TRUDEAU APOLOGIZES IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS FOR THE EXECUTION OF SIX WAR CHIEFS OF A B.C. ABORIGINAL BAND WHO LED THE CHILCOTIN WAR IN 1864. ‘THEY ARE WELL REGARDED AS HEROES OF THEIR PEOPLE.’
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with the backing of both opposition parties, exonerated Monday six Tsilhqot’in war chiefs executed more than 150 years ago for leading an uprising against colonial authority in British Columbia.
Calling the 1864 executions “wrongful,” Trudeau delivered the apology in the House of Commons, where the current leaders of the Tsilhqot’in Nation were gathered on the floor of the parliamentary chamber.
“We recognize that these six chiefs were leaders of a nation, that they acted in accordance with their laws and traditions and that they are well regarded as heroes of their people,” Trudeau said.
Over the decades, the conflict known as the Chilcotin War has emerged as a struggle between good and evil: Indigenous warriors defending their land against rapacious colonists. As former B.C. premier Christy Clark said in her 2014 apology, the executed chiefs were “engaged in a territorial dispute to defend their lands and their peoples.”
But one of B.C.’s darkest events is also filled with more nuance than political speeches may let on. The history of the Chilcotin War reveals a drama of conflicting allegiances and a settler community that may not have been surprised that a Canadian leader would one day be apologizing on their behalf.
“Depend on it, for every acre of land we obtain by improper means we will have to pay for dearly in the end, and every wrong committed upon those poor people will be visited on our heads,” wrote John Robson, editor of the New Westminster Columbian, only days after news arrived of a deadly confrontation a white road-building crew that had entered Tsilhqot’in territory without permission in 1864.
Although 21 road crew lay dead, Robson was not alone in saying that the conflict had been sparked by the illegal moves of colonists trying to seize swaths of B.C. land without regard for Indigenous title.
The crew had been building a road through Tsilhqot’in land to reach gold-rich Williams Creek when they were suddenly targeted in a dawn attack that saw 12 of their number killed while still in their tents.
Subsequent attacks on a pack train and a lone settler in Tsilhqot’in territory would bring the body count to 21.
The attackers were 24 Tsilhqot’in men. Led by a man named Klatsassin, they were on the brink of starvation and only months removed from a smallpox epidemic that had killed up to half of their 1,500 people.
Eight, including Klatsassin, would later turn themselves over to colonial authorities for what they believed were peace talks with the colonial governor. Instead, they were convicted and hanged as murderers.
Crucially, the men never denied that they had killed whites but maintained that it was an act of war. When the missionary R.C. Lundin would try to point the men towards the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” he was met with the famous reply “We meant war, not murder.” And indeed, in his dispatches colonial governor Frederick Seymour would agree that their actions had constituted open war.
Attacks on sleeping, unarmed men may be abhorrent by modern standards, but this was indeed what war looked like in B.C. for centuries. Every B.C. First Nation at the time would have been on either end of such an attack, often within living memory.
It would have surprised nobody at the time that the famously standoffish Tsilhqot’in would be the first to declare war on the British. Their isolation, in fact, had played to their advantage, allowing them to dodge the worst excesses of liquor and disease. That is, until 1862, when an outbreak believed to come from Bella Coola wiped out as many as 800.
It was in this context that a member of the road crew almost certainly sealed the fate of his colleagues when he callously threatened Klatsassin and a group of other Tsilhqot’in with more smallpox. “A white man took all our names down in a book and told us we should all die,” Klatsassin said later under questioning.
At the time, most Tsilhqot’in would have been unaware of the attack, and some would even attempt to save the lives of targeted non-Indigenous. This was the case with the settler William Manning, whose Indigenous wife Nancy had reportedly tried in vain to warn him that there were plans to kill him. Another Tsilhqot’in woman, Klymtedza, also tried to warn the targeted pack train, only to be killed herself in the ambush.
As the letter from Robson illustrates, settler societies were also not united in their view of the war. The eight Tsilhqot’in encountered no angry mobs or threats of vigilante violence during their transport to Quesnel. They were even paroled without incident as they awaited sentencing.
Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie, the man who sentenced the five to die, has shouldered much of the guilt for the Chilcotin War hangings. Nevertheless, Begbie’s notes reveal the thoughts of an intensely conflicted public servant. The judge was able to speak to the prisoners in their own language. While he referred to them as “savages” in his notes, he expressed deep respect for the group and soon learned of the smallpox threat, not to mention Tsilhqot’in shortchanged for road work and Tsilhqot’in women raped or pressed into prostitution.
“The Indians have, I believe, been most injudiciously treated. If a sound discretion had been exercised towards them I believe this outrage would not have been perpetrated,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, “the blood of 21 whites calls for retribution,” Begbie wrote in a letter to the colonial governor.
To the Tsilhqot’in, the event is as signature to their history as the Red River Rebellion is to Manitoba Metis. It was also the only significant challenge to British colonial authority in what is now British Columbia.
One thing is certain: The Chilcotin War worked. The road was never built and to this day, traditional Tsilhqot’in land is almost completely untouched by white settlement. In 2014, a Supreme Court case confirmed as much by granting Tsilhqot’in title to a 1,700-square-kilometre patch of land near Williams Lake.