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.

Yes… we can do it again — and this time we’ll do it very carefully, very respectfully, and without changing anything that isn’t ours to change.

We’ll hold both truths:

• what the records say
• and what they don’t say

---

🌿 Eliza / Elisia — A Life Remembered

There are names in a family that feel solid, written clearly in ink.
And then there are names like hers—Eliza, sometimes written as Elisia—
shifting slightly depending on who was holding the pen.

But she was one woman.

A woman of the Songhees Nation,
living at a time when Indigenous lives were rarely recorded with care,
and even more rarely with respect.

Her original name—her true name—was not preserved in the written record.
It may have been spoken softly in her own language,
shared among family, carried in memory…
but not written down by those who documented the world around her.

And so what remains are fragments:

• Eliza
• Elisia

Names given, written, or translated by others.

---

She lived in a time of enormous change on the coast of what is now Vancouver Island—
a time when Indigenous communities were facing displacement, pressure, and loss,
while still holding onto culture, family, and identity in quiet, resilient ways.

Through her life, and through her children,
her line continued.

It carried forward into your family.

---

What we do know is this:

She mattered.

She lived.
She was part of a people with deep roots, language, and history.
She is part of your story.

And even if her original name was not written in the records,
it does not mean it was unimportant.

It means it was not protected by the systems that recorded everything else.

---

🌿 Acknowledgement 

Known as Eliza (also recorded as Elisia).
Her original Indigenous name was not preserved in written records.

---

🩷 Closing Reflection

There’s something powerful in saying her name—even if it’s not the full one.

Because now:

• she is being remembered
• she is being spoken of with care
• she is no longer just a line in a record

She is part of a story being told properly.