Salt Spring Island Archives

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Audio

Blagbourne

2015

220B_Blagbourne-created-2015.mp3

otter.ai

28.01.2024

no

Unknown Speaker 00:00
Good afternoon. Welcome to our meeting. This is the Saltspring historical society if you wonder where you are, and we're at Central Hall, it's our regular monthly meeting. Today, we don't have any business as most of our business people are away so I can just carry right into the main program. reminder that our AGM is the next meeting that's made meaning you can all come and stand for Office. We appreciate having you on the executive, we have a short fall of new executive members for next year. So if you'd like to help us out, let us know. Today, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Richard Lightboard, a former soltrain Islander and co founder who now lives on Saturna Island, and has been very active in the development of the archives on center and Island is working with the community over there over the last few years to simulate a program for people who go to East Point on Sutter Island. And he'll explain how that came about, and what his goals and what the goals are of the archives. Oh, it's a turtle. So Richard, welcome to Salzburg.

Unknown Speaker 01:12
Thank you very much. And it's a pleasure to be here. And I particularly want to welcome Jim and Lorraine Campbell, who are here on the front row who are really my best source of Saturnian history that I've ever had. Now, this, this should be fun for me because I'm not a historian. I'm I'm an I'm an amateur historian, I mean, a history enthusiast like many of you. And those of you who are like me know that, we get a great deal of fun out of reading history and finding the way things connect together. And it affects everything that we see and do. But because we have all that fun, the good Lord decided to punish us. And the way they do it is with is what they call the the Ono moment. And the odo moment is when you're busily explaining something absolutely wonderful, of a historical nature to someone. And you notice that their eyes glaze right over. And they start looking over your shoulder at the cheese plate. Or they suddenly decide it's time for them to go home. And you realize, oh, no, I've done it again. But when you come out in the afternoon, to a group of historians who come here because they say the like history, this should be fun. And I shouldn't be allowed to talk for a while without your eyes glazing over. So we'll try to try. Now the story that I want to tell you is a little adventure that we've had on dear littles aterna, where we created a an interpretation center, a storytelling center, in a little building that we wanted to save, we call it the center and a Heritage Center, fab for short, which means fog alarm building, because that's what it was. So I'm just going to use that as the main backbone of the presentation. And you will see how this little building evolve. And once in a while, I'll take that side course into one of the stories that we're telling in the building to give you a little bit of that history stuff. So the for those of you who've never been there, this is a turner, we're right down at the far end. If you go past this, you make those big guys from the border security. And a little sick. Turner is at the end of the line. So there's a surprising number of people who've never been to sisterna. I've been there over 20 years. Before that I was 15 years just down the street here. I used to own the old Collins farm. And that's where we raised their children was right here, just down the street. And I see you've really gone uptown, we never used to have those upholstered chairs when Mrs. Cunningham used to come and play the piano for the movies. So you guys are really, really getting up down. Now the island, the island is a very small island and sense of community and getting smaller. Our population has actually gone down from an official 340 to 315. And but as you know, as islanders that that's a very flexible number. In the summertime, we probably have about 600 in the middle of winter when the snowbirds are gone. We were lucky to get a couple of 100 but we're a very small community in terms of the resources that we have to do projects on the island and so we have to be pretty shrewd about how we get them done. The large gray areas in the in the center of the building are now all national park. So we are the largest portion of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve, and that's made a huge difference to the island and the East Point, our East Point. Getting on right now He's point is this section out in here. And that's where the fog alarm building is right on that point, which is where it's at right the far end of the island. And there's not much down there in the way of structures. We have one ferry dock, we have one general store, we have a little store down by the ferry dock. We have the old community hall, and we have a new big Recreation Center. There's a church somewhere in the woods, there's few other things. But that's about it. There's not a lot on this island.

Unknown Speaker 05:31
This was the opportunity to start it all of this. This is the photograph of the East Point Light Station in the 90s. And you can see the number of buildings. And you can see this beautiful point, we were negotiating to try and get a piece of that the lighthouse had been there since 1886, was an important Lighthouse from the perspective of the province because they had to get the coal from Nanaimo, out into the Pacific and down to the market in San Francisco. And if you leave Nanaimo in a sailing ship full of coal, and try and get out, this is the most constricted corner, you're going to have to go around. And it's very difficult because that point, turns into a low reef that carries on out in a big circle. Under the water, there's a great big Niagara Falls that goes all the way across just about to the American side. And so there's a lot of tide, lots of current, and they desperately needed if I have some assists to get the mariners around the corner corner. So in 1886, they, they built the original lighthouse, there was automated and D staffed in 1997. At that time, we the islanders were trying to acquire this land as a community park. We were trying to get it from the Coast Guard, and we were well along. Then suddenly, the park appeared on the scene and they purchased that big chunk of land in the middle and then wanted to acquire whatever land there was that they could add to it. And of course, they had first dibs on the on the coastguard property. So so it went to the parks. It's awarded our hopes were disappointed, but we still wanted to have some kind of a toehold out there. They started eliminating all the buildings, and they quickly they were being knocked down and put into trucks and taken away. And we didn't want to lose that little building out there on the point. See the little one way out there. Oops, this is this was the fog alarm building. It was built in 1934. At the request of the mariners at the time, because obviously no loriana radar or anything else and getting around that corner was a challenge. And fog alarms were starting to appear on the coast. And so they they requested that they build one here in the very beginning and I can 34 it was a little cluster of three buildings. This one which housed all the machinery, which was to large diesels, engines that ran compressors that then pump air into the large tank that was in another separate little building. And, and then there was a tiny little building for the operator and was about a 10 by 10 Check. There were three little buildings in a cluster out there in 1934. It got modernized in 1947. And they added an electric generator and electric compressors. And it stayed like that right up until it was decommissioned. So it was a little machinery shed. But we wanted to save it. We didn't want them to stop it. So what would we have to do? And resources, we had to have some leadership? Well, we were fortunate there because we have our Dear Pat Carney who lives on the island, who some of you may know, was a real sparkplug and trying to save lighthouses on this coast. And, and the last bill that she ever put into into action in Ottawa was the heritage Lighthouse bill which was, was considered to be her bill in which he put it through. And it's a marvelous bill that really requires the government to try and see if any of the gifted communities can use any of these buildings after they'd been demand demand before they're torn down. Because some of them are marvelous buildings. And, of course, Public Works and Parks Canada and so on, were somewhat reluctant to go down that path because they didn't really want to save a lot of these buildings because it's expensive. So Pat Wood had been fighting for a long time to to save some of the more prominent lighthouses. And when when we talked about it, we realized perhaps we could use this little tiny project as a demonstration project. We could show that a community could utilize one of these little buildings and make something out of it so So Pat, and her with her connections. And her understanding of how you get things done in Ottawa was a huge asset. And then my background is in architecture and planning. And I've done a lot of international expositions and pavilions, and so on. So exhibits and stuff like that was something that I understood. So the two of us sort of got together. And we plotted out how we would do this. And the next step was, we need community volunteers. And that's not easy, funding some political sport, and then we're going to have to convince Parks Canada, to let us do this. And you have to accept that the the perspective of Parks Canada is that they don't really want operations in the park, they want it to be theirs, and they don't really want to have to deal with any other organizations. So the trends, I won't go through all this, but we were we were the trends on our island is that we were getting older, and there were less of us, and that we were and while we were getting less and less volunteers, we kept inventing new organizations on the islands. So we had more societies and more clubs and more things to do. It was it was a crazy kind of, of activity we were doing, but it had to do with the kinds of people that were retiring and coming to the islands. They're all people that had bureaucratic backgrounds, or business backgrounds, or whatever. And whenever it came down to solving a problem, that was, let's make another society into it. So suddenly, we found that just staffing, all these presidents, treasurer's secretaries, and everything else who need these things was using everybody up. So we accepted that and said, We're gonna have to do this in such a way that we don't make big demands on all that. So we were there was competition for funding and competition for volunteers. And we, we said, Okay, we have to, we have to raise a concept, so completely that everybody understands what we're trying to do. So we said, we're going to put some money into it and do an effective presentation of the concept, even before we went out and started to rally all the troops. And then we would hand deliver that to selected people, politicians, and so on, and so on, and speak to them privately. So in other words, it was a very small wedge of effort, but but it was professionally well done. And this was the concept document that was done. Christmas time, and 2007. And all these ones with the white background, I'm just going to give you a feel for it. It had a

Unknown Speaker 12:36
whole it was an introduction, descriptions, building ideas, concept, sketches, interpretation, all this for this little building, implementation, and then a conclusion, appendices of budget, everything else was there. And it was all very, very, very neat looking and looked like had been done by, by professionals. And that was, and then we pointed out, this is the tiny little building, it doesn't have any great architectural merit, but its site, and its setting is spectacular. And we were able to prove that over the years, people like Tony, only the artist and many other photographers would go to this point and photograph this building, and it would appear in magazines all the time. We carefully measured the building and prove that it was solid. And then we understood what we were getting into. And we went in with some ideas about what we would do. And we and they said well, why we said because one we want to community place. At ease point. Two, it's feasible, we can do this, even though we're small, it's not a huge project. Third, it's excellent visit, everybody goes to sub Turner goes to East Point. So I said we got great exposure. And the site is truly inspirational. It's a beautiful place to be. And we said we can make it multi-use for them. So we can do different things out there. And we can enhance the park visitors experience. And then it wouldn't do much, it wouldn't do any damage to the park. So those are our ideas. So what will we do with it, we'd make it into a multipurpose little facility that could do exhibitions, could do meetings, and it could do small functions. So we would set it up like this for exhibitions where there was a for you on the left, you came in the entrance, you'd be met by a host or hostess. And then you go into the main room and the main room would have some kind of displays in it. For meetings, we would drop a table, pull the seats apart and have a meeting at a meeting room. And when we did constant functions like weddings are very popular out here. We opened the double doors, let people in and we could use it for that and get people out of the wind. Very tiny little project but it made sense. But one of the things that man was because we're so small, we would not be a museum. We could not do collections. And that was good from my perspective because we don't have the labor or we do we have the Money to properly curatorial, we look after a collection of artifacts. So we would just tell stories, storytelling would be our modus operandi. Right away Parks Canada in you got to realize that a big part of the use of this document was to prove to Parks Canada that we were an asset to them and we weren't going to be a problem. Well, they tell a lot of stories. They think that's their purview is to tell natural history stories. It's up to them. So they were very, very kind of nervous about anything that we would be talking about that was in the park as they thought it might. And we we work really hard to tell them no, no, no, no, inside the walls, everybody's going to know it's just the community. It's got nothing to do with you. Not on another No. Well, there were lots of reasons for doing that. One was we don't want to do it in French, because we'd lose half our wall space, like right now. And so but we were able to tell them that we were really going to be talking about history, the history stories, we're not going to be doing natural history, you can talk about the plants and the butterflies and all those things, but we'll just tell history stories. And they agreed to that. So so we had we we suggest that we would do some early exploration stories. And we would talk about how the Spaniards and the British and the early Europeans came, we would do the boundary story, because when you stand at East Point, you can actually see the boundary because the buoys right off of East Point mark the edge of Canada in the beginning United States, how did that get there? It's interesting question. And then of course, the Pig War story of the of the struggle for that boundary is a wonderful story. So I'll show you hang in there. And and we would that's next theme we would do would be local Island history, much like your archives and things you were doing the first the first pioneers on the island, and so on. And then we also wanted to do a natural history theme. But we and we were able to convince the parks that would that we were going to tell a story about something because you cannot go to East Point because we have the orcas going by we have a sea lion Hall out right in front of you. There are always lots of owls and eagles and everything down here. It's a fantastic place. So we said we have to tell some kinds of stories about it. And we said, but we'll do it from a historical perspective. We won't we won't talk about what kind of an animal anarchy is we'll talk about something and happen to them here. And then the very important question, and this was very much a strategy question, how are you going to structure this? How are you going to organize it? Because here we were a little group on a little island and negotiating with the federal government about how we were going to be such wonderful tenants. Well, we were very clever about this. We said no, no Parks Canada, you just have to sign a license of of occupation with the CRD not with us, right. And what they said is not too bad. We trust those guys. So so they we signed we and then we went to the CRD and convinced them that they should do this for us. And it would be no trouble for them. Because they could then assign it to go to their parks and rec commission on aterna. And they say, oh, yeah, well, we could do that. So so they did that for us. And then the Parks and Rec commission, of course, we're easy for them, for us to make them into our allies. And then the heritage committee, which we're down at the bottom, we're nothing but we're doing everything. But technically speaking, when you look at this, we don't really exist as a society as an organization, nothing. And this works really, really well for us because all kinds of good things happen. For example, the CRD provides all our liability insurance. So we don't have to spend any money on that. And also, the CRD can accept donations for us, because they work very much like a foundation. So I can, I can artfully dodge through a number of things and get donations, receipts tax receipts for donations through the CRD. And the Parks and Rec commission loves to bask in the glory of the of the heritage committee and they don't have to do a damn thing. So it works well for them. And we down at the bottom, because we're kind of this mysterious, Artful Dodger, when we do grant applications, which I'm doing quite often, I can sort of appear in whatever costume I want to appear in. And sometimes I appear as a committee of the of this episode turnout community club, because it's the oldest and most stable club on the island. Or I might go and say, Oh, no, I don't have anything to do with parks, because you know, they can't give money to me if you're part of the government, that sort of thing. So I we can kind of artfully dodge your way through and put ourselves in good positions. And because of that we were able to raise funds through good programs and satisfy the needs of those programs. Some of them a little bit. Some a little bit of a stretch. For example, I got $25,000 from the New Horizons department and the federal government, which is a program they have to get, get elderly folks like us out of the basement where we're not having any fun at all, and out into the public and get us to have, well, you know, I gotta drive him out. Turner, you got to find them. But they accepted that and they say, oh, that sounds like a good program. It's about history and how they'd like that, and so on. And so we use that money to buy a lot of our AV equipment and all that sort of stuff. So, so it's some of it's a bit of a stress, but it works. But this, what I'm trying to illustrate here is that we didn't have to create a big organization and a society and all that sort of stuff. You we could do it in a very simple way. The building rehab rehabilitation while they accepted, and they said, Okay, we'll let you do it. So then then the first thing that had to happen is Parks Canada had to remove all the lead paint off the old building. And we, we negotiated with them for a while we tried to get them to let us do it. But all they were so convinced that they had to do it. And so they hired an environmental company who put a wrapping around the whole building. And their approach was to scrape off every bit of paint off every shingle. And

Unknown Speaker 21:16
it took them a long time. So we didn't actually get in to do our work until it was in October. And so here we are, we're putting on a brand new shingle roof, we could have singled the whole building with new shingles and done a beautiful job for a third of the cost of what barks candidates says spent scraping the building, it was just really crazy and unfortunate, would have given us a huge budget. But anyway, we carried on we got the building, we did it. And this is the day that we finally went out, took everything down, and there was the building. And now it was there it was it was preserved. And this gotta remember was our goal, we wanted to preserve this building, a lot of everything else we're doing is all just because what we wanted to do, and now there was new roof, all the rot taken out of it has been reversed, it's going to stay. Since that time, we've actually had this rebuilding designated as a national heritage lighthouse. So now Parks Canada has to look after the outside of it. So we really have saved this little building. So even when we got to hear we were successful from from our early goal, but we did want to go on and do it. And we wanted to do some more things to it, I managed to find the original contract drawings of that building. And from 1934. They were in the archives of the Coast Guard in in Ottawa, which was a huge help, because Parks Canada had taken the position that alright, if you're going to preserve it, you have to do you know exactly the way it is. Zoning has never been static and its whole life has changed many times. And it used to have a lovely window, right here. And it would be so nice to have that because that's exactly where our host sits. And they can look out the window while there. And they said no, no, no, you can put the window in this drawing showed that there was originally a window there. And so we were able to make a window and put it back in again. And it was terrific. We couldn't find the original cable that connected this building to the to the power, it had somehow disappeared. After the building was shut down. I think I'd went all that copper ended up in some scrapyard somewhere. But so we had to dig a new trench and put the power in. And then so on. And by Xmas that year, we had power heat light and, and for Xmas. So the built the building was was really come back to life again. So then we started on our displays. So we started doing some drawings to show the building and and then we looked at all the walls space, these this, these are drawings of each wall. And we figured out what we could actually do on them in terms of panels. This is the main room and turned out that there was room for about 25 to 30 large panels about this big. That was what we had to work with. And so we started to divide that in themes now at this point. I mean, I could have just gotten a nice writer and sat down and we could have written a first show and done it. But that's not what you have to do with one of these because we're always trying to recruit islanders into the process. I mean, this building without the energy to keep it running and keep people interested would be useless. So you do everything you can to bring people into the process. So invented a bunch of theme teams tried to convince people Oh, go read those books and come back and tell me what's your best idea? What do you think was the best story? And so we ended up with six theme teams. The Light Station itself, the early exploration one, the boundary story that pioneers aterna and Natural History and First Nations but First Nations dropped off. And that's another story because we wanted to begin not with European discovery. But we wanted to begin with some panels about the First Nation use of the point. Logical, right? The difficulty is that in Canada's parks right now, you cannot put any stories up about First Nations. Without that it goes through the entire protocol that federal federal parks has signed with the First Nations, which means that every band that has any kind of a claim in that park must review everything you put up, while there are 19 bands that have claims in the Gulf Islands National Park. And we were a little group, you know, trying to put this together, the process of actually reviewing the First Nations stuff was so onerous that we said no Parks Canada, you do it, you know, you want to tell the stories in here, we did it. We weren't happy about that. But we just couldn't provide the manpower to do it. We're still waiting. We hope that eventually we will be able to do some First Nation stories. So we were down to five. Well, obviously, we had to talk about the Lightstation itself. And when we got into that we found there were a lot of wonderful stories. There are some really neat stories about the lightkeepers and and, and shipwrecks and all kinds of things that have happened at this point over the last 100 years. And so we had no difficulty in filling the panels in that room. And they will sort of stay as a permanent part. Because when you go to his point that that you're on, you're on the artifact you want to know about all this stuff. So that will continue. We just continue to make it richer, to add things to it more stories. And so that that's all in the foyer in the first room when you walk in. So you answer a lot of those questions there. And this, this is sort of just give you a feeling for what a panel looks like. There in that panel is about that. Hi, about this wide. So So you and actually the artists who did this one is sitting right there. Then theme to we wanted to get into early exploration and there was a bit of history to this. So turna, the names aterna comes from a little ship called the Santa Saturninus. That's her right there. This painting was done by a wonderful artist from Vancouver called Gordon Miller, who painted this just for us. If you took the boats out, you're looking exactly at what you see when you look from the little bottle arm building. That's Patos. So on the American side is the first island Mount Baker behind. That's the view in 1791. In June, these two little vessel vessels came sailing by the center Nina, and the long boat that was accompanying it, and they were the first European vessels to enter into the Strait of Georgia. So it was kind of a special occasion. And so on that occasion, the pilots on board, Juan Carrasco, and nervous they named the reef that that's extended out from East Point. And they call it bajo de Santos after Nina. And eventually that morphed into sub Turner. So that's where we get our names to turn it. So all of us the turnouts have a little connection to this ship. So I managed to get a grant. And I decided we would have a symposium. And I'm illustrating this because, you know, this is one of the things that a little organization like this can do on an island to enrich the experience of the people that live in that community. And so we invited

Unknown Speaker 28:53
a bunch of people who were very, very knowledgeable about this period. So there are two of them are artists, one who are from the States and one from Gordon Miller is in there. And very golf, who is a very well known historian from the area has written a lot of history books about about early exploration, you just finished one on one to fuca and the guy in the middle in the blue shirt is a is a is an amateur historian but with the most tenacious terrier like qualities I've ever met in any researcher, and he's from Gabrielle Allah, and he started researching early maps because he was interested in in the Spanish naming Gabriel Ola. And so he couldn't find all the answers here. You went to Madrid, and he went to the to the archives in Madrid and he found the original charts that have been made, because he had determined that these different pilots, Galliano and Val doesn't seem to have different handwriting, and so he could figure out who wrote unmap on the chart, which was that's the kind of detail he was in. So it didn't take much for us to turn him into saying okay, well what a About Saturna. And so he threw himself at it and produced a wonderful paper that is, I think, the definitive explanation of exactly how the names aterna evolved through the through the various charts, journals, maps, it's quite, quite delightful. So at this conference, we all they all did wonderful presentations. And what we were looking for, is we wanted to know what was the Saturn Nina really like? And so we had seen different illustrations Steve mayo, the American he drew it like the top picture. And, and Gordon saw that was like the bottom one. And so there's you probably as a sailor, you'd see the difference. The top one has more sales, see the top sales on top, and it also has an extra Gibco in front. That's a different rig. Right. Now, both rigs are authentic. And how do we know about this? Well, because we found the original manifestos our manifesto was a list of equipment. That was one that I Skipper had to fill out and sign and hand in before he left on a voyage, and it would list every cannonball Bisket, sail, everything that he had on the ship. So we found three different manifestos for the Saturn, Nina. And we were able to determine that in 1791, on her first voyage, she looked like the drawings on the right, she didn't have those top sales and so on, which to some of us sailors, this was all great fun. And actually, even the locals got quite curious and interesting. And it was a really a fun, a fun symposium. The result was that Gordon Miller drew us could set up proper lines. And we had the we had the Saturnino reconstructed and brought her back to the island. And so she now has pride of place in our little Heritage Center. And she's kind of the symbolic entry. And the segue into the the early exploration. The early exploration stories you will find on those panels in the first section. There's there's a couple on the Spanish beginnings. Why were they here? What were they were doing and so on. Then, of course, there's the arrival of Cook, and the cooks context, what was he doing what we see up to, and so on. Then there's the British in the United States for traders who were very, very significant part of what was going on in those early years. And then I've got 99 and 217 92. That's, that was an important year because that's the year Vancouver was here. And it's also the year that Galliano and Valdez were here in their little schooners. And we call that those panels, the summer of cooperation, because that was a very unusual circumstance for the first time. And in a long time, the British and the Spanish were actually allies. They were they were cooperating. Why? Because this French Revolution that just happened, and all the monarchs were afraid of the Republicans and suddenly thought we better stick together. So both Vancouver and and the Spanish officers had been instructed by their governments to cooperate with each other and they did. It collaborated that summer. So we've explained some of that. Then we did the plumper and company now the plumper and company are important vessels is an important story for us down at that end. It's important up here too, but down there, particularly because we live on plumper sound. And main was an officer and Bedwell was an officer, and all these all the names around so turna all relate to the officers and crew on on the Goodship pumper, who is here and in 1858, during the survey, there was going to be necessary in order for that red border dispute to be resolved. And then we added another one, which is a story that not many people, you're gonna have to come down and look at the panels. I'm not going to show you all those but but there's another really good story that I think a lot of Canadians actually a lot of Americans don't know about it either. But it's called the United States x x, the exploration expedition. It was a an expedition of five well fitted out ships that were fitted out in the spirit of Cook ships with, with scientists on board. They had they had geologists and biologists and geographers and astrologers are astronomers, and they were sent on a on a big expedition around the Pacific and did a tremendous amount of surveying and charting for the American government between 1839 and 1841. Well, the Americans already had their eyes on on Oregon and the and the coast up here and they wanted more good charts of this area. So Wilkes, the captain Wilkes and I see Captain Using isn't, is in quotation marks here because he was really only a left tenant. He pretended to be a captain on this voyage and he was an extremely interesting character. So the whole story of the XX and Captain Wilkes is a great story. He named Eastpointe. And he named tumble. And he also named the the Orcas Island monk constitution, the big one that looks over us. And there's some good stories about him and his relationship to his to turn it in that section. Then the boundary Story Of course, many of you know about the big war is a great story full of great characters, including Admiral Baynes up there on the right whose flagship was the Ganges. And, and down here, you've got Captain Pickett, who goes on to become the famous picot of Pickett's Charge and Gettysburg. He was in charge and the American troops that were down posted on San Juan Island during this conflict. And those two old paintings reflect the two sites which are down on San Juan Island. The top one is the American camp where they were there for 12 years. And the bottom one is the is Garrison Bay, which was the British camp. Both of those are both in the United States Park Service now, and particularly the bottom one has a lot of the buildings, it still remains a wonderful sight to see. So there are tremendous stories about the big war that are really fun to talk about. But the one that ended up being the story that resonated the most in terms of visitors, and what happened on the island turned out to be this natural history story that we chose. And the Natural History story was the story of Moby doll. Moby doll was the very first orca to ever be captured and exhibited in public, it happened in 1964. It was done by the an amateur group from the new Vancouver Aquarium. And what they were trying to do was to capture and kill a killer whale, so that they could measure it and make an anatomically absolutely correct model. Now, when you first hear that story today, you sound horrible. But as we, as we learned about this story, we began to realize that it was a really interesting story, because of the way attitudes have changed. Since this actually happened. I mean, we have really learned a lot and change their attitudes about these animals. And it turns out the dear old Moby doll in his, in his short life, was the instigation for a lot of that change. And so that these panels, this is what the panel looks like. Now,

Unknown Speaker 37:54
the movie Doll Story I'm going to come back to because it turns into something quite useful and still going on in terms of what's going on in the island. Now, beyond our graphic panels, we do do other things. We, we have a very large plasma screen, we have a you know, internet connection, we have all the kinds of digital stuff that you expect to find in a decent shop, we got all that stuff going to. And when we have kids to run a mall, where we get all those going, we started the digital archives. And for this, we're extremely grateful to your Saltspring archive team. And Presley Frank, who's been down several times, and they've been extremely helpful and, and getting us up and running. And we don't have 1000s of images like you guys do. But we do have hundreds and, and it's growing. We're starting to get the people involved in it, people are coming forward more things. So the digital archives for the island will grow there. And and they're very also useful to us because we've had aspirations to do some little video productions that we can show both on our website. And we can show them in the building on our big screen. And we have quite a number you can go on to our website to turn to heritage.ca. And you can you can click on them and watch them if you want. And this is for example, this is Ian McNeil, who was the last Lightkeeper he came over to a session and we did a walk about on the on the island and and around Eastpointe and tried to persuade him to talk some of these light housekeepers are not very loquacious. And Ian was crazy. Was it classic? Maybe he was the last guy to live in the old lighthouse before it tore. He told it down, tore it down. And so I had him up in front of the crowd and I was trying to get them gone. And I said, Ian, I said, you were the last one to live in that old house Lighthouse built in 1886 cents and you and your family are in there. So what was it like living in there? And there was this long silence and we're all we Eat. Mice, mice, there were lots of eyes, there were mice everywhere. Oh, that's a funny thing to remember. But anyway, so but anyway, he's a great guy, he's helped us quite a bit with some of the documents. Another thing we did, there was kind of fun is that we, you know, on our, on our little islands, whenever a big resources are our summer people think about that, but the summer people, their sphere of influence, and the kinds of things that deal with is in the big city or the university or whatever. So if you can get them involved, you sometimes can find a doorway into resources that we just don't have on the island. And one of our summer people has a little shack on the island. And she's a very clever woman. And she at that time was that was the director of the Center for Digital Media, in Vancouver. So she had all these marvelous graduate students who are all doing super amazing things with digital stuff. And we managed to convince her that she should take a group of five of her students and make and make us a project for them. They loved it, they came over and we hosted them and looked after him like cooking hands. And so they made a lot of, they did a lot of film footage, and they filled around a lot of stuff. And then they produce some things for us. And so they did, they did about six little documentaries. They also did some other innovative stuff that I found really fascinating. And we hope someday if we get the right people will continue on, you can do this on our site, you can go to the site, and you can bring up this picture. But what this is, is it's a walk around of the site in a gaming platform called Unity. You know how you can the kids go in and they play games. And they will go through these environments? Well, this is East Point, you can go in there, and you can use your left button, your right button and your Up Down button, you can walk around the building, you can walk out to the point and look back, you can do all kinds of things with it. And we began to see that this actually has huge potential for a little place like us, because then you can walk around this building now that was made from photographs that they took just as we were renovating, but we could do the building in 1934. We could put all the machinery back in, we could we could redo the lighthouse from 1886. And you could walk around that you could do all kinds of wonderful things with this tool, all it and it's getting easier and easier because these, these computer programs for producing games are getting simpler. So I think this will be something that will be fun to play with in the future. We also created one of the one of them was he really liked gaming. So he he took the Saturn and Santa set or Nina. And he made it so you can sail it around. And you could go on board and walk around the center Saturday, you know, which is great for kids, great for kids, right? So we're setting up a right now we're just trying to figure out how to make it more user friendly for little kids, so they can do it with a joystick. Anyway, those kinds of little things are things that we want to carry on and do. And it depends very much on them on the kinds of personalities and energy that comes to the hall comes to the center every summer. And I've been fortunate and be been able to get youth Canada works grants. And I've had a number of really great young students, university students who have come in the summertime and they, they're great because they're every day, we can keep this thing open every day. And they also do a lot of work for us. And they're what the ones that were there last year basically have put together almost all the archival material we have. And we have a number of projects that we're we're working on and and those students and the energy they bring are terrific. So I hope we can get a couple more this year. The first year we we didn't open until till 2012. So that was our official opening. great deal of fun. And they we've been running since then. It's even interesting to me because the building is definitely now part of the community. And you never know what people are going to want to do with these things. You know, we have our own purposes that a lot of people go out there now and want their photos taken out their families, things like that. Weddings are really popular. They love to go and get married out there. And here's the one that's a classic I could never have imagined this would happen. These are normally saying so turn Island women who have put on wigs and Prom gowns and had a prom date at East Point. And they had a giggling great time. I tell you, all of us guys were afraid to go there. And so you know the security center is there. I really hope that somebody will get the chance to come down. I'd love to show you around and we're open all summer. We're open on the weekends in late spring and in their early fall. Now, this whole experience of making this little thing happen is is that very interesting for me because like I said I'm not really a As a museum, historian, type person, more of a community activist, and I like to see things happen and I'm very curious about how these things influence the community. And, and I tend to look at history not as something dead at you know, but I think history is happening all the time. Spin is always around us. And it's and so that even even getting these stories into the community and getting people involved has had an impact. It's been interesting to see what actually happened. This that you should hear now I hope I don't hear the sound or is it?

Unknown Speaker 45:54
The Guest of Honor has arrived back in BCWS aterna Island,

Unknown Speaker 45:57
you got Moby in the back.

Unknown Speaker 46:01
time getting almost 50 years after his last visit here triggered a series of momentous events. This is a symposium of whale lovers or workaholics. They call themselves people crazy about killer whales, such as organizer Richard Blackburn, orcas, they've

Unknown Speaker 46:20
become an iconic animal in the west coast and people loved them. Before getting

Unknown Speaker 46:25
into what's brought everyone to aterna. Consider this. Between 1948 The 1968 Vancouver Island was the epicenter of a thriving Canadian industry in slaughtering whales.

Unknown Speaker 46:44
In those 20 years, the whaling community of coal harbour processed the carcasses of 10,300 whales, fin whales, right whales, humpback whales, sperm whales, even the mightiest largest creature on earth, the blue whale, all of them hunted down by Canada's whaling fleet are pwned and towed back to shore, a humpback whale a valuable and increasingly rare species. And so, in 1964, in the midst of all of that killing, began the story of an orca named Moby doll.

Unknown Speaker 47:25
That year British Columbians harpoons killed, dragged up on the beach chopped up and boiled 864 whales, large whales. This was the 860/5

Unknown Speaker 47:41
It was all marine humans idea. Now just shy of his 90th birthday. In 1964. Newman had just been named the first director of the brand new Vancouver Aquarium, and he wanted a replica of an orca for the entrance to the new bill. Thank you for doing this.

Unknown Speaker 47:57
We were told it was impossible to have to capture live with that if you if you wanted it, it would turn and kill you. It will attack you. And so no, our intention was to have a sculptured

Unknown Speaker 48:14
replica. Indeed, the widely held view of workers was that they were vicious creatures, despised by fishermen for gobbling up their salmon. The BC government wants even set up a machine gun post to shoot at them. The aquariums plan was to kill an orca and they picked this kelp rich spot and to turn the island East Point to do the deed and he

Unknown Speaker 48:37
come by really close. You're way closer here than you now you can allow it to be on a

Unknown Speaker 48:42
boat Athena George is a maternal naturalist who knows the story? Well, she says artists and Burridge the man who was to design the Orca sculpture was also chosen to harpoon the whale even though he never fired a weapon in his life.

Unknown Speaker 48:57
This is not a professional team. They practice they towed a little little raft and shot at a raft and he mounted this harpoon and then they waited.

Unknown Speaker 49:06
Finally, they got their opportunity. July

Unknown Speaker 49:08
16 1964. In the morning, a pod of killer whales came by and they ran down to their Harpoon and they shot one

Unknown Speaker 49:17
word spread and within minutes east point was packed with curious onlookers.

Unknown Speaker 49:22
I heard too that like islanders came down here and we're seeing here we're going to shoot at it. Because the idea was to kill it.

Unknown Speaker 49:30
Only they didn't kill it. Once the whale was hit, and wounded, the harpoon owners had a change of heart. The mammal was still clearly alive and able to swim, and maybe not in such bad shape. Marine human says he made the decision to try to bring the whale back to Vancouver.

Unknown Speaker 49:50
It just follows along behind the boat. You just told it. Well, we didn't really talk, but it just came along at the end of the month. I'd like a dog and a leash.

Unknown Speaker 50:04
With the harpoon still sticking out of its back, a dry dock normally used for ships was flooded, and became the whales new home. A vivid example of just how little the scientists knew was the name they chose. They thought they were dealing with a female. So a radio contest picked the name Moby doll, a plan the famous whale from Melville's book. Turns out, they were wrong. Moby doll was actually Moby Dick,

Unknown Speaker 50:32
a whole city one to see the whale. That was the whole beginning of the craze for killer whales. Suddenly, they it was perceived that these animals really were quite different. Moby

Unknown Speaker 50:46
doll was poked and prodded, studied and examined from tail to nose. But things were clearly not going well. Even here, you can see the fungus growing on the whale skin. After 87 days in captivity, Moby died from the skin disease. Despite the sad ending, a young Marine humans seem to appreciate the significance of what had just happened to the I would

Unknown Speaker 51:11
very much like to capture several of these animals. If I could keep them under good conditions, I'm sure that they would live and be healthy and active. And I think it would be possible to exhibit some public. Indeed,

Unknown Speaker 51:30
that's exactly what would happen in the decades to follow. mobi dollars capture triggered an incredible global interest in orcas.

Unknown Speaker 51:38
There was a huge rush on capturing more orcas and exhibiting them in aquariums around the world, which was a difficult thing because it really did deplete the pod. And this is before we knew how many they were, they thought there were 1000s of orcas on on the coast. And it wasn't till after all this happened and several years of research by some very interesting people that we learned there were only about 347

Unknown Speaker 52:07
of Moby dolls relatives from the Georgia strait would eventually be captured and sent to aquariums before the practice was stopped. Most of the whales didn't live long. But for all the missteps, Richard Blackburn says Moby doll represented a crucial turning point in our relationship with whales

Unknown Speaker 52:31
science. In those days, what they called Science was mostly science designed to help people catch fish harvest trees dig up minerals, the focus was more on on that aspect of acquisition and, and utilization. To do pure science just to understand the animals, nobody was doing it. So nobody knew it. They knew how to find them and catch them and kill them. But they really didn't understand much about them.

Unknown Speaker 53:00
And so on Saturna Island, three generations of scientists came together recently, to learn from the mistakes and to figure out the next steps. American researcher Ken Balcomb is credited with perhaps understanding the whales of Georgia Strait and puget sound better than anyone. He knows them all by name. And after 40 years of following them around. No doubt many of them even know him too,

Unknown Speaker 53:28
can tell them apart, we can count him we can see how many are here. And at that point in our beginning, ever 70 And we went up almost to 100. And now we're back down. We're going on the slide. It's, there's not enough food. Orcas

Unknown Speaker 53:42
eat salmon, big Chinook salmon. And as those populations that swim back to the Fraser River have declined. So have the whales

Unknown Speaker 53:50
get rid of fish farms start taking down dams, restore river systems, get wild fish populations recovered, get it going? We're losing. We're losing the top icon animals and will lose us.

Unknown Speaker 54:08
At this aterna symposium, there are weighty issues to consider all of it watched over from the back of the room by that guest of honor none other than Moby doll himself. For almost 50 years, his skull has been a large desk ornament at the Vancouver Aquarium. But from now on, said Turner will be its permanent home. I'm

Unknown Speaker 54:30
really quite happy that people are much better informed today than they were then set. Our actions could have had so much effect on a public data set to such an extent.

Unknown Speaker 54:53
For Marie Newman. It's a fitting tribute for a whale that did so much to change the world's understanding of a misunderstood species. Chris Brown, CBC News on Saturna island.

Unknown Speaker 55:13
So I think what's important is that our little group on our little island got managed to garner this much attention. And this played a lot, but you can still go and watch it on CBC site. And, and so it was a very successful from the point of view of, of giving us some credibility. The secret was that we didn't talk about the harpooning of the whale very much. What it was what we were talking about was it we call the conference reflections on change. And what we were trying to demonstrate is how much we have learned in the 50 years since we harpoon the whale. And, and that it was really a story about three generations of scientists who've spent their lives trying to give us more and more understanding of these amazing animals. And we, what we realized when we start to think about whether we could do this symposium is that the key people were all still alive, and they were available to us. And so when I managed to meet with Marie, and with Padma gear and talk to them about this, and began to realize that this was a story that they were very passionate about, but they were very reluctant to, you know, really talk about it too much, because there was a great risk, that there would be misconstrued as celebrating the, the harpooning of a whale. But when I learned the story, and I learned that some of the, the other generations, the guys that followed along, they were kids, as young students working at UBC, when Moby doll was in his, in his, in his, in his, his 10. And a lot of them participated with Moby dog became fascinated by Moby doll, John Ford, who was trying to make recordings of him, he's now the head of this excitation Department of Fisheries. And he's the most most respected expert in terms of whale sounds, orca sounds in the world. And he was a kid in the, in the same helping out with movi, the guy who learned to do the photographic recognition process. Dr. Michael Biggs, same thing he was a young student working at university with with Dr. MMA gear, and got inspired. And he was the one who actually figured out a system to recognize them and count. And it was a huge contribution to do what we know on the coast. Well, and we couldn't get Dr. Michael Vick there, but got his daughter to come and and we ended up bringing all the scientists and each one was asked only to tell us what they knew at the time, they started doing the research. And it was fascinating because the gear and Newman knew nothing. They didn't know they tried to feed them chicken, they didn't know anything about about orcas, but they learned a lot. And then the next group, the young students that were there, they're the ones who figured out how to count them who started to use their language. And they engaged in a whole lot of interesting science. And then the last generation, the young guys are doing it now dr. Lance Barrett Leonard and, and some of the others that we had there. They're doing very interesting, sophisticated research now, but it's not about that simple stuff. It's about pollution and family lineages. And where do they go out in the ocean. And so there's been this tremendous growth in development. And we were convinced that putting the three generations one after the other, to show this progression, and to show that it's not right to think about things only in the context of today, you have to look at the problems that were being solved in the context of the time. And that worked like a hot dance, because it not only got us this kind of attention. It also made friends of all those scientists who are still working with us today. And we have had some wonderful experiences with them that I mean, we're it looks like we're going to be a major participants in that fifth international orca Conference, which is coming up next year. And a lot of the workshops are actually going to happen on sisterna. So there, you know, it's really brought some to the island. Now, I wanted to mention another thing that this was going this project I'm going to show you now just a couple of slides, but this is also something that was going on at the same time. And what I'm trying to illustrate here is that there are events that are going on in the community. You can benefit from this historical interest. And and so we had a problem in that our school was running out of children, like many small rural areas, there's not so many breeders anymore. They they're all off in the city. And so we were down to like six kids in this turn Elementary School. And we had, we were fearful that at some time with any more cuts in the education budget, it would just be too hard to justify keeping our schools open. And if we lose our school, that's a huge mugging. Imagine we'd be we'd just be a retirement community with no school we'd never even the young people again. So a group of us were determined that we were going to try and, and solve this problem. Unfortunately, we had a, we had a teacher at that time, in elementary school, who had been to back to university and then studied and studied environmental science, he was very interested in teaching kids about, about the environment. And he believed that it might be possible to run a residential program, where students could come to see aterna, we got all these parks, we got this lovely community. And that was the beginning of what's called seek, when you have a you have part of it over here, too, they have a seat for middle school kids here. And Steve Dunsmuir, who is the teacher who's still running the program, really wanted to try and do one on the island, the difficulty was that we didn't have a place to put him because the the, you know, the snowbirds go away in the winter. And the ones that stay there, they're often in the mood that on I raised, my kids are gone, I don't want to look after any teenagers. And so we had a challenge to figure it out. So we decided we're gonna solve it. So we built our own residential camp for the kids. And this, this is it, this is the seat camp. These are some of the building the two buildings that are closest to us are the bunk houses for the banks and for the girls and boys. And then the far building is the common room and so on. And it's, it's up in the woods on a on a piece of leased land, it was cobbled together with whatever we could do. And it's got its own special character, because we felt the character of the program was unique. This is not the YMCA or a Christian summer camp or whatever it needed to look like something that was unique and different. And so we did that. And the kids have helped it's solar and off the grid completely. We also have a little micro hydro that that runs the thing. And those are teaching tools to teach the kids about, about how to live off the grid and everything else. They do their own cooking on that big wood stove in there, and so on and so on. So that program has been very successful. The school essentially is also saved just like the old logline building, because we now these kids mostly come from outside the school district. And because little eterna is a rural school, we get a much larger stipend per student than they do in the city. And that's enough to pay for the program. So we're at self supporting program within the school district, but it's saving our school. So it's a really, it's a really, it's a good story. And it worked well. But while we were doing all of this, of course, education, and the possibility of education in some way, helping us through our economic trials, which we all know we've been through in the last years became a kind of a one of those stories, it's going about the item like stories do go about items. And so that was going about plus we'd had all this fuss about the scientists and everything else. What happened is they synthesized into an initiative to try and do more education and scientific research on such an island and it in it and it surfaced as the Saturnian marine research. That's why it's called like Cirrus, the turn Island Marine Research and Education Society, great name. They've been doing marvelous work. And their focus is on education research and, and also to try and get something to happen like a research station or to have have the have the universities coming over and working on Saturn, and so on, so that we get some spin off from all of this. And this has been quite successful. We've got we've had an absolutely marvelous series of speakers and scientists, and who are some of our biggest cheerleaders, those scientists from the symposium that we had in the very first beginning. So what I'm trying to piece together for you as an as an interesting kind of, to me an interesting kind of connection between history and storytelling, and community activism and the resources that we can have in our communities if we if we use this stuff in the right way, and we don't teach history just as being, you know, dead stories. It's so much more and it has so much more potential in it. And so I I'm delighted to be here to be able to present the story Raise, I hope you get the idea now that we're not just a pretty face out there, we actually like to try and do some constructive things in our organization. And I sincerely hope that we'll see some of you over on the island, you'll come and visit us. Thank you very much.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:27
You injured?

Unknown Speaker 1:05:34
Very much, Richard. Very inspiring and very good. And they always do well. I'd be very happy to answer any questions if you had them. Yes.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:50
Our archives on Salt Springs are in an area in our brand new library. And for some of this to go on, in conjunction with our library, associated with art history. Wonderful. And I really would like to ask you to come and present this show in our library. You've given me so much to think about, but the other question was, paintings that you showed

Unknown Speaker 1:06:24
mean the paintings of the other ships and things like that?

Unknown Speaker 1:06:32
No, no, thanks. So most of the paintings that we have, we are are from Gordon Miller, who was the artist who did that one painting for us. And then there is a reason he was really wonderful and wanted to help us. And he has a wonderful collection of photographs. So are paintings and he gave us permission.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:55
You Wilson was a Saltspring?

Unknown Speaker 1:07:00
Oh, you have to come and show me which one? You mean, come up afterwards and show me which one you mean. And then we'll we'll we'll see if we can find. Thank you very much.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:12
You mentioned that you got a lot of the materials from our warehouse to do some things.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:23
Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, we have. You know, on aterna. We have about five fold families that were there's descendants are still there. The Campbells have a huge collection of photographs. The monies have photographs, they came in about 45 or something. But we've also we're now into the previous generations, like the pains that came Jarrell pain came in, I think 1896 or something like that. So and his his descendants have contacted us and we've got a lot of photographs from them. Taylor from Taylor point, you had the had the old quarry down on Taylor point. And that was in the 1880s 1890s. His son Dermot, and his children. So his grandchildren, one of them lives on Pender. He's given us a whole bunch of wonderful photographs from the 20s and 30s. His sisters in Kamloops. We you know that we're finding that the resources are certainly there. You have to find the family descendants and new usually very happy to contribute them and to you know, let us scan them and so on. It's just labor. As you guys know, you guys do such a great job. You know, you have, you have quite about 20 people that seem to really do it while we're about 120 of your size a little under. So I haven't quite got to that one person yet.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:52
There's really not a lot in the building that's really valuable in the sense of artifacts that are so precious that you would do it. But we do like I say that the value, great thing is that we're covered under the CRD insurance policy as well as their liability insurance. So up to a certain point, I just worked out a little deal with the Vancouver or the Victoria Maritime Museum. And we know they're all going through lots of trauma, but we don't have room for a lot of artifacts. But we thought that would be great to have at least one iconic artifact for each of our themes, right. And so like for the lighthouse, we were looking for the original lantern, their original whale oil lantern that they use and we think we found one of those so we we would put that in a little box. We'd have something for the span or something for the British something from the Pig War. And so we've been in discussions with them and they're very willing to lend us stuff because they don't know what to do and all that stuff now. They221 don't they have no they have no room and so that idea Having just those artifacts in there that would probably require some special insurance but other than that we know what happens on

Unknown Speaker 1:10:15
Saturday Anita Yeah, I could show you lots of pictures of her she's in great shape she looks better than the rest of us. She's you know, we we use her we built a little shelter for her it's set up by the general store. The shelter was designed so that it's convertible to our market in the summer. So we take the boat out put in the water and put the tables down and it becomes a little market and then we use the Saturn Anita for you know, we use it as a water taxi at the barbecue. We have a number of events with it. I'm glad you asked that question actually, because we have a lot of fun sometimes with Gabriel Galliano island because Galliano has a couple of rowing boats and they have a they have an eight ord Spanish longbow, we're six ordered, right, but we beat them. And so we like to race against them. It's a lot of fun. But you guys have the seat back from the original captain's gig from the Ganges. It's in the it's down in the nail on the wall down in the in your ball here. You got to build the rest of it. Gets a group together and build the thing. You can have a lot of fun with a longbow. And it's our it's great. It's great for kids and it's just a lot of fun and you got lots of talent on this island can't get busy

Unknown Speaker 1:11:45
right? You don't have your summer regatta days anymore data isn't too bad. You guys what happened? Spiders

Unknown Speaker 1:11:54
disappeared. is around but it's not so much in the water. Now it's more in the market.

Unknown Speaker 1:12:00
And then my Oh yeah. Too bad because it used to be a lot of fun on the water. And we would if you would, if you put that on again. We'll roll over. And we'll get we'll get we'll get going and I'll come to

Unknown Speaker 1:12:15
you and ask Richard other questions. One more question. Are we wrap up now? Okay. Well, thank you Richard again. You're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you all