Episode list

Issues surrounding the incorporation of what is now known as the Province of British Columbia in 1871 is presented. It is posited that the Fraser Canyon War of 1858 is the most influential factor leading to the creation of the province, the war surrounding largely American miners who came north for the gold rush fighting against the indigenous population, and the subsequent attention that it brought to the British authorities for this outpost which up to that point in time had been largely ignored until what looked to be the American desire to annex it because of the gold. The origins of the name "British Columbia", the reason behind the merging of what were the separate British colonies of British Columbia and Vancouver Island, both largely support for the fur trade, to form the province, and the reason for choosing what was then Fort Victoria as the capital are discussed. Further discussions surround the laying of the framework for various levels of government to assimilate into western and/or quash the indigenous culture, such later measures as the creation of the residential school system and the enactment of the Indian Act, which in its original form banned what most indigenous peoples see as the center of their culture, namely the potlatch.

British Columbia has historically been a region of resource based industries, beginning with coal mining, the salmon fishery and associated canning, which has required a manual labor force, albeit one that benefited from knowing the local situation, which many of the managers and administrators, some proverbial robber barons, had no idea. This situation has led to a history of a strong labor movement and associated activism. These industries also led to immigration largely by visible non-Europeans to support these industries. While Chinese immigration is well known, albeit not associated to the coal mining in central Vancouver Island as is the case, as is the Japanese immigration associated to the salmon fishery, the black immigration from the United States is less well known, that situation slightly different in that it was largely to escape the racial oppression faced south of the border. Labor and the labor movement in association to WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, and the post-war suburbanization and the quest for a society-wide comfortable life is presented, with an emphasis on the half of the population not associated with much of this work, namely the female population.

The indigenous population has inhabited what is today called British Columbia for a few thousand years. It has only been the last two and half centuries that other ethnic groups began migrating to the area for whatever reason, most in search of a better life than from where they came. When the British starting migrating there in the mid-nineteenth century, there was already a significant Chinese population in addition to the existing indigenous population. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), which was largely built on the backs and lives (in that many did not survive the dangerous work) of the Chinese, opened up British Columbia to migration from the rest of Canada, which meant primarily white people of British ancestry. The established geopolitical system being British allowed for the enactment of policies and legislation which not only discriminated against the existing indigenous and Chinese populations, but made it difficult for people of color in general to migrate to what was now British Columbia - not only the Chinese (although much legislation was directed specifically at limiting Chinese migration), but other east Asians, primarily Japanese, south Asians, and to a lesser extent blacks migrating from the United States. Stories of the Japanese internment during WWII, the persecution of the Doukhobors, an already globally marginalized ethnic group, in the 1940s, and American contentious objectors - also referred to as draft dodgers - of the 1960s and 1970s are also told as part of the migration aspect of British Columbia's history.

British Columbia is largely renowned for its nature: in the natural beauty of such, the inherent desirability of that beauty, and the economic value of what can be extracted from it for global markets. Those natural resource sectors have largely been the trifecta of forestry - on which the province largely thrived economically - mining and fishing, centered largely on salmon, but which started with the fur trade, most specifically the harvesting of sea otter pelts, and whaling. The initial belief in any of this resource extraction has led to a near collapse of many of the resources themselves, leading to a strong environmental activism having emerged in the province, with Vancouver-based Greenpeace being one of the first globally known environmental activism organizations. Such groups and individuals have largely espoused the opposite end of the spectrum in protection at all cost. In the middle has been the indigenous population, who have historically worked on their traditional principles of having a symbiotic relationship with nature, with certain creatures, such as whales and salmon, having a special meaning culturally. While the indigenous population has largely been caught in the middle, they have also been proverbially manhandled by various levels of government, as the indigenous peoples have strove and still strive for self-determination and management of the resources on what is considered by many, indigenous or not, on land stolen from them. Beyond the aforementioned resources, another discussed in detail is the hydroelectric industry which in its development, in an effort to satisfy the new want for a affluent society in general in the 1950s and 1960s, ended up displacing many indigenous nations especially in northern British Columbia whose ancestral lands, on which they were tied, were flooded in the process in the name of development.