Just like the smallpox that repeatedly tore through Coastal First Nations, COVID-19 is uniquely deadly because it came out of the blue

On Vancouver Island, First Nations have proved to be among the communities most aggressive at battling COVID-19. Many remote reserves have completely sealed themselves off from the outside world, instituting roadblocks, patrols and even pass systems to ensure that only community members are allowed in. Below, Meaghie Champion writes on why the destructiveness of infectious diseases is particularly resonant with First Nations.

My family is part of the Somena Nation, one of the Cowichan Tribes that are native to this island. We were here in 1918 when the Spanish Flu came through. In British Columbia about 4,000 people died from that. That was with a much lower population. Today, the same death rate would kill 37,000 people in BC.

That was bad enough, but our people also tell stories of an earlier epidemic, one that was much worse. The late Willie Seymour, also known by the name Kwalthutstun, an elder of the Stz'uminus First Nation (Chemainus), told a story passed down to him from generations before about the smallpox epidemic that struck Vancouver Island in 1862.

"The people would go to the ocean to soak in the water. It was all they could do to relieve the pain of the pox on their skin. Many of them did not live to get out of the water. They died and just floated away and were never seen again."

A 1909 photo from the collection of Library and Archives Canada showing a woman with smallpox (Source).

That epidemic in 1862 is estimated to have killed about half the native population of coastal BC. I have also heard stories told in Cowichan about how so many people died so fast that it was impossible to bury them all. Instead, people put the dead into the river and let it carry the bodies away to the sea.

When a significant portion of the population is suddenly gone, it changes things. In the Cowichan Valley and many places in BC, the situation changed as a result of the 1862 epidemic. Before the epidemic, the government had been asking the natives to sign a treaty giving up most of their lands so settlers could live there. The natives in Cowichan and elsewhere had been saying no for years. They had no intention of ever saying yes and the Cowichans never did.

Just learned our rez has instituted a pass system of its own now. Except this one allows you to enter reserve (as oppose to keeping you confined to one), and is meant to protect our people from outsiders. — Robert Jago (@rjjago) April 4, 2020

In May and June of 1862, the colonial government forced all natives to leave Victoria. This spread the disease all up and down the coast and to Nanaimo and Cowichan. About two months later, on August 18, 1862, right after the disease had killed about half our people, a British warship named HMS Hecate showed up in Cowichan Bay with the first shipload of settlers for the Cowichan Valley. Suddenly, the government was sending in settlers without a treaty.

They used the chaos and death of the pandemic to take over our lands in violation of their own law (the Royal Proclamation of 1763) that said they could only do it if we agreed to a treaty first. It was actually worse than that. When the smallpox came to Victoria from San Francisco in 1862, all or almost all of the white people in Victoria were vaccinated against it. Very few of the natives were vaccinated. When the natives who had come to live in Victoria got sick, they were not quarantined. Instead, the colonial government forced them at gunpoint to go back home to their own tribes.

A naval gunboat named the Forward towed 26 canoes full of natives up the coast via Nanaimo all the way to the Tlingit and Tsimshian territories in the far north. At Nanaimo and all along the coast, they dropped off sick people and spread the disease. They said they were doing it to remove the natives from Victoria to protect the white people who lived there. But they certainly knew what it would do to our people. The Daily Colonist ran an article warning that it would spread the disease to all the native nations along the coast. That's exactly what happened. It also hit the interior nations.

An 1857 painting of the Songhees village across from Victoria Harbour, just before the smallpox (Library and Archives Canada).

As the Forward passed Ganges Harbour on Salt Spring Island, Cowichans shot at them with guns. It is unclear if this was to try to stop infected people from entering Cowichan territory or because of the hostility and warfare caused by previous Haida attacks on Cowichan.

Either way, the vessel carried on and brought people from Victoria where the epidemic was raging out of control and forced them to go ashore at Nanaimo. This was part of their effort to remove natives from Victoria and send them back to their tribes. The smallpox immediately started slaughtering native people in Nanaimo, too. From there it spread to Cowichan and to our people. That's when our family members, grandparents, children, brothers and sisters became covered with the sores of the pox and soon were just corpses drifting in the river and the sea, too many to bury. Nothing was ever the same again.

