Sometimes, A Story Is All In The Telling, I Think

Pacheenaht patriarch Charles Queesto Jones was 111 years old when he told me a story that had been handed down to him from the time of his great-grandfather. It was about a terrible mistake some of the Pacheenahts’ neighbours made after they’d attacked, burned, and sunk an American ship that had put in to trade for sea-otter fur.
Jones’s memory was failing, but the lesson of the story remained perfectly clear to him.

The story was almost certainly an account of the 1803 attack on the American ship Boston near Yuquot. Chief Maquinna, who ordered the assault, spared the life of one of the ship’s crew, John Jewitt, the ship’s armourer. Jewitt lived as Maquinna’s favoured slave until he was ransomed to another American ship in 1805. The event and its consequences became known to the outside world because of Jewitt’s enormously popular memoir, first published in 1815.

In Chief Jones’s telling, the captive was a blacksmith, and the mistake was sparing the man, because of the misfortune that later befell the Nuu-chah-nulth tribes of Vancouver Island’s west coast. Had the crewman been killed with all the rest, the world would never have come to know about what had happened to the ship and its crew.

The lesson of the story, in Chief Jones’s words, was this: “We should have killed all of them.”

That's from my Georgia Straight column this week. I eventually get around to explaining how all this relates to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's ugly, divisive, and inflammatory rhetoric in the matter of aboriginal fisheries.