Stanley Park's Secret

By Jean Barman

Book Overview

Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize

Shortlisted for George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing

Each year, over eight million people visit Stanley Park, a 400-hectare (1000-acre) haven of beauty that offers a backdrop of majestic cedars and firs and an environment teeming with wildlife just steps from the sidewalks and skyscrapers of Vancouver. But few visitors stop to contemplate the secret past of British Columbia's most popular tourist destination.

Officially opened in 1888, Stanley Park was born alongside the city of Vancouver, so it is easy to assume that the park was a pristine wilderness when it was first created. But much of it had been logged and it was home to a number of settlements. Aboriginal people lived at the villages of Whoi Whoi, now Lumberman's Arch, and nearby Chaythoos. Some of the immigrant Hawaiians earlier employed in the fur trade took jobs at the lumber mills that dotted Burrard Inlet from the 1860s and settled at Kanaka Ranch, which was located just outside the park's southeast boundary. Others resided at Brockton Point on the peninsula's eastern tip. Only in 1958 was the last of the many families forced out of their homes and the park returned to its supposed pristine character.

Working in collaboration with descendants of the families who once lived in the park area, historian Jean Barman skilfully weaves together the families' stories with archival documents, Vancouver Parks Board records and court proceedings to reveal a troubling, yet deeply important facet of BC's history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550174207
• ISBN13: 9781550174205
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Harbour Publishing
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Quintessential Barman: Exposing the truth behind the colonial facade in Vancouver, BC.

Stanley Park - the "pristine" jewel in the crown of the city of Vancouver is exposed for what is - a colonial machination! Barman at her best deconstructs the creation of the Park even as she illuminates the erasures of the local Indigenous population that had inhabited the land and waterfront for millennia. She traces the stories of the families that were dispossessed through the colonization of places of special meaning in the evolving province to the present. There is nothing pristine about the "park". Jean always provides us with a new way of seeing familiar places and spaces, helping us to take the blinders off and "awake" to the realities which are our historical legacy.