British Columbiana: A Millennial in a Gold Rush Town

Review By Madison Helsop

February 27, 2025

It takes a certain kind of audacity to publish a memoir in your twenties — a conviction of the uniqueness of your experiences or insight. It surprised me, then, how much in common I had with the Josie Teed, author of British Columbiana. We are both millennial women who majored in humanities fields at large public universities and went on to Master’s programs in the United Kingdom. Like Teed, I spent much of my late teens and twenties feeling ambivalent about dating and the impermanence of my presence in the many places I lived. I, too, flew across the continent to spend a summer working at a historical park in a small, old gold rush town as a young woman. It was unfortunate, then, that British Columbiana and I almost immediately got off on the wrong foot.

As she describes her journey to Wells, BC, where she will spend the next year as first a curatorial intern and then historical interpreter for the Barkerville Historic Town and Park, Teed reflects on the notion of “the West,” writing “I thought that, although it was a common genre of film, no one really paid much attention to the fact that the west was not some big homogenous thing,” a laughably trite sentiment to anyone who has spent any meaningful time thinking about the West as either region or genre (8). This was the first time I rolled my eyes while reading but would not be the last.

Teed is disappointingly uncurious about anything in Wells except what the people in town think of her and who they might be dating. She is uninterested in the history she works with, a fact that Teed herself laments in describing, first, her tepid attitude toward her Master’s work (a dissertation on depictions of medieval buildings in film) and, later, her feelings of professional inadequacy next to her coworkers at the living history museum, but she never takes any steps to rectify the issue. As it turns out, British Columbiana isn’t about Barkerville, or working in public history, or, despite the title, British Columbia. The most important relationship in the book is the one between the author and her therapist in Quesnel.

Teed, ultimately, has no special wisdom or insight to offer, but her straightforward, confessional prose does come across as genuinely authentic in a way that may offer some much-needed camaraderie for readers in their twenties struggling with feeling directionless. Other than the young and lonely, the other main readership for this book is likely to be the nosey — people who have been to Barkerville or visited other living history museums and are ravenous for some behind-the-scenes gossip.

The memoir gives a fair showing for a debut but would have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand. The early chapters, in particular, are populated by paragraphs filled with unnecessary detail that read like the setup for a joke but go nowhere. In taking on the position of interpreter, Teed pitches herself to her new boss as a storyteller, someone who values facilitating the understanding of history and historical narratives. In the end, however, the only story she really seems interested in is her own.