2012/04 Sunshine Coast - Bridging the past |
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Bridging the past |
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Back in early March I spent a weekend at the Bridging the Past conference in Hope. Hope has a short but very lively business history with its fur trading, gold rushes, canyon war, three railways, and four major highways, but the conference theme was the diverse peoples that had come together during that history. Having some government funding for multicultural studies probably influenced the theme. So we had a series of presentations on cultural conflicts, beginning with the British Hudson Bay company and the aboriginal nations, moving on to the influx of American gold miners and the Canyon War, and the use of Chinese labourers to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. More recent conflicts were the church’s residential schools for aborigines, the internment of Japanese Canadians during WW2, and the march of the Sons of Freedom, the frequently naked and lunatic fringe of the Doukhobors, a Russian sect that rejects government, warfare, and the church.
We had a private showing of the Canyon War, a recent film made about the Fraser Canyon gold rush. In those days the area that’s now British Columbia was administered by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and largely run by company staff and their Indian partners. It wasn’t open to settlement, so there were few Brits in the area. The invasion of 30000 American gold miners from San Francisco was a disaster in the making, especially as the Californians had solved their “Indian problem” by exterminating them. There was a real danger that a war with the Indians would give the American government an excuse to send in the cavalry to “rescue” their people and annex all of the area. In the end, it was the American gold miners that solved the problem in BC by brokering a peace with the canyon’s tribes, embarrassing for the British and causing them to subsequently create the colony of BC and welcome settlers. The idea was that the presence of British settlers would deter American annexation. It seems to have worked, so far.
We had the film’s main instigator, Dr Dan Marshall, and its producers and director there for the showing, also some other historians who disputed the film’s details. Dr Marshall is descended from one of the gold miners and he had compiled his information from letters written by the American miners. He also told us about his subsequent chance meeting with a Finn whose 
gold miner grandfather had written home about finding a headless body in the Fraser.
The conference was held in the Anglican church, the oldest building in Hope, so we attendees were sent on a bus trip on the Sunday morning to free up the space for services. We went up the canyon to Yale and then up to Tashme in Sunshine Valley. Yale was the biggest town in the northwest during the gold rush, with over 20000 people compared to about 150 today. We visited its museum and its church, a couple of years younger than Hope’s. Those 150 residents do a great job of preserving their history.
Tashme is just past the Hope Slide and is a thousand feet higher than Hope; there were a few feet of snow on the ground around
the buildings. It was home for 2500 Japanese Canadians interned during the war. The original huts are long 
gone, but we met in the giant barn that held apartments back then. We heard a talk from a lady who had been interned there as a child; she had lived in the barn with her sick father. Even after the war they could not go back to the BC coast and they were “repatriated” to Japan even though the whole family was born in Canada. She came back in 1949, as soon as she could.
It was an interesting weekend, even though most of the presenters just talked about what they knew rather than trying to weave it into the theme of the conference. Sandie didn’t attend the conference; she was knitting for Zabrina’s baby and quilting for 
Michael and Lauren.
March is the time of year for grappling with taxes. In previous years, we’ve had help from international tax accountants for this. Their knowledge of what forms to file and which parts are relevant has been good, but they always make mistakes with the details, resulting in revisions and delays. Every year we’ve ended up mailing the tax returns at the last possible moment. This year we’ll be traveling during the critical periods so I’ve been going it alone and dealing with the two tax codes and the US-Canada tax treaty myself. The US tax code contains such poetic gems as
“For treaty purposes, a person is a resident of a treaty country if the person is a resident of that country under the terms of the treaty.” 
I think that this is lawyerese for “Forget the dictionary and common sense, a resident is whatever the treaty says”, but the example gives you an idea of why the international accountants are so expensive.
March’s weather was mostly wet and dismal but with occasional sunny days when we got out to Croft Island, Thacker Marsh, and Cheam Lake, all excuses to exercise the camera. We were too early at Cheam for the big migration crowds, but we found these cute ruddy ducks with their blue beaks, and this garter snake, early out of hibernation. The clouds at Cheam were also worth a picture