Jean and Roderick Barman and Jenn Ashton
NORTH VALPARAISO
Parallels 02
Parallels 02
“Not everyone, perhaps, knows that there is a settlement in this Province called North Valparaiso,” the Vancouver Daily World newspaper explained on 18 November 1895. “The name may not be in the post-office directories or on the maps but the place exists just the same, and it is well-known to many residents on the north shore of the Inlet.” As to the reason: “Chilean ships have for the last quarter of a century been coming to the Inlet to load lumber… Ever since these ships commenced sailing, there has been a settlement of Chileans at Moodyville.” A sawmill operating there from 1863, followed two years later by Hastings Mill on the south side of Burrard Inlet, gave two venues for their employment. During a Depression in 1893, however, the Moodyville mill levied a rent of $5 a month on workers’ cottages. In response, the newly appointed Chilean consul in Canada based in Vancouver, Maximo Patricio Morris, “after a long correspondence with the Ottawa authorities, advised [his countrymen] to settle on the foreshore of North Vancouver on Dominion lands.” The article described what ensued: [Millhand] Peter Flores, the veteran Chilean who came here over 20 years ago, was the first to erect his cabin and now there is quite a little settlement, consisting of Chileans and their families…They have named it North Valparaiso [after Chile’s main port]. The settlers are a law-abiding and industrious class and are among the best fishing and lumbering men of the Province. A dozen years later, on 1 July 1907, North Vancouver, including Moodyville, officially came into being. In his invited remarks, the Chilean consul lauded North Valparaiso as on a par with the new entity. However briefly its name held, North Valparaiso testifies to the many arrivals from the Republic of Chile, which had been created in 1818 along the southern Pacific coast of South America. While Chileans are almost wholly absent from published histories of North Vancouver, the stories shared by descendants of the hundred or more arriving during these years make it possible to return them into view. Peter Gonzales’s granddaughter described his reasons for slipping away from his ship, as they came down through the family: “Men were not treated all that well on ships — they came here and liked what they saw.” A later arrival’s daughter‑in‑law explained: “The sailors would desert, or jump ship,
Parallels 02 — North Valparaiso
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Annie (Merrifield) Carrasco with family, date unknown
Jean and Roderick Barman and Jenn Ashton
Moodyville Sawmill Company and Townsite, 1882, courtesy Royal B.C. Museum & Archives, #A00397
Annie (Merrifield) Carrasco and children in Moodyville, date unknown
Segundo, Annie, and Clara, c. 1883–84
Parallels 02 — North Valparaiso
and would hide on the hills at the foot of Grouse Mountain until their ship was out of sight, as they were towed by a tug until the sails caught the wind. The sailors’ friends would take them food and blankets for a few days, and they would come down and stay with friends till they found work. None of them were lazy.” The mills and the docks where lumber was loaded needed hard workers, which the Chileans were, along with local Squamish men and Indigenous Hawaiians who arrived with the fur trade or on their own.
Segundo and Annie Carrasco with children, c. 1897
Besides jobs, men’s personal lives were critical to their decisions to stay. As reported by Squamish elder Simon Baker, “many of them married Indian women from here.” Two factors drew them to Indigenous women. The first was demographic. The earlier fur trade and recent gold rush had brought so many men to British Columbia that, as enumerated in the 1881 and 1891 censuses, there were three non-Indigenous men for every non-Indigenous woman. The second factor was proximity, in and out of the workplace, to Squamish and other Indigenous people. “My grandfather was a Chilean who jumped ship, Benito Miranda, and mixed in with the Squamish on the North Vancouver reserve.” In another typical sequence, Balinto Fidele Sanhueza, who would restyle himself Manuel Andrew, arrived in 1882 aged twenty-one, was hired on as a millhand, partnered with a daughter of Chief Squamish Jim, and by decade’s end was a Canadian citizen.
Jean and Roderick Barman and Jenn Ashton
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Segundo and Annie (Merrifield) Carrasco and family members, c. 1917
Parallels 02 — North Valparaiso
Jean and Roderick Barman and Jenn Ashton
Other Chileans wed their countrymen’s daughters by Squamish or other Indigenous women. Arturo Morales, Roberto Rodrigues, and Pedro Araneda married respectively Sophie, Amelia, and Rita Gonzales, whose father Pedro came in 1875. In a story passed down through one branch of the family, but disputed in another: “Peter Gonzales jumped ship and ran into the woods—his [future Squamish] wife met him in the woods and she married him.” Soon becoming a citizen, he worked variously as a handlogger, millhand, and fisherman. On his death, in 1942, Gonzales left four children, twenty-four grandchildren and twenty-one great-grandchildren, and was lauded in the Vancouver Sun as “one of the oldest residents of the North Shore.” Benjamin Cordocedo went one better, according to his daughterin-law, by aiding two young ship jumpers, Manuel Silva and Elias Campo, who in due course married his daughters by Catherine Komonake, who had a Squamish father and Sechelt mother. Cordocedo’s sympathies may have been aroused by having himself come as a young seventeen-year-old in 1884. Initially clearing land for what would become West Vancouver, Cordocedo was soon handlogging and making shakes for shingles. Indicative of the tensions in the Chileans’ identities, Manuel Silva, along with his wife Elizabeth Cordocedo, decided in later life to return to Chile, only for her to change her mind part way, and so both came back to North Vancouver and to their eight children left behind. The Chilean counsul is said to have promised 1889 arrival Francisco Miranda, prior to his dying in 1904, to send his young son Louis to his paternal family in Chile, only to yield to the opposition of Miranda’s Squamish widow. Pasco Cortes’s namesake son described how “my father kidnapped me to San Francisco” on the way to Chile, but “the [Squamish] band came and got me and took me back.” As the first generation became the second, then the third, and so on, descendants’ sensibilities as Chilean, Squamish or otherwise Indigenous, and Canadian were tested by the federal government’s actions. The Indian Act of 1876 removed from Indigenous women married to non-Indigenous men, and then from their offspring through the generations, their status as Indian persons and thereby their right to live on the reserves
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set aside in North Vancouver and elsewhere. Among the few permitted to do so were Pedro Gonzales and Francisco Miranda’s son Louis, both adopted as Squamish with the concurrence of government officials, and José Gallegos, who was welcomed into his wife’s Sliammon community near Powell River. Attempting to resolve this conundrum, one descendant explained how in her family, while “Grandmother talked Squamish and Chilean and English fluently, we were always told to say we were of Chilean descent—not the Indian.” Only in 1985 did it become possible for descendants, should they so choose, to seek legally to reclaim their Indigenous descent. It is long past time to return Chileans to our common history. They and their many descendants have for almost a century and a half contributed to the wellbeing of North Vancouver and of British Columbia. Their stories merit the telling.
Anne Merrifield Carrasco with children, date unknown
Jean and Roderick Barman and Jenn Ashton
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Author Acknowledgements:
Author Biographies
Images, far more than words, have the power and authority to evoke time and place. Thanks to North Vancouver artist Jenn Ashton, and to the Ashton and Fisher Roberson Family Archives, it is possible to do so. Jenn’s great-great grandfather Segundo Carrasco slipped off a ship in 1875 at the age of seventeen. A workplace encounter at the Moodyville mill with Englishman Alexander Merrifield may have secured him his wife. Merrifield had two daughters with a Squamish woman named Saimelaht, also known as MaryCelestine. Merrifield refused to marry her, though ordered by the Catholic priest to do so, whereupon she left him and Merrifield dispatched Annie (who would wed Carrasco) and her sister Mary to St. Mary’s Mission Catholic residential school in the Fraser Valley. The ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout lauded Annie Carrasco later in life as “an intelligent helper…to gather a fairly extensive list of the phrases and sentences illustrative of the laws and structure of the [Squamish] language.”
Jean Barman has dedicated her career to telling the stories of British Columbia and its people. Her historical scholarship has focused on the lives of women in B.C. and relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers. She has published more than 20 books and innumerable articles, including The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 2007), one of the most important books on the history of the province, and Stanley Park’s Secret: The Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch, Brockton Point (Harbour Publishing, 2005). Her two most recent books are Invisible Generations: Living between Indigenous and White in the Fraser Valley (Caitlin Press, 2019), and On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia (Harbour Publishing, 2020). Barman is professor emerita in the Department of Educational Studies at UBC. She is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, and was recognised with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012, and the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Scholarly Research in 2015.
For generously sharing their memories and understandings, we thank in alphabetical order the Ashton Family, Wayne Ashton, Jessica Casey, Mary Clifton, Laurie Cole, Tina Cole, Louis and Marjorie Cordocedo, Pascal Cortes, Laurie Fisher‑Roberson, Karen Gallegos, Terry Gallegos, Vi Johnston, Elsie Kerr, Elvida McClelland, Loretta Maverty, Mike Mearns, Donna Miranda, Ron and Kathy Read, Mike Recalma, Rocky Sampson, Nita Savedra, and Amber Stubbins, and Simon Baker as shared with Verna Kirkness in Khot-La-Cha: The Autobiography of Chief Simon Baker (Douglas & McIntyre, 1994).
Roderick J. Barman is a historian of Latin America with a focus on Brazil. He has published numerous articles and is the author of Princess Isabel of Brazil: Gender and Power in the Nineteenth Century (Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–1891 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Brazil: the Forging of a Nation, 1798-1852 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). He received the Warren Dean Award for the Best Book on Brazilian History, 1999–2000. Barman is professor emeritus in the Department of History at UBC. Jenn Ashton is an award-winning writer and visual artist living in North Vancouver. She is the author of the prize- winning “Siamelaht” in British Columbia History in 2019 and of the forthcoming People Like Frank, and Other Stories from the Edge of Normal (Tidewater Press). She is a director on the Board of the Federation of British Columbia Writers as well as on the Indigenous Writer’s Collective. She is currently completing a book about the history of her family in Vancouver and is a teaching assistant in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, where she is helping others learn how to tell their stories.
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Parallels 02
North Valparaiso Parallels is a series of chapbooks that explores ideas about cultural history and the visual arts, spanning from the histories of our locale to contemporary art and photography. Commissioned on the occasion of The Polygon Gallery’s inaugural exhibition N. Vancouver (November 18, 2017–April 29, 2018), curated by Reid Shier. This publication is generously supported by Tyke Babalos, Jane Macdonald, John and Helen O’Brian, as well as John and Jennifer Webb through their membership in The Polygon Gallery’s Publication Circle. Text: Jean Barman, Roderick J. Barman and Jenn Ashton Editorial: Michèle Smith Images: From the Collection of Jenn Ashton Publication coordination: Justin Ramsey Design: Information Office ISBN 978-1-988860-10-7 ©2020 Information Office and The Polygon Gallery, all rights reserved. Individual texts, © the authors. Images © 2020 Jenn Ashton. All images courtesy of the artist. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written consent of the publishers.
The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Court North Vancouver, BC V7M 3J4 Canada www.thepolygon.ca
Information Office 4780 Main Street, 202 Vancouver, BC V5V 3R5 Canada www.i-o.cc
Parallels Series Parallels is a series of chapbooks that explores ideas about cultural history and the visual arts, spanning from the histories of our locale to contemporary art and photography.
Co-Published in collaboration with The Polygon Gallery and Information Office. Parallels 02
9 781988 860107