B.C. Day celebrates province’s pioneers

From the outset, the first Monday in August was to be a public holiday “dedicated to the pioneers who built the colony of British Columbia into the great province it is today” and which we now all share, colonized and colonizers alike.

Pioneers are in bad odour in some politically correct quarters these days. Earnest efforts to decolonialize the language — and thus the antiquated thinking such language enables — seek to shed the unpleasant legacies we inherit. Like it or not, the province we now share was forged from the colonial rivalries of globe-straddling empires. First as a story, then as a traders’ hegemony, then as a formal British colony, and finally as part of a democratic Canada.

But the retroactive application of moral judgments informed by enlightenments achieved, in no small part, from the striving of many of those pioneers to ensure that our better natures prevailed, imposes a narrow and simplistic perspective on a complicated and colourful past.

Yes, there were racist, ethnic and social assumptions at work when B.C. was created. But not all pioneers were automatically racist bigots. Some fought hard, for example, for equality, justice and the higher purpose of humanity. Many embraced diversity right from the get-go. Some of the disenfranchised victims of colonialism did the same — Hlakay, born in 1835 and a descendent of the famed Okanagan Chief Nicola, fought fiercely for the aboriginal rights now entrenched in the Canadian constitution. When war came in 1914, every man of warrior age from his band enlisted to defend their country, quarrels notwithstanding, even grave ones.

Pioneers are not just newcomers to a geographical area, or course, they include the special ones who are the first to venture into new territory of any kind. By that standard, Alfred Scow, who was born in Alert Bay, became the first aboriginal person to graduate from UBC law school, the first to be called to the bar and to be appointed provincial court judge, is a pioneer. So is Nadine Caron, the first aboriginal woman to graduate from UBC medical school. They, too are of the adventurous and bold pioneering spirit with which this province was built. So is Clarence Louie, the progressive business-minded chief of the Osoyoos Band. So is Stewart Philip, the outspoken chief of the Penticton Band and longserving President of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, who serves as a conscience for all of us.

There’s no denying that what became the B.C. we celebrate this weekend was from the outset a territorial pawn in the duelling of the imperialistic superpowers of the time. It was peopled by newcomers who settled among and often exploited the indigenous nations here since time immemorial. Yet not all newcomers were oppressors, not all indigenes were oppressed. At first encounter, they invented a new language, married each other, did business together, appreciated each other’s strengths and weaknesses. It wasn’t all peachy, it still isn’t, it won’t be tomorrow. And yet even amid the collision of cultures propelled by long-abandoned imperial ambitions, desires for commercial advantage and the ubiquitous human failings of greed, envy, avarice and vainglory, there’s far more good to celebrate in our collective history than there is bad to lament.

It’s the collective good toward which the best of us strive and the “pioneering” B.C. spirit that continues to shape this astonishing place we share that we should celebrate on Monday.