Haro Street, Vancouver (looking north-west) 49° 17’ 34’’ N 123° 08’ 25’’W
Stanley Park, Vancouver (looking north) 49° 18’ 27’’ N 123° 08’ 25’’W
Island as a burial ground, since time immemorial, the ‘park’ was also home to a number of Chinese families, European immigrants married to First Nation women, fisherman with houses on stilts on the beach of Dead Man’s Island and the Kanaka Ranch, a piece of land where Hawaiian men lived with First Nation wives and their children. The newspapers were induced to start a campaign against the ‘undesirable squatters’ and ‘loose and disorderly sort of people”—terms that might justifiably be used by the Coast Salish for the interlopers instigating the campaign. In the long term they were successful, using either legal instruments, intimidation or when forced, compensatory payments.The legal cases are interesting because they involve claims by many of the occupants to title on the basis of adverse possession, or proven 20-60 years of uninterrupted occupation. In these cases courts ruled that the oral testimony of Indians was not to be relied on, a judicial way of silencing the land. Having succeeded in clearing the area the city erected totem poles representing many First Nations (but not those who had recently occupied that piece of land, they had no tradition of wood carving) from all over British Columbia.
issue was not about individual settlers acquiring title to plots of land, but rather about rationally defining and standardising land ownership in order to make tax assessments based on the estimated level of agricultural production, the administrative foundation for revenue extraction in its purest form. Some specifics of place In 1871 when British Columbia joined the Canadian confederation, one of the pre-conditions was that BC be connected to the rest of Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company was commissioned to extend a line to the Pacific Coast. In the 1880s, on Vancouver Island, Robert Dunsmuir founded a railway company. Both the CPR and Dunsmuir’s company, the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, received land grants – as one incentive amongst others – for their efforts: 30km each side of the line. Dunsmuir’s deal also included mineral rights. In his case this meant that the company owned around 20% of the island which is about three- quarters the size of Switzerland, while the CPR ‘owned’ much of Vancouver. The CPR land commissioner, Lauchlan Hamilton, laid out the street grid for Vancouver after its almost complete destruction by fire in 1886. One of the first pieces of business that the inaugural session of the newly-formed Vancouver City Council dealt with, was a resolution proposing to designate a large area of land for recreational purposes). They had their eye on a peninsula looking westwards to the Strait of Georgia and eastwards up Burrard Inlet. Many on the council had, or represented, interests in the remaining real estate in the neighbourhood. Should the British Crown put 950 acres of prime property on the market, their holdings and those of the CPR (Lauchlan Hamilton, was a CPR employee as well as an alderman) would have suffered. However if it was turned into a municipal park it would not only increase the value of the remaining plots and provide a space for middle class leisure occupations – sailing, cricket etc., it would increase the attractiveness of Vancouver to potential outside investors. The area was christened Stanley Park. But there was a one other problem. Some of the area was inhabited.Apart from some Coast Salish people who had been using the area, including Dead Man’s
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