Decolonizing Willows Beach in Victoria B.C and Reclaiming Sitchanalth

Synopsis:

Willows beach is located within Songhees traditional territory in Victoria’s Oak Bay municipality on Vancouver Island. It was named after the fairground, which was a colonial institution developed on Aboriginal land in 1981. It was Victoria’s main horse racing venue in the early years of the twentieth century. The Indigenous name given to Willows beach was Sitchanalth which according to Songhees elder referred to the drift logs and trees lodged in the sand” (Times Colonist, 1994). The beach was once lined with longhouses and was used for hundreds of years as as site of ecological and cultural wealth. Historically, the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now the Victoria area, spoke dialects of Northern Straits Salish and speakers of the Songhees or Lekwungaynung dialect traditionally occupied the Oak Bay area. The Willows Beach village and the group that inhabited it were known by the name Si•čǝ’nǝł.

The colonial history of Willows beach in Oak Bay Victoria, British Columbia begins with the instillation of the Hudson’s Bay trading Post and the early settlement of Victoria. Despite the European narrative of ‘discovery’ Indigenous peoples in Victoria had been living off of the land for many generations. The first European settlers arrived in Victoria around the late 1700’s, resulting was the expropriation of Indigenous land, and the dispossession, removal, ghettoization and extermination of Indigenous peoples and communities (Belshaw, 2002). Prior to this, Oak Bay was inhabited by the local Coast Salish people of the Songhees First Nation who heavily relied on the land as a source of food and culture. By 1843 Fort Victoria was established and the Hudson's Bay Company had control over most of the land that now makes up Oak Bay. Aboriginal communities in Victoria became subject to ever more close management in a system of reserves in the 1860’s and onwards (Belshaw, 2002). This structured the social, political and economic systems of governance that would reinforce the settler colonial dichotomy for the next century in Victoria.

Rationale:

For my original blog entry I decided to engage with de-colonial narratives in Victoria and expand my view of the colonial history of Victoria and further understand how I (as a privileged, white settler), am implicated in ongoing colonial structures. I decided to visit and research Willows beach in hopes of uncovering the colonial history of the location. Decolonizing settler knowledge is a critical part of transnational feminism. Without a central interrogation and analysis of colonization, international feminist relations will continue to be recognized as a fundamentally colonial and Eurocentric project.

Keywords: colonization, decolonization, feminism, Indigenous, politics

Author: Smiths