A Sechelt reader sent in a short letter to the editor that couldn’t appear in the letters section unless it was followed by a lengthy response. But the question, as well the way in which it was asked, screamed out for some kind of answer, so here it goes.
Barbara Goulet wrote: “It’s a simple question. Who are the Pender Harbour Indian Band? What are their names? How long have they been around? Where have they been? Do they even exist? Can we get the facts from someone? It looks to me like they are a fictitious group, created in the minds of a few frightened Pender Harbourites (probably “Summer People”) that are looking for ways to avoid working with the Shíshálh Indian Band.”
Who are the Pender Harbour Indian Band?
The short and easy answer is that there is no Pender Harbour Indian Band – not officially. According to the federal government, as of February they had yet to formally submit an application under Ottawa’s band formation process.
But the federal government is aware of them and takes questions about them seriously, because they are Status Indians with long family histories in Pender Harbour.
There are about 30 of them, with others “sitting on the fence,” and they are working toward band formation with the assistance of the UBC Indigenous Legal Clinic, Shauntelle Nichols told me earlier this year.
I asked if they were Status Indians. That’s one question she answered. “I can tell you,” she said, “all members of Pender Harbour Band are Status Indians.”
So they’re not exactly “Summer People.”
What are their names? The Nichols family has been the most vocal at community meetings, and a book that can be found at the Sechelt library — an unbiased history called Women of Pender Harbour – links branches of the Nichols family to Thawquamot, the original Theresa Jeffries.
The story goes like this: William Jeffries was a young English seaman-turned-pioneer who in the mid-1800s made his way up to shíshálh territory. Jeffries married Thawquamot, who was the daughter of a chief, and they had eight children.
“Many of today’s residents of Egmont, Sechelt and Pender Harbour – among them branches of the Johnson, Silvey, Paul, Page, Higgins, Edwardson, Gough, Rouse, Warnock, Dubois, Nichols, Scoular, Myers, Duncan, Reid and Fritz clans – can trace their family trees back to these children of Thawquamot Theresa Jeffries,” the book’s authors, Dorothy Faulkner, Elaine Park, and Cathy Jenks, wrote.
Common ancestry, of course, doesn’t guarantee tribal affiliation, and I have no idea how one group became estranged from the other or why one was forced out of Pender and the other was allowed to stay. The result of attempts in recent decades to reconcile seem to have been unpleasant for both sides, and neither wants to talk about it very much – at least on the record – because it’s become a legal thing.
I’d like to think, though, that in the spirit of these times, some form of reconciliation between the two might still happen. It would certainly do a lot to calm the waters in Pender Harbour.
