Lightkeepers on Huu-ay-aht Shores

Indigenous Labour and Knowledge in the History of Coastal Navigation

Abstract

The concurrent growth of steam travel and state-sponsored navigational aids—marine charts, sailing guides, lighthouses—played a complicated dual role on British Columbia’s West Coast. Such technologies allowed settlers to literally bypass the Indigenous intermediaries necessary for coastal travel in previous eras. This distancing effect shaped settler perceptions of the coast and undermined the measure of autonomy that intricate coastal environments sometimes afforded Indigenous communities. Yet lighthouse logs and government records reveal that Indigenous intermediaries remained essential for the successful functioning of navigational infrastructure into the twentieth century. This article considers the Cape Beale Lighthouse to show how the state strategically engaged Indigenous knowledge and labour to construct a navigable coast. Huu-ay-aht canoes and seafaring skills were martialed to build and provision the lighthouse. Lightkeepers learned the Chinook jargon and relied on Indigenous intermediaries to communicate with government officials in Victoria. At the same time, tensions over compensation, missing livestock, and rotting whale carcasses occasionally threatened to result in physical confrontation and intervention from Indian Agents. By examining such instances of intercultural contact, conflict, and negotiation, this article argues the construction of a navigable coast was a far more protracted process than previous studies have suggested. Ultimately, however, the article positions Cape Beale and other lighthouses as among the colonial arsenal that rendered coastal environments safer and more accessible to settlers, capital, and the state itself.