HORG==> Tour ==> The Songhees

INFORMATION Tour Home Contact Us Copyright © 2000 History of Racialisation Group Victoria, BC CANADA All rights reserved This page last updated 20 July 2000 Contact the Page Maintainer Hosted by the University of Victoria This site looks best with	Imperial Paradise? An Alternative Walking Tour of Victoria, BC The Songhees / Lekwammen -- Across the Inner Harbour
	The Songhees today -- as viewed from the foot of Fort Street.	Where Condos Stand Today... Across the harbour from Bastion Square is an exclusive plot of land occupied by luxury condominiums and a five star hotel. This was the land that the local aboriginal people settled on after Fort Victoria was established. These people who the settlers called Songhees, but call themselves Lekwammen, moved from their village locations in Esquimalt Harbour and Cadboro Bay and established a village, which, according to the treaty they signed with the colony in 1850, was to be theirs forever.
	... Was First Nations' Territory. The site was known to the Lekwammen as Pallatsis, the place of cradles. Lekwammen parents had brought the cradles their children outgrew here because to do so would offer protection to the children. Young men also came here in preparation for initiation into the winter dance ceremonies and dove into the waters off the point opposite.	The Songhees in the late 19th century -- as viewed from approximately the same spot.
	The islands in the harbour and on Laurel Point, south of the Lekwammen land, were centuries old gravesites. In the 1850s white kids of the colonists torched at least one of these islands. Even now, when road work is being done near Laurel Point, skeletons are dug up. Shifting First Nations-Settler Relations The village and the fort faced each other from the 1840s, the fur traders and colonists afraid of the aboriginal people and protected by their walls and bastions. The native people who were not afraid of the whites, left their walled villages to live here, without walls. As the town grew in 1858 with news of gold on the Fraser River, a call was immediately put out to move Indians away from the town. From 1858 to 1910 every city and provincial politician tried to find a way around the treaty that promised this land to the Lekwammen — land that was increasingly valuable as the city grew. Having aboriginal people living in the middle of the city offended the sensibilities of the citizens of Victoria and they wanted them out. Finally in 1910, by passing a special act of the federal parliament, the federal and provincial governments brokered a deal that got the Indians out of town and out of sight. For $10,000 per family, the Lekwammen agreed to move to the suburbs, to a new reserve established in Esquimalt. After half a century of trying Victorians got the Indians out of town.

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