Eliza (Songhees Woman, Mother of Joseph Enos)

 Eliza (Songhees Woman, Mother of Joseph Enos)

Eliza was born around 1832.

Before Victoria was a city.
Before streets had English names.
Before ships lined the harbour.

She was Songhees — T’sou-ke? No. Tsongees — the people of the inner harbour of what is now Victoria.

When she was a child, the land was not “settlement.” It was village. Canoes. Reef nets. Smokehouses. Cedar. Reef-fishing, camas digging, reef-net knowledge passed down through women.

Her world changed fast.

In 1843, Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Victoria. She would have been about eleven. Imagine watching strangers arrive and stay. Watching fences go up. Watching the shoreline shift from canoes to ships.

Then the gold rush.

Then 1862.

The smallpox ship.

When the disease arrived in Victoria aboard the Brother Jonathan and others, Indigenous people were forced out of town. Entire encampments were pushed away while infected settlers were treated. The epidemic devastated Coast Salish communities.

Eliza would have been about thirty.

How did she survive?

Some Fraser River communities were vaccinated by missionaries. Some weren’t. Some families fled to islands. Some carried immunity from earlier exposure. Survival was not random — but it wasn’t guaranteed either.

The fact that she lived means something.
It means someone cared for her.
It means she endured fever, fear, or loss.

Five years later, in 1867, she had a son: Joseph.

His baptism record at St. Andrew’s Cathedral shows something striking. His father listed as “Joseph – native of St. Mary’s, Azores.” His mother: Eliza, Songhees.

That means her life bridged three worlds:

• Songhees
• Portuguese Azorean
• British colonial Victoria

That’s extraordinary.

Imagine her home. Likely near the harbour before the forced relocation of the Songhees reserve across the water. A place where Lusophone Catholicism met Coast Salish traditions. Where cedar baskets and rosaries existed in the same room.

Her son would later write in English. Keep diaries. Work land. Hunt cougar. Deal with Indian Agents. Navigate colonial systems.

Who taught him English?

Maybe mission school.
Maybe the Cathedral.
Maybe hearing it every day in town.
Maybe Eliza insisted he learn it to survive.

We don’t know.

But we know this: when she died in 1882 in Nanaimo District, he was fourteen.

Fourteen is still a boy.

He had already begun a diary. Then he stopped for two years.

That pause says more than any record.

Her death wasn’t just a line in a register. It was a rupture.

She died at fifty. Not elderly. Not frail. Just… gone.

And her son had to step into manhood without her.

---

What might a day in Eliza’s life have looked like?

Morning smoke from cooking fires.
Camas bulbs roasting.
Children moving between languages.
Church bells from St. Andrew’s.
Fishing gear drying.
Watching the shoreline change year by year.

Holding both grief and adaptation in the same body.

---

Questions to sit with

• Did she choose baptism, or was it required?
• What did she think of the Cathedral bells?
• Did she teach her son traditional knowledge alongside catechism?
• What did she lose in 1862?
• Did she ever imagine her descendants would still be asking about her?

She is not just “Tsongees (Eliza)” in a register.

She was a woman who survived epidemic, colonization, cultural upheaval, and raised a son who walked between worlds.

And because she did, I am  here.