Bill Jones | studio

At the edge of the shrunken sea is a video work that engages historical photography’s complicity in the cultural assimilation of the Indigenous people of the Salish Sea. The project interrogates the archival record chronicling Vancouver’s rapid growth from colonization to gentrification after the 1886 fire. It uses elements of collage and montage to extend its critical frame, encompassing erasure and displacement as an alternative to the accepted narrative of progress and empire. The video also shows the obvious cultural and social crosscurrents within the new urban experience between First Nations peoples and non-Caucasian settlers. Furthermore, the work looks at the critical period from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, when B.C.’s urban expansion, resource extraction and manufacturing employed the many various sectors of B.C.’s growing population. 

The project focuses on the period between 1880 and the First World War when photography first  flourished in Vancouver. The video opens on a triptych with its central image of the Marrion family ca. 1885 posed in a rowboat on Greer’s Beach, the tree line of Senákw (False Creek Reserve No. 6) visible in the background. This grouping of prosperous European Vancouverites, at leisure, on what had been native land until the 1880’s, serves as prelude to the illegal seizure of Senákw in 1913. This theme of displacement is echoed at the close of the sequence when an image of two young women on Greer’s Beach is juxtaposed with displaced indigenous people in a settlement at the foot of Alexander and Douglas Streets in 1898. The white tents for lounging on the beach that are echoed in the Indigenous refugee camp presage the tent cities of the unhoused that can be seen today throughout the West. 

The narrative then juxtaposes various images of 19th-century Indigenous people with a photograph of two bears captured in the Kitsilano forest and chained outside a local real estate office. This sequence, anchored by the image of wild animals displayed for amusement in front of a business selling federally preempted land, forms the metaphoric core of the visual narrative. It is followed by a series showing the bridging of False Creek in the late 1880s that brought the railroad to the edge of Senákw, setting the stage for the forced eviction of its Squamish owners. As the photographic record shows, they were placed on a barge and cast away to be rescued by their North Vancouver relatives.

In the video’s third movement, the story of Senákw and the urbanization and industrialization of False Creek intersects with Emily Carr’s telling of her life-long friendship with Sophie Frank (Sewinchelwet), a story that speaks to the desperate conditions on the North Vancouver Reserve. Carr writes: “Every year Sophie had a new baby. Almost every year she buried one. Her little graves were dotted all over the cemetery. I never knew more than three of her twenty-one children to be alive at one time. By the time she was in her early  fifties every child was dead and Sophie had cried her eyes dry.”

A montage of Vancouver’s rise from the ashes of the 1886 fire into an urban metropolis is then followed by images of the Anti-Asian Riots of 1907. This trove of devastating images leads into the video’s final movement, which opens with a panoramic view of a regatta on Coal Harbour in 1913, the year of the expulsion from Senákw. Finally, the narrative returns to groups of Anglo-Canadians at leisure contrasted with group portraits of Indigenous families that were forced from their homes by rapid urbanization. At the edge of the shrunken sea ends with the statement: “ In 2003, after a decades-long court battle, a 4.25 hectare portion of Senákw was returned to the Squamish Nation.”

Click on grid above for slide show