Indigenous people have lived in British Columbia since time immemorial. For much of the nineteenth century, they provided the bulk of wage labour on their ancestral lands to the emerging colonial economy.

Rampant expansion in the province’s rich resource industries – logging, sawmills, fisheries and mines – beginning in the late 1800s a flood of immigrants from around the world displaced indigenous workers.

We acknowledge that the events described in this exhibit take place on the traditional territories of Indigenous people. The majority of the land in British Columbia remains unceded Coast Salish territory.