Colonists and Contradictions

Colonial Attitudes toward Natives

Most views that colonists expressed in writing during the smallpox epidemic were not new. Even before the epidemic, many settlers thought that the Natives were going to die out, and realized they were harming Natives through their own activities. With the gold rush, mines began to take over lands where Natives had lived, ruining some of their food sources. Settlers began to take over productive land to farm.¹⁰ Because of this, some felt guilty, but guilt tended to make attitudes even more harsh: "By disparaging Indian culture Europeans could convince themselves that little of worth would be lost if the Indian way of life was brought to an end."¹¹

Colonists pushed the government to send Natives away from Victoria for three main reasons:

1. The rapid growth of the European population in Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century led to a huge increase in prostitution, theft, and assault. The colonists tended to blame these social ills on Natives.¹²
2. Colonists also wanted to appropriate the land of the Songhees reserve, as it had become a valuable piece of property.¹³
3. Native ways of living offended the Victorian sensibilities of the colonists. It is interesting to see how much of the discussion of Natives mirrors the discussion of lower classes in London. Both groups were seen to be dirty and naturally "lower" than the British middle and upper classes.¹⁴

Governor James Douglas's speech to the Colonial Legislature on 12 August 1856 shows the colonists' fear of Natives, who vastly outnumbered the colonists. It also shows that those fears had little justification:

Gentlemen, The Colony has been again visited this year by a large number of Northern Indians, and their presence has excited in our minds a not unreasonable degree of alarm.

Through the blessing of God they have been kept from committing acts of open violence, and been quiet and orderly in their deportment, yet the presence of large bodies of armed savages, who have never felt the restraining influences of moral and religious training and who are accustomed to follow the impulses of their own evil natures, more than the dictates of reason or justice, gives rise to a feeling of insecurity, which must exist as long as the Colony remains without Military protection.

Douglas promised to protect Native rights, because, he said, "we know from our own experience that the friendship of the Natives is at all times useful, while it is no less certain that their enmity may become more disastrous than any other calamity, to which the Colony is directly exposed." He went on to explain that the British government was about to send a ship to protect the colony.¹⁵

Colonists and Contradictions