Before We Call It a Giveaway: My Songhees Ancestor, the Douglas Treaties, and Listening to History
By Tina Winterlik aka Zipolita
Sometimes history stops being something you read about and becomes something you realize is sitting inside your own family tree.
That happened to me when I began researching my great-great-grandmother, Theresa Eliza, a Songhees woman who lived on Vancouver Island in the 19th century.
And then there was another branch of the family tree:
My great-great-grandfather, João Ignacio d'Almada, came from the Azores, the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic.
Somewhere in colonial British Columbia, these two worlds met.
A Songhees woman.
A Portuguese immigrant from the Azores.
Their descendants became part of my family.
That makes today's conversations about treaties, land and reconciliation more than an abstract political argument for me.
It makes me want to slow down and listen.
I am not speaking for Songhees Nation
I want to be very clear about something.
I am not speaking for the Songhees Nation.
I have not reached out to Songhees Nation to tell them what they should think or do.
My ancestry does not make me an authority on Songhees history, culture or governance.
The Songhees people speak for themselves.
What I can do is tell my own family story, acknowledge where my ancestors lived, and listen respectfully when Songhees people explain their history and their position today.
Recently, I read an opinion piece by Ron Sam, Songhees Nation Chief and Chief Negotiator for the Te'mexw Treaty Association, responding to criticism of the modern treaty negotiations.
His central message stayed with me:
A treaty should not automatically be described as a giveaway.
That made me think about something we sometimes forget when talking about land.
We are looking at the present.
Our ancestors lived through the beginning of this story.
My great-great-grandmother was alive when Victoria was changing
Theresa Eliza was born around 1836.
That means she was already alive when Fort Victoria was established in 1843.
She was alive when the colonial settlement expanded.
She lived through the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1862.
And she was an adult when the Douglas Treaties were negotiated in 1850.
The dates matter.
They put a human being inside a history that can otherwise become nothing more than names on a government website.
The Douglas Treaties involving the Songhees were signed in April 1850. Federal historical records identify Douglas Treaty No. 1 with the Teechamitsa (Songhees) on April 29, followed the next day by Treaties 2 through 6 involving several Songhees groups and Esquimalt.
These agreements are part of the complicated history underlying today's relationships between First Nations and governments in British Columbia.
And there is something I think every British Columbian should understand:
Those treaties did not happen in an empty landscape.
They happened in Indigenous territories where Indigenous peoples already lived.
What were the Douglas Treaties?
The historical record tells us that James Douglas negotiated agreements with Indigenous Nations around what is now southern Vancouver Island.
The agreements involved land, reserves, compensation and continuing rights to hunt and fish on unoccupied lands.
The historical record is also stark about the material compensation associated with the Songhees agreement. One federal historical account says the Songhees surrendered their title to the District of Victoria in return for 371 blankets and a cap, along with reserve lands and certain continuing rights.
Reading that today, I have questions.
What did the people negotiating understand the agreement to mean?
What did the written English document mean to colonial officials?
What did the Indigenous signatories understand they were agreeing to?
How were concepts of land ownership understood across completely different legal and cultural systems?
And what happened afterward?
Those aren't unreasonable questions.
In fact, they are exactly the questions we should be asking if we want to understand reconciliation honestly.
Then came the Indian Act
My great-great-grandmother Theresa Eliza later married my Portuguese/Azorean ancestor.
Her marriage happened in 1876—the same year the federal Indian Act was enacted.
That coincidence stopped me in my tracks.
I began wondering what the law meant for women like her.
The Indian Act created a federal system for regulating First Nations people and reserve lands, and its status provisions contained serious gender discrimination.
Indigenous women who married non-status men could lose their legal status, while the rules historically treated Indigenous men who married non-status women very differently.
In other words, a woman's marriage could become a government decision about whether she remained legally recognized as an Indigenous person.
Imagine that.
A woman is born into a Nation.
She belongs to her family.
She carries her history.
She marries someone from another background.
And a government says her legal identity has changed.
That is not simply genealogy.
That is the power of legislation reaching directly into families.
And my family became a bridge between worlds
My ancestor Theresa was Songhees.
My ancestor João came from the Azores.
Their descendants carried both histories forward.
Portuguese.
Songhees.
Coast Salish territory.
Colonial British Columbia.
Catholic records.
Indigenous family history.
And generations later, here I am trying to piece together what happened.
Genealogy has taught me something important:
History is rarely as tidy as the categories we put on paper.
People married.
People moved.
Languages changed.
Children adapted.
Families survived.
And sometimes government paperwork recorded only a fraction of the lives people were actually living.
So when I hear the word "giveaway"...
I pause.
Not because I think every treaty proposal should be beyond criticism.
It shouldn't.
People have legitimate questions about land, access, governance, development, environmental protection and relationships between neighbouring Nations.
Those questions deserve answers.
But I don't think we should begin with the assumption that reconciliation is a government gift being handed to people who simply showed up and asked for something.
The Te'mexw treaty negotiations have been underway since 1995. They involve Songhees and four other First Nations, Canada and British Columbia, and the process has taken decades. B.C. describes the current agreements as modern treaties intended to establish long-term relationships, governance arrangements, treaty lands and certainty around rights and responsibilities.
That is not an overnight transaction.
It is the latest chapter of a much longer history.
A history that includes the Douglas Treaties.
A history that includes colonial expansion.
A history that includes the Indian Act.
A history that includes Indigenous resistance, survival and adaptation.
And a history that includes families like mine.
We don't have to agree on everything to listen
I don't expect everyone to have the same opinion about the Te'mexw treaties.
I don't.
I think people should read the agreements.
Look at the maps.
Ask questions.
Listen to neighbouring Nations.
Understand public-access provisions.
Understand governance.
Understand what land is actually being discussed.
And then form an opinion.
But there is a difference between questioning a treaty and questioning whether Indigenous people belong here.
The first is democracy.
The second erases history.
B.C.'s current information about the Te'mexw negotiations says treaty lands would be located within the respective Nations' territories and that, in the proposed arrangements, public access and recreational opportunities would continue in the provincial park lands proposed as treaty lands for Songhees and T'Sou-ke, while conservation values would be maintained.
Those details matter.
Facts matter.
And Indigenous voices matter.
I keep thinking about my grandmother's grandmother
I don't know everything about Theresa Eliza.
I don't know what she thought about the arrival of settlers.
I don't know what she thought about the Douglas Treaties.
I don't know what she thought about the church.
I don't know what she told her child about being Songhees.
And I certainly don't want to invent those answers.
What I know is that she lived.
She survived enormous change.
She raised a child.
She married a man whose family came from the Azores.
And her descendants continued.
Her story survived even when much of the surrounding history became buried beneath colonial records and changing identities.
That is why I am listening now.
Maybe reconciliation begins with changing the question
Instead of asking:
"What are they getting?"
Perhaps we should ask:
"What happened here?"
Instead of:
"Why are we giving them land?"
Perhaps:
"What were the original agreements, what happened to them, and what relationship are governments and First Nations trying to establish now?"
Instead of:
"What will they do with it?"
Perhaps:
"What does the proposed treaty actually say?"
Those are very different questions.
They don't require blind agreement.
They require curiosity.
And respect.
My family story is not a claim to speak for anyone
My great-great-grandmother being Songhees does not give me permission to speak for the Songhees Nation.
It gives me a responsibility to be careful with her story.
My great-great-grandfather coming from the Azores doesn't erase her Indigenous ancestry.
And her Songhees ancestry doesn't erase his Portuguese story.
Both are part of the complicated family history that eventually became mine.
Maybe that is one of the lessons genealogy can offer Canada.
Our histories are intertwined.
The Indigenous history of this place did not disappear when settlers arrived.
Portuguese immigrants became part of British Columbia.
Indigenous women married newcomers.
Children crossed cultural worlds.
Families adapted.
And the descendants are still here.
So I am listening
I am listening to Songhees voices.
I am learning about the Douglas Treaties.
I am learning about the Indian Act and what it did to Indigenous families.
I am trying to understand the Te'mexw negotiations without reducing them to slogans.
And I am remembering my great-great-grandmother.
Not as a political talking point.
Not as a convenient ancestry claim.
But as a woman who lived through a period of extraordinary change.
She was here before Canada became the country we know today.
Her descendants are still here.
And that is why, when I hear the word "giveaway," I think we need to be very careful.
Because before we decide that something is being given away, we should learn what happened to it in the first place.
Sometimes reconciliation begins not with having the loudest opinion—but with finally listening to the people whose history we were never taught properly.
🌿
By Tina Winterlik aka Zipolita
This is a personal reflection based on my family-history research. I do not speak for the Songhees Nation or any other First Nation. Where historical records are incomplete or uncertain, I have tried to distinguish documented facts from questions that remain unanswered.
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