrijk, West Flanders; Archives, Benedictine Sisters, Queen of Angels Monastery, Mount Angel, Oregon; Archives, Benedictine Brothers, Mount Angel Abbey Library, St. Benedict, Oregon; Victoria’s Victoria, www.victoriasvictoria.ca, Index of Historical Victoria Papers; University of Victoria Library, Special Collections; Koerner Library, University of British Columbia; National Archives of Canada; Canadian Museum of Civilization; National Archives of U. K.; Hudson’s Bay Archives at Manitoba Provincial Archives, Winnipeg. Thanks also to Paul Brokenshire for his help with the maps. Finally, I acknowledge the invaluable editorial assistance and advice provided by Ronald Hatch, Erinna Gilkison and Deirdre Salisbury, which helped me turn an unwieldy, cumbersome manuscript into an actual book.

MAPS

Map of Nootkan tribes and their neighbours, c. 1850 8

Map of Hesquiaht sites 34

Map of Nootkan tribes in 1979 38

Map of southern Nuu-chah-nulth settlements in late 19th century 43

Map of central Nuu-chah-nulth settlements in late 19th century 50

Map of Hesquiaht Reserves 305

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Because six versions of Father August Joseph Brabant’s life were written between 1900 and 1983, the reader may justifiably ask: Why do we need a seventh? What is new or different about this one?

I began researching Father Brabant’s life in 2002, after a friend suggested it might make an interesting documentary film. The more I examined the six major sources of information about this man (one periodical, one magazine, three books, and one journal article), the more convinced I became that a secular historian needed to write a new, significantly different account. To understand my reasoning, consider the nature, purpose, and content of each source.

Brabant’s primary description of his missionary experiences appeared twice in 1900, under different titles. First, The Messenger of the Sacred Heart periodical ran Vancouver Island and Its Missions: Reminiscences of Rev. A. J. Brabant as a serial article. The frontier priest wrote the material retrospectively and hastily near the end of his active years. He relied on his memory, more than two decades of apparent diary entries (although there is no record of these, the detail he included in his reminiscences would indicate they probably existed at one time), and some personal essays. Then, late in the same year, the Messenger’s editor republished the complete series as an eighty-nine page booklet and gave all the copies to Brabant so he could sell them for the benefit of his mission. This time the title was Vancouver Island and its Missions 1874–1900: Reminiscences of Rev. A. J. Brabant. Although these two essentially identical publications contained valuable historical details, it should be remembered that both of them were published primarily to help raise funds for Brabant’s missionary activities. Herein, the author has used the latter as the primary source for Brabant’s observations, which will be referred to as Vancouver Island and its Missions. That booklet conflated a reasonably objective day-to-day account with subjective, sometimes inaccurate observations, left many gaps that needed to be closed, presented a chronology that was difficult to follow, and advanced a considerable number of provocative but unsubstantiated perceptions and opinions. Someone needed to clarify Brabant’s basic document in several ways.

That task was first undertaken in 1920 by Rev. Joseph Van der Heyden, a church historian at Brabant’s alma mater, the American College of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Louvain (Leuven), Belgium. Van der Heyden wrote Life and Letters of Father Brabant, a rambling biography that blends many portions of Brabant’s Vancouver Island and its Missions, a large number of letters that the frontier missionary wrote to family, friends, and colleagues in Belgium, and the author’s opinions. Frequently, Van der Heyden failed to clarify how he merged these materials. The excerpted letters in this third version of Brabant’s story give considerable insight into Brabant’s character and motives. Nevertheless, the overall result is an idealized, confusing, obviously promotional portrayal. It constitutes a hagiographic, church-authorized eulogy that fails to make any sort of critical, objective analysis of the missionary’s career.

The fourth publication about Brabant was a commemorative book produced by Father Charles Moser. When he succeeded Father Brabant at Hesquiaht in 1910, he found about seventy copies of Vancouver Island and its Missions on site. In 1925, on the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the first mission at Hesquiaht by Brabant, Moser published Reminiscences of the West Coast of Vancouver Island. This small volume was essentially a reprint of Brabant’s account, supplemented by other documents, an excerpt from another priest’s journal, a biographical sketch of another missionary, and Moser’s observations. However, as happened with Van der Heyden, Moser failed to clarify distinctions and relationships between these different source materials.

In 1977, Charles M. Lillard, known as a collector and editor of Pacific Northwest Coast historical documents, published the fifth version of Brabant’s missionary work — a significantly edited, altered version of Brabant’s Vancouver Island and its Missions under the title Mission to Nootka 1874–1900: Reminiscences of the West Coast of Vancouver Island. In addition to changing Brabant’s grammar and syntax to make the text flow better, Lillard tried to remove religious overtones from the missionary’s writing. As a concise, generally accurate, sanitized reproduction of Brabant’s original document, Lillard’s small book provides researchers a useful, readable, secular reference. However, it is not error-free and, once again, it is limited to Brabant’s largely retrospective, sometimes inaccurate, personal reminiscences.

The sixth publication about Brabant’s missionary activities was a fifteen-page article written by historian Barry M. Gough. His scholarly paper, Father Brabant and the Hesquiat of Vancouver Island, was published in 1983 in the Journal of the Canadian Catholic Historical Studies. It was part of a series of studies of Christian missionaries working in British Columbia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By introducing some important ethno-historical information about the indigenous people whom Brabant encountered, Gough was the first biographer to bring a new perspective to his analysis, thereby producing a more balanced picture of the priest’s work. Gough’s carefully documented study combines a brief but reliable overview of Brabant’s life and work with an impartial, though incomplete and — given more current evidence — now out-of-date assessment of his achievements.

In summary, the first four of these different sources were basically reprints or rewrites of Brabant’s Vancouver Island and its Missions, the fifth was a biographical eulogy, and the sixth was a reliable, albeit dated, synopsis of the man’s missionary career. After reading each source and probing many of the numerous letters, reports, and essays that Brabant left us, I concluded that a new, authoritative account was definitely needed to do the following:

Present the first thorough, chronologically accurate, carefully documented story of this remarkable but controversial man’s life and work.

Provide the first critical assessment of this missionary’s activities that is based on a secular, unbiased reading of his Vancouver Island and its Missions and personal letters, supported by research into numerous other sources of information about the man, and informed by contemporary understanding of the socio-cultural impact missionaries had on indigenous peoples.

Create an account that is balanced by a stronger aboriginal perspective.

With these objectives in mind, I have used all of the sources above and many others to present a complete, unvarnished biography of Father Brabant, including a thorough evaluation of his impact as the first Roman Catholic missionary to live and work among aboriginal people on the west coast of Vancouver Island during the colonial period. Wherever possible I have corrected the spelling of the names and places mentioned by Brabant and tried to identify accurately the unnamed persons or places he cited. I have used names and spellings for linguistic groups, tribes, bands, and many geographic locations that were selected by anthropologist Philip Drucker,¹ ethnographer Wilson Duff,² anthropologist Eugene Arima and archeologist John Dewhirst,³ or are in current use by the Nuu-chah-nulth (see Appendix A for details about names of tribal groups used herein). Numerous place names correspond with current maps. I have placed my occasional insertions in brackets. In referencing Brabant’s account, I have made minor grammatical and syntactical changes without noting them, and tried to transform his diary-like style into a more engaging narrative. Unless noted otherwise, the source for all of Brabant’s reports is his booklet Vancouver Island and its Missions.

There is one other small but important point that requires mentioning. After more than a century of commentary about Brabant, it is time to establish the correct spelling of his first name. In the literature it has been variously written as: August, Augustus, Augustin, Augustine, Auguste, and Auguste-Joseph. Various libraries and archives have catalogued materials by and about him using the following given names: Augustin, August-Joseph, and Auguste-Joseph. The author’s search for documentary evidence of Brabant’s actual first name yielded the following information. According to his birth certificate which is on file at the archives in Kortrijk, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, he was born October 23, 1845, in Rolleghem, Kortrijk, Belgium, and named Auguste Joseph Brabant. The 1901 Census of Canada for the Alberni-Clayoquot district of Vancouver Island lists August J. Brabant, age 55, born October 23, 1845, Belgium. The priest’s death registration which is on file at the British Columbia Archives indicates August J. Brabant died in Victoria on July 4, 1912, at age 67. Although he was born Auguste, throughout his missionary career Brabant used the name August, which is also what his close friends and colleagues called him. He signed most of his writings either A. J. Brabant or simply A. J. B. Throughout this book, the author will use either August Joseph Brabant, or August J. Brabant, or August Brabant when referring to the priest or his writings, except when texts written about the man by other authors are cited.

During Brabant’s thirty-three-year tenure on Vancouver Island’s west coast, his primary opponent was Chief Tawinisam, acting hereditary chief of the Hesquiahts. I have derived most of my information about this important antagonist from Brabant’s observations about the resolute native leader, from Drucker’s detailed ethnographic descriptions, which include a few specific remarks about this person and extensive details about Nuu-chah-nulth chiefs in general, and from several interviews with Chief Dominic Andrews, the Hesquiaht’s recently deceased head hereditary chief and great-great-grandnephew of Tawinisam. From these sources, and indirect evidence, I have constructed a composite portrait of the venerable chief’s personality, character, opinions, and motives.

Whenever possible, I have tried to indicate how the Hesquiahts and other Nuu-chah-nulth peoples reacted to Brabant’s intrusive efforts to precipitate rapid, often disruptive, acculturation during the colonial period. However, my main objective is to gain insight into the missionary priest himself: his motivations, aspirations, frustrations, doubts, successes, and failures as an agent of radical socio-religious and educational change.

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1 Philip Drucker, The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1951), map facing page 1.

2 Wilson Duff, The Impact of the White Man, in The Indian History of British Columbia (Victoria: Provincial Museum of Natural History, 1964), 33–35.

3 Eugene Arima & John Dewhirst, Nootkans of Vancouver Island, in Handbook of North American Indians (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), vol. 7, 3391–3411. This is the most authoritative presentation of the Nootkans’ language-based territories.

INTRODUCTION

Clash between Two Heroes

Father August Brabant: Saviour or Scourge? examines the efforts of a notable priest who devoted most of his adult life to converting aboriginal people to Catholicism. It is also, however, a story of resistance by a little-known hereditary chief, his controversial nephew, and many members of their tribe. The ideological struggle between the missionary and this group of natives epitomized the most consequential cultural conflict that has occurred on the Pacific Northwest Coast — the intense discord and misunderstanding between two civilizations, two religions, and two cultures which left a lasting imprint on British Columbia. For twenty-five years on the west coast of Vancouver Island, this clash centred on two men: August Joseph Brabant¹ (1845–1912), a zealous Catholic missionary, and Tawinisam (c. 1820–1889),² a proud Hesquiaht chief. To their followers, each was a hero.

Tawinisam, who lived his entire life in the Hesquiaht area, could trace his clan’s lineage back to that misty time when his forefathers first appeared on the Pacific Northwest Coast. He and his people knew that they had lived in this part of the world for many thousands of years. They honoured tribal and inter-tribal spirits, possessed a rich oral tradition of myths and legends, and practised shamanism. Along with other Nuu-chah-nulth peoples, the Hesquiahts had formerly engaged in ritual cannibalism and they still kept slaves. Tawinisam was proud of this heritage and knew he had a special responsibility to protect and preserve it.

From his first encounters with Father Brabant, Chief Tawinisam — assisted for a short time by his nephew, apprentice chief Matlahaw — resisted the pioneer priest’s efforts to bring European customs and a new religion to the various Nuu-chah-nulth peoples.³ Tawinisam used every resource at his disposal to wage a sustained battle to repel or eliminate the intruder, reject and resist his alien ideas, and promote adherence to a rich traditional culture that was under widespread attack. Brabant represented an immediate, local threat that had to be dealt with as swiftly as possible. Tawinisam’s leadership and, in many instances, the Hesquiahts’ response showed that indigenous peoples must be credited with making sound judgments about the white culture’s offerings. During this period of cultural conflict, the Hesquiahts endured many hardships, but they were not mere helpless victims being overwhelmed by a conquering society. They tried to adapt when it seemed practical and they waged a sustained resistance to aspects of Euroamerican culture which they found unacceptable. They also had the perception and wisdom to recognize both positive and negative attributes of the missionary who came to save them.

It was not the first time Christian clerics had operated in different parts of what is now called Vancouver Island. Eighty years before Brabant arrived on the large island, a few Franciscan priests had occupied a short-lived Spanish outpost in Nootka Sound, about forty kilometres northwest of Tawinisam’s territory. During the early colonial period, both Anglican and Catholic priests had established parish churches in the Victoria area at the island’s more populated southern tip. These places of worship primarily served settlers, Hudson’s Bay Company employees, coastal traders, travellers, and visiting sailors. But Father Brabant established the first permanent colonial mission that was aimed exclusively at evangelizing indigenous people living in the wilderness. It was located at Hesquiaht, a remote coastal village near the mouth of Nootka Sound, about 275 kilometres northwest of Victoria.

Brabant, a Belgian by birth, was a product of ethnocentric nineteenth-century colonialism. By definition, civilization was superior to any ancient, primitive culture. Europeans, and especially those who emigrated to America, believed they had inherited a manifest destiny to civilize savages or even eliminate them, wherever they lived.

Father Brabant’s view of aboriginal people was paternalistic, condescending, and distrustful. He saw himself making a great sacrificial service to his God by bringing salvation to people he believed were inferior, sinful heathens destined to eternal damnation unless they became Christians. Convinced of this special calling, he felt compelled to create order out of the chaos he perceived among the Nuu-chah-nulth. During his active missionary years, Brabant struggled almost single-handedly to change many aspects of this ancient civilization. The changes that occurred were not, however, effected by Brabant alone. In most instances, his efforts were greatly supported by Canadian law, spurred by colonial industry and commerce, and aided by armed force. For example, Brabant’s presence may have contributed in minor ways to ending the inter-tribal warfare that had plagued indigenous peoples and alarmed white settlers for decades, but the pacification had largely been achieved by military gunboats prior to his arrival. Moreover, when these same sources of power were employed to impose European law and order among the Hesquiahts, Brabant did little to protect or assist the natives. Instead, he deliberately destabilized their traditional socio-political framework. Today, we can understand how Brabant’s efforts as a crusading missionary were biased and misguided. Nevertheless, he managed to impose many aspects of his alien vision on another culture and leave a lasting, if largely negative, imprint. Fortunately, that stain is finally being re-examined and erased. Along with other pioneers, whose numbers were relatively small compared with the large indigenous population, Brabant was instrumental in systematically undermining the aboriginal culture that he sought to transform. To this day, he is reviled by many Northwest Coast indigenous people for the devastation he instigated. Despite that tragic legacy, as a resolute frontier missionary Brabant demonstrated a degree of courage, tenacity, and zeal that must be acknowledged.

Both Chief Tawinisam and Father Brabant participated directly in the most important transition period in Pacific Northwest Coast history: the intense cultural conflict that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in British Columbia. The story of their encounter personifies the struggle for survival of an ancient, fully functional culture that was brought to the threshold of being swallowed whole. It gives us vivid, provocative insights into this period of drastic social change, the intercultural misunderstandings that it generated, and the heritage it left for future generations.

Fortunately, we can gain considerable insight into Brabant’s experiences by examining the reminiscences and letters that he wrote, and the reports of his work by other Euroamerican observers. The picture could be balanced further if the aboriginal viewpoint had been recorded. Unfortunately, the indigenous people have left little written material about this period. As Barry Gough has noted in his examination of Brabant’s work, this lack of primary information makes it difficult to counterpoise and test the documentation left by and about the missionary.⁴ Therefore, to probe Tawinisam’s perspective and those of his followers, I have taken an approach that combines the methods of historians and anthropologists with a limited but necessary amount of interpretation and extrapolation from secondary sources. This multidisciplinary technique is required for an outside observer to gain some insight into how the Hesquiahts responded to the socio-cultural challenges they encountered during the colonization period.

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1 Flemish pronunciation of surname: \brah-bunt\ with accent on first syllable.

2 Transliteration by Philip Drucker in The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes. Brabant used Townissim.

3 For the origin of this relatively recent designation, see sidebar in Chapter 1.

4 Barry M. Gough, Father Brabant and the Hesquiat of Vancouver Island, in Canadian Catholic Historical Studies, vol. 50 (Ottawa: Canadian Catholic Historical Association, 1983), 554.

CHAPTER 1

The Field of Conflict

VANCOUVER ISLAND, WHICH is about three-fifths the size of the province of Nova Scotia, is the largest island along the Pacific Northwest Coast. It is actually the top of a huge undersea mountain range that runs northwest-southeast along the southern coast of the British Columbia mainland. Like a wall fronting on the Pacific Ocean, its jagged, saw-toothed peaks thrust skyward more than 600, 900, and 1,200 metres above sea level. Volcanic activity that began approximately 360 million years ago south of the equator created the island. At a speed of seven centimetres per year, a series of immense Pacific island arcs were gradually carried north and east on the Pacific Plate. About 170 million years ago, these arcs were beside present-day Mexico. Approximately eighty million years ago, they lay along the coast of what is now California. The arcs collided with the westward-moving North American Plate, and, one after another, the island arcs fused into what is now the British Columbia mainland. But the most western arc remained offshore, leaving a large gulf between itself and the mainland.

According to the most recent research, about fifteen thousand years ago, the first people migrated from Asia by sea and land to this rugged volcanic island.¹ The earliest archeological objects excavated from the Nuu-chah-nulth region date back to more than 4,300 years ago at Yuquot and almost 4,000 years ago at Hesquiaht.² The first European to sight the island was the Spanish navigator Juan Pérez in 1774. Four years later, the British navigator James Cook became the first European to land on one of the large island’s many contiguous islands. In 1792, the first circumnavigation of the island was accomplished jointly by three maritime surveyors: the Spanish Captains Dionisio Galiano and Cayetano Valdés and the British Captain George Vancouver. Subsequently, Vancouver and Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra, the Spanish commander at Nootka, agreed to name the large body of land Quadra and Vancouver’s Island, and it was designated as such on late eighteenth-century maps. As Spanish influence in the region declined, the British shortened the name to Vancouver Island.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, most of Vancouver Island — cut off from the rest of British North America by thousands of kilometres of rugged wilderness and the majestic Rocky Mountains — remained largely unexplored and almost totally unsettled by Euroamericans. By 1843, Great Britain had established the toehold of a permanent colony with a small Hudson’s Bay Company settlement at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, which would eventually become the city of Victoria. In 1849, the British made the entire island a Crown Colony and leased it to the Hudson’s Bay Company for seven shillings a year. But in 1855, there were still only about a thousand Euroamericans in the whole British cordillera, most of them living in the southeastern corner of Vancouver Island near Victoria. Natives outnumbered whites by more than fifty to one.³

When gold was discovered on the mainland along the Fraser River in 1857, thousands of immigrants from California, Oregon, and Washington came to Victoria and the mainland searching for instant wealth. To help maintain law and order, the British government established the Colony of British Columbia in 1858, with the name only being applied to the mainland. In 1866, when the frenzy of the gold rush was over, the small Colony of Vancouver Island and the much larger Colony of British Columbia merged. In 1867, the British Parliament passed the British North America Act, creating the Dominion of Canada and confirming that the Canadian government was bound by British legislation, which indigenous peoples claim included the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

Father Brabant arrived on Vancouver Island in 1869. At that time, the fledgling Colony of British Columbia was still in its formative stage, and remained greatly isolated from the eastern sections of the country. In 1871, the promise of a rail link between the Pacific Northwest Coast and the rest of what is now Canada convinced British Columbia to join Confederation. The terms of the union acknowledged the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which explicitly protected native sovereignty and specified nation-to-nation treaties as the only means for obtaining Crown title. Nevertheless, the consent of First Nations people to the unification was not sought.

According to the estimates of ethnographer Wilson Duff, in 1835, the pre-colonial aboriginal population of what became British Columbia must have been at least eighty thousand but fifty years later, it had been reduced to about twenty-eight thousand.⁴ Although the natives were vulnerable to several diseases introduced by Euroamericans, most of the decline was caused by several epidemics of smallpox and German measles. Already by 1855, these had reduced the aboriginal population by perhaps a third,⁵ and continued to devastate native peoples throughout the colony in the 1860s.

Determining the pre-colonial indigenous population of Vancouver Island itself has produced widely different estimates. In 1822, the Governor and Committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company ordered its trading officers to conduct a census of the aboriginal population throughout what is now Canada. Their 1823 census figures identified a total of approximately 17,772 native people living on the entire island, about nine thousand of whom belonged to west coast societies.⁶

In 1856, James Douglas, Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) at Fort Victoria and governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, supplied a higher estimate of the island’s aboriginal population after he completed another census with something like accuracy based on information he obtained from local traders. Douglas estimated there were about 25,873 native people living on Vancouver’s Island. At the time, both Douglas and the Colonial Office in London were primarily concerned about assessing the military threat posed by aboriginal groups living in almost totally unsettled areas northwest of Victoria. No probable event can ever prove more disastrous to the settlements than collisions with the natives, wrote Douglas. Fortunately for the whites, the powerful tribes of Vancouver’s Island, so formidable alike for their numbers and resolute bearing, have no common interest, they are divided in their views, and [they] regard each other with jealousy and distrust. By retaining their confidence and taking advantage of their mutual animosities, we may therefore always manage to prevent extensive combinations of the tribes for the purpose of assailing the settlements.⁷

In 1850, according to Duff, three large ethnic groups of Northwest Coast Indians occupied different portions of Vancouver Island: Coast Salish in the east and southeast; Nootka along the west coast, and Southern Kwakiutl in the northwest and northeast. (In 1996, these ethnic groups renamed themselves the Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Kwakwaka’wakw nations, respectively. However, nation implies a degree of political organization that did not exist in the nineteenth century among tribes that formed loose confederations.)⁸ Each ethnic group was made up of many tribes and bands. From Victoria in the south along the west coast to the northern tip of Vancouver Island, there were about ten Coast Salish tribes and bands and twenty Nootka tribes and bands. The Coast Salish (Cowichan tribes and bands in the Southern Straits) were located at Esquimalt, Victoria, Sooke, Becher Bay, and on the Saanich Peninsula. The Nootka ranged from what is now Point No Point in the south to Cape Cook in the north. From south to north (using Duff’s spellings), the Nootka included: the Pachenat at Port Renfrew; Nitinat at Clo-oose; Ohiat at Bamfield and Sarita; Tsishaat and Hopachisat at Alberni; Uchucklisat at Kildonan; Toquat at Toquart Bay; Ucluelet at Ucluelet; Clayoquot at Opitsaht; Kelsemat at Yarksis; Ahousaht at Marktosis; Hesquiaht at Hesquiaht; Moachat at Yupquot; Muchalat at Yuquot; Nuchatlaht at Nuchatl; Ehattesaht at Oke; Kyuquot at Village Island; and Checklesaht at Acous.⁹

Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations

For more than 200 years after Captain James Cook misnamed the people he met at Yuquot in 1778, a number of Northwest Coast Indian tribes on what is now Vancouver Island were collectively referred to as Nootkan by voyagers, traders, historians, and anthropologists. But in 1979, a Tribal Council of the nineteen territorial groups shown below adopted the name Nuu-chah-nulth, meaning all along the shining mountains.¹⁰

At that time, most of the former Nootkan tribes established the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, which is now composed of fifteen First Nation governments that have some new spellings. From south to north, these are: Pacheedaht (independent but culturally affiliated, pop. 259); Ditidaht (independent but politically and culturally affiliated, pop. 690); Huu-ay-aht (pop. 598); Tseshaht (pop. 918); Hupacasath (pop. 256); Uchucklesaht (pop. 181); Toquaht (pop. 117); Ucluelet (pop. 606); Tla-o-qui-aht (pop. 881); Ahousaht (pop. 1,951); Hesquiaht (pop. 653); Mowachat/Muchalaht (pop. 520); Nuchatlaht (pop. 165); Ehattesaht (pop. 294); Kyuquot/Cheklesaht (pop. 486). According to the Nuu-chah-nulth tribal council, in 2006, the total population of the member nations was 8,147.¹¹ (See map on p. 38.)

Brabant would naïvely assume that these peoples formed only one nation, as they all speak the same language. However, linguists now recognize there was a language continuum along the west coast composed of three general linguistic groups: those who lived south of Barkley Sound; those who occupied sites between Barkley Sound and the entrance to Nootka Sound: those who resided farther north. Brabant would also mistakenly lump all these peoples’ cultures together. Their manners, mode of living, in one word, all their habits are so much alike, that to know one tribe is to know them all, he asserted.¹² Subsequently, in the late 1800s, ethnologists identified the presence of at least three different large cultural groups. Each was made up of people who spoke one language or a number of related languages, occupied a given area continuously, and shared a basically similar culture.

The Nuu-chah-nulth lived along a rugged, rocky coast that was indented by numerous large inlets and arms of the ocean. Hills, mountains, and thick forests ran down to the shore. Communication between tribes occurred mainly by canoe, sometimes on foot. During the fall and winter, however, incessant stormy weather and strong winds limited the number of possible visits.

Wherever their hereditary territories were located, the indigenous peoples took it for granted that the land which they had occupied for thousands of years belonged to them. But the arrival of Euroamerican settlers soon placed that assumption in steadily increasing jeopardy. Between 1850 and 1854, Governor Douglas made a series of fourteen land purchases from aboriginal peoples. These so-called Douglas Treaties covered about 930 square kilometres of land around what are now Victoria, Sooke, Nanaimo, and Port Hardy. Douglas’ policies toward acquisition of land from native bands were generally consistent with the long-established principles followed by British officials in making treaties with aboriginal groups. After 1854, however, the colony discontinued treaty negotiations, leaving issues of land ownership and acquisition throughout most of Vancouver Island in limbo until 1871, when confederation of the Crown Colony of British Columbia with the Dominion of Canada was ratified (without the consent of indigenous peoples). The Terms of Union left the Dominion government in charge of the Indians and the trusteeship and management of the lands reserved for their use and benefit. The legal status of the aboriginal people, however, was not defined until the Indian Act of 1876 went into effect. All natives in the new province became Canadian nationals, whose rights were subject to special provisions of this Act, but they were not Canadian citizens. With no treaty in place, aboriginal title to the land was not extinguished, which created problems that remain contentious and largely unresolved to this day.

Most Euroamericans who settled on the northwest coast during the colonial period did not come with a definite plan or policy for changing aboriginal culture; they simply expected the natives to submit to their demands. The missionaries, however, had deliberately and consciously formulated specific plans for acculturating indigenous peoples and requiring them to make significant social and religious concessions. Seeing themselves waging war against a relentless deluge of iniquity, they intended to alter Indian society completely.

But what about the hearts and minds of the native inhabitants? Would they be open to the new ideas, concepts, and beliefs that the zealous Catholic priests were determined to instill? Brabant must have known that Spanish priests had occupied an outpost at Yuquot (Friendly Cove) in Nootka Sound between 1789 and 1795.¹³ And he definitely wondered if, during their brief intervention, the Franciscans had been able to have any impact on the aboriginal population. Surprisingly, they made no serious efforts to Christianize the natives.

Franciscans at Nootka, 1789–1795

During the six-year Spanish occupation, a small number of Franciscan friars from what is now California were stationed at the remote military outpost of Santa Cruz de Nutka. One of these men was Padre Magin Catala, who came to Mexico from Spain in 1786 and served forty-four years as a missionary on the Spanish-American coast. After acting as chaplain at Nutka for thirteen months, he returned to California in 1794. Catala Island (originally named Isla de Catala by the Spanish explorer Dionisio Galiano in 1792) at the mouth of Esperanza Inlet commemorates Padre Catala.¹⁴ He was succeeded by Padre Gomez, who left in 1795 when Spain withdrew after the British claim was settled. The Franciscans might have qualified as the first Catholic missionaries on what is now Vancouver Island, except for the fact that none of them tried to evangelize the Nootkan people.

This has often puzzled historians, but one scholar who analyzed the intent of the early Spanish presence on the northwest coast asserts that Spain and its agents had absolutely no desire to spread the Catholic faith and deliberately employed a policy of colonization at Nutka that had a different purpose.¹⁵ From the outset, this Spanish garrison was a haphazard, unsustainable operation that served as a pawn in the game of eighteenth-century European power politics. Organized as an establecimientos de paz (peace establishment), the garrison was manned by well-trained professional soldiers, who were supposed to ensure the fort’s safety and remain disciplined enough not to mistreat native people and thereby jeopardize Spain’s tenuous position on the northwest coast. Friars sent to the outpost were expected to act as chaplains for the soldiers and to promote cultural exchange with the Nuu-chah-nulth. To avoid annoying the native population, missionary proselytizing was forbidden.¹⁶

Brabant would also have known that in 1609, the Jesuits set up their first mission in the French Colony of Acadia. For the next 154 years Jesuit missionaries spread throughout New France evangelizing First Nations people, establishing missions, and opening seminaries. In 1763, Great Britain took over colonial rule of Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi River, but it allowed twenty-seven Society of Jesus missionaries to continue working in First Nations communities in Quebec. Meanwhile, the Jesuit order was dissolved in France until it was restored by Pope Pius VII in 1814. Jesuits resumed missionary work in Louisiana around 1830 — when Father Brabant’s hero, Pierre-Jean De Smet was preparing himself for frontier missionary work at a Jesuit college in Maryland. The Jesuits did not return to Canada until the 1840s. Although the Jesuit missionaries of New France had never reached the west coast, in 1845–46, Father De Smet visited the southern interior of what became British Columbia (see Chapter 2). Inspired by De Smet, Brabant would become the first in a long line of non-Jesuit priests who brought many missionary ideas and tactics formulated by the Society of Jesus to aboriginal people on Vancouver Island’s west coast in the late 1800s. A brief history of Brabant’s predecessors will indicate how each of them, to varying degrees, influenced the work that he eventually undertook.

After the Spanish left Yuquot, a few Protestant missionaries had operated between 1829 and 1838 at locations on the Pacific Northwest Coast that were removed from Vancouver Island, but they had achieved little success. Roman Catholic missionaries did not return to the region until November 1838, when they set up a mission in Fort Vancouver (Washington) under Fathers François Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers, both from Quebec. Travelling for seven months with the Hudson’s Bay Company’s annual caravan, these two French-speaking secular priests,¹⁷ who were not associated with any religious order, had journeyed about eight thousand kilometres by a combination of canoe, portage, barge, horseback, and small boat. The pair began their ministry among Oregon’s Willamette Valley settlers and the neighbouring natives. However, they actually had been assigned a vast region that extended from California to Russian Alaska and from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. In 1841, Father Demers spent a week at Fort Langley in the southwestern mainland of British Columbia and about eight months in the Cariboo, where he built two log churches. The natives in Oregon welcomed the priests but the largely non-Catholic, English-speaking settlers gave them such grief that, by 1846, Demers was disgusted and ready to leave the country.¹⁸

When James Douglas made a reconnaissance trip around the southern end of Vancouver Island in 1843 for the HBC, he was accompanied by Father Jean-Baptiste Bolduc, a secular priest who had worked largely in the Puget Sound region. At the request of the HBC, Bolduc and Demers had been visiting the Cowichan tribe and other bands located at the southeast end of Vancouver Island. With Bolduc’s assistance, Douglas managed to arrange a friendly meeting with the local Songhees natives. It marked the Songhees’ first communication with Euroamerican officials since the arrival of early voyagers. By 1849, Douglas was placed in charge of the Colony of Vancouver Island.

Meanwhile, Father Blanchet had managed to have himself appointed archbishop of the Oregon Mission. To recognize Father Demers’ nine years of largely unsuccessful efforts to deliver the gospel to Northwest Coast Indian tribes and to establish an official ecclesiastical province in the region, Reverend Blanchet convinced Pope Pius IX to issue a papal bull in November 1847 appointing Demers first bishop of Vancouver Island (426,400 square kilometres), the Queen Charlotte Islands (33,800 square kilometres), New Caledonia (the present mainland of British Columbia; 1,024,400 square kilometres), and Russian Alaska (1,536,600 square kilometres).

Unfortunately, Demers had no priests, no funds, limited ability, little confidence, and a short temper. Furthermore, he viewed aboriginal people with a condescension that bordered on flagrant racism. His stifling, patronizing paternalism rendered him dysfunctional.¹⁹ He was completely unprepared for the unknown challenges that he faced. Depressed by the knowledge that he was incapable of managing such an enormous area, Demers wrote a friend in Quebec: Now that I am the first bishop of Vancouver Island, I do not know in what terms to express my misery.²⁰

For the next five years, Demers toured Quebec, the eastern United States, and parts of Europe, seeking money and missionaries. Of the ten volunteers he recruited in Europe, five changed their minds before sailing and four left soon after reaching Victoria. Only one recruit stuck it out: Father Honoré-Timothée Lempfrit, a native of Lixheim, France, former army chaplain, and Carthusian monk. On June 11, 1849, Lempfrit arrived at Fort Victoria in the company of James Douglas, who was acting as de-facto governor of the fledgling Colony of Vancouver Island. Lempfrit became the first Oblate priest to work in the diocese of Victoria.²¹ For the next three years, he assisted Demers by trying to convert natives living in Victoria and the Cowichan valley. The zealous missionary also opened the diocese’s first school. Located in a shed inside Fort Victoria, it was attended by twenty to twenty-five wives and children of French-Canadian men who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company.²² In October 1851, Lempfrit moved to the Cowichan area. The following spring, however, he was forced to resign after being accused of fathering a native child.²³ Lempfrit’s alleged misdeeds reinforced Demers’ long-standing prejudices about the Oblates. Nevertheless, in desperate need of clergy to assist him, he turned to the Oblates, claiming they had an obligation to repair the damage caused by Lempfrit.²⁴

These early efforts by Roman Catholic missionaries were superficial and had minimal lasting effect. Receiving little if any religious explanation, hundreds of natives were baptized, but few were truly converted and almost all returned to their traditional practices. Some natives rejected Christianity completely. Others added the Christian god to their existing pantheon as a theological insurance policy. Many developed syncretistic cults which fused aboriginal and Euroamerican elements. These early missionaries may have paved the way for their brothers and sisters who would follow, but it was not until after permanent settlements were established in the late 1850s that missionary work among the natives began to have a significant impact on aboriginal life and thought.

As long as their traditional way of life remained intact, the Indians had no reason to adopt a new value system such as Christianity, reasoned historian Robin Fisher. It was only after the disruptive impact of settlement seemed to render old truths ineffectual that the Indians needed to turn to new ones. Acceptance of missionary teaching by Indians was a sign that their culture was undergoing major change and that they needed new knowledge to cope with their new situation.²⁵

Meanwhile, Governor Douglas was more concerned about establishing law and order among the Euroamerican population of the rough and ready frontier settlement of Victoria. He asked Bishop Demers to find teachers capable of bringing some semblance of a religious presence to the turbulent community. Demers’ quest would draw a group of nuns to southern Vancouver Island, several of whom would forge strong working relationships with Brabant.

In 1856, Demers travelled to Vaudreuil, Quebec, to appeal to the Sisters of St. Ann, an eight-year-old order founded by Esther (later, Mother Marie-Anne) Blondin.²⁶ All thirty-eight nuns volunteered to undertake the daunting challenge. Demers, however, was allowed to select only four: Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart (Salome Valois), Sister Mary Angèle (Angèle Gauthier), Sister Mary Lumena (Virginia Brasseur), and Sister Mary of the Conception (Mary Lane). Along with Demers and their lay companion, Mlle. Marie Mainville, the four sisters left Quebec on April 14, 1858. Their seven-week-long journey involved travelling by carriage from St. Jacques to Montreal; taking a two-day-long train ride to New York City; sailing thirteen days south on the SS Philadelphia to Havana, Cuba, and Aspinwall, Panama; taking a three-hour train ride across the Isthmus of Panama (on the newly opened railway); sailing north along the Pacific Coast for thirty-five days in three ships — the John Ellis Stephens from Panama City to Acapulco and San Francisco, the SS Pacific from San Francisco to Portland, and the Seabird from Portland, via Seattle, to Victoria, where they finally arrived on June 5, 1858.²⁷ These French-Canadian nuns were the first Catholic missionaries to work effectively as a group in the Victoria area.

The Sisters of St. Ann arrived amidst turbulent social unrest. The great Fraser River Gold Rush of 1857–58 had swelled the colony’s permanent population from three hundred to six thousand in a few months, as gold prospectors poured into the area. In the next few years an estimated twenty thousand miners and adventure-seekers would pass through the overcrowded settlement, which boasted a saloon on every corner.

Living in a small ramshackle log cabin on the outskirts of Fort Victoria, the intrepid Sisters immediately began ministering to the community’s physical and spiritual needs. Two days after arriving, they opened a school and enrolled twelve students. By year end there were fifty-six pupils. One year after the Sisters arrived, they informally opened Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Victoria.²⁸ Among all the people who were assisted by the Sisters, few would be more appreciative than Father Brabant, to whom they would deliver vital nursing assistance on more than one occasion.

In July 1858, the Oblates finally acceded to bishop Demers’ repeated requests for them to send him priests and set up a headquarters at Esquimalt on Vancouver Island. But shortly after the new missionaries arrived, Demers asked that they be reassigned to take charge of the mainland. Father Louis D’Herbomez, Oblate Vicar of Missions to Oregon, who had harboured reservations about Demers’ effectiveness as an administrator, eagerly acceded to the bishop’s request and transferred the Oblate missionaries immediately. Part of their mission was to foster immigration by decreasing the fears that this relatively unknown stretch of the Pacific Northwest had generated among Euroamerican settlers.²⁹ During the 1860s, the Oblates were given what they considered the grand task of converting and civilizing the Indians. The Oblates’ system required the natives to build new Euroamerican-style houses concentrated around a church; to give up old customs such as dancing, gambling, potlatching, and reliance on shamans; to pledge abstinence from intoxicating liquor; to accept the leadership of a few chiefs, often picked by missionaries; and to endure police control by designated native watchmen — essentially spies who made sure everyone obeyed the rules.³⁰

After the Oblates left Vancouver Island in late 1858, the diocese quickly lost any systematic approach to missionary work. Consequently, Catholic efforts to convert the aboriginal population lost momentum until a handful of new secular priests began to give serious attention to this ministry. One of those who came to Vancouver Island was a young Belgian, Charles John Seghers. Ordained in May 1863, the twenty-four-year-old Seghers left Belgium for Victoria in September of that year. He would be engaged in missionary work in the far west for the next twenty-five years. In 1869 — the same year Father Brabant arrived in Victoria — Seghers visited the northern west coast of Vancouver Island briefly, following the controversial shipwreck of the John Bright (see Chapter 5). The dramatic experience convinced the young priest, who was filled with grandiose visions of evangelizing legions of aboriginal people in the remote region, that Hesquiaht might be a potential mission site. He vowed to return as soon as he could recruit one or more priests to work there.

On June 29, 1873, Seghers was appointed to succeed Bishop Demers, thereby becoming the second bishop of Vancouver Island, and he was eager to bring new vigour and direction to the diocese. Three weeks later, the young prelate undertook a trip to the Department of Alaska, by that time owned by the United States, where he built the first Roman Catholic mission post in the southwestern settlement of Sitka. He also visited Kodiak and Unalaska, before returning to Victoria in September. Then he turned his attention to Vancouver Island’s rugged and almost completely unsettled west coast, where he hoped to launch a mission. On the entire Vancouver Island, Seghers had only six priests to choose from: Fathers Patrick M. Hurley, in Victoria; Peter Rondeault at Cowichan; Joseph Mandart at Saanich; and Giovani Giacomo (John J.) Jonckau and August Brabant at St. Louis College in Victoria. August Brabant was being groomed for the task.

By 1874, Brabant had spent five years assisting first, Bishop Demers and then his successor, Bishop Seghers — two pioneer missionaries who approached their work in markedly different ways. In the process, Brabant received what amounted to a graduate course in missionary work. Brabant studied English and familiarized himself with the highly developed approach to acculturation that had been introduced by the Oblates, which was followed admiringly by most missionaries in the far west. Harbouring notions of racial supremacy and cultural superiority, the Oblates practised a form of reduction that aimed to demean and/or dismiss the native culture, systematically destroy it, and then assimilate the conquered society through radical forms of re-education.³¹ To indoctrinate natives, these missionaries initially relied on an approach called religious syncretism — the spontaneous melding of ideas and practices related to two or more world views. Eager to put this kind of plan into action among the northern Nuu-chah-nulth tribes, young Brabant grew increasingly impatient to reconnoitre the wild area he had heard so much about.

Finally, in April 1874, the two Catholic missionaries — Bishop Seghers and Father Brabant — would make their first visit to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Seghers was an effeminate-looking, romantic visionary. Brabant was a broad-shouldered, commanding, practical worker. Both men were stubborn Belgians, fervent Catholics, and convinced that they had a common mission. Their journey would mark Father Brabant’s initiation into a drastically different, adventurous, and challenging way of life that would absorb his entire being for more than three decades. Seghers would soon turn his attention to propagating the faith in other parts of the vast diocese, relying on Brabant to take charge of Vancouver Island’s west coast.

As a zealous missionary determined to save indigenous people from being themselves, Brabant would view the remote, unfamiliar