Mount Douglas
This 260-metre hill is located on southwest
Vancouver Island. Originally known as “The Hill of Cedars”, or simply Cedar Hill, officials turned
it into a Government Reserve in
1858, and later renamed it Mount Douglas, after
Governor James Douglas, in
1910.
1
In an 1850 despatch,
Blanshard refers to a Hudson's Bay Company survey, delineating HBC lands as the area
bounded by a line drawn nearly due North from the head of Victoria harbour to a hill marked on the charts as Cedar Hill, or Mount Douglas.
Cedar Hill provided settlers with lumber to build the palisades surrounding
Fort Victoria in the early 1840s.
2
Human use of Mount Douglas goes back much further for WSANEC people. It began when
XÁLS, the Creator, brought stones from
Cordova Bay and stood on the hill, named PKOLS, creating mountains by placing stones on the land
around him.
3 In the SENĆOŦEN language, PKOLS means “White Head” or “White Rock”, which alludes
to an oral history of the Coast Salish people that identify PKOLS as the place
where glaciers last receded from Southern Vancouver Island.
4 Tensions surrounding the re-naming of PKOLS to Mt. Doug stem from differing versions
of
Governor Douglas’s meeting with the local First Nations at the top of PKOLS. In general, First Nations
do not see this meeting as a land settlement, some having reported the agreement as
one that would allow settlers to live and farm on their land in exchange for regular
payments.
5 This event and the treaties signed with
Douglas is still debated today.
6 Dispute over the hill and its name is ongoing; in
2013 Chief Eric Pelkey led a group of Coast Salish people and hundreds of local supporters
up the mountain to place a hand-carved sign at its summit. First Nations reclaiming
of Mount Douglas as PKOLS represents
a small bit of decolonization
on
Vancouver Island.
7
- 1. Mount Douglas, BC Geographical Names Information System.
- 2. Ibid.
- 3. Reuben Rose-Redwood, 'Reclaim, Rename, Reoccupy': Decolonizing Place and the Reclaiming of PKOLS ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol 15, No 1, 2016.; Lliam
Hilderbrand, A History of PKOLS (Mount Douglas) Capital Regional District (CRD) Community Green Map.
- 4. Philip Kevin Paul, The Re-Emergence of the Saanich Indian Map. Sidney, BC: Institute of Ocean Sciences, 1995.
- 5. Government of Canada. Background to the Douglas Treaties.
- 6. Paul, The Re-Emergence of the Saanich Indian Map.
- 7. Reclaimed Pkols (Mount Douglas) a source of First Nation pride". Times Colonist, 22 May 2014.