The Smallpox War Against the Haida

Review By Frederick White

August 13, 2024

BC Studies no. 222 Summer 2024  | p. 164-165

Tom Swanky’s volume, The Smallpox War Against the Haida, unveils a weaponization of the smallpox disease against the Haida Nation.  This volume has bearing on BC’s settler colonial history as well as current land claims against Crown usurpations of Haida sovereignty.  Swanky reveals this research was a result of verifying the Tsilhqot’in oral tradition that smallpox was weaponized against their nation and used to destroy them.  Uncovering the role of Governor James Douglas and Francis Poole in the intentional spread of the disease, Swanky provides abundant evidence that the smallpox epidemic among the Haida, and everywhere Poole went, was a calculated effort.  Swanky also substantiates that BC’s colonial governor was not only complicit in the spread of the epidemic, but had careful plans of gaining Haida lands as a result of their demise.

Swanky re-traces Pooles’ deadly foray into the Tsilhqot’in territory on the chartered Hamley and the subsequent devastation of their residents due to the smallpox infestation that Poole systematically introduced by having numerous infected men who accompanied him mingle with the local population.  Seeing the results of his efforts, both Poole and Douglas set their goals on Haida Gwaii.  When Poole arrived in BC, all the First Nations communities had sovereign rule over their territory.  Swanky meticulously recounts the failure of Douglas and colonial BC leaders to establish their authority on Haida Gwaii and in their southern villages (known as ‘lingaay’ in Haida), in Victoria.  That sovereignty, according to Swanky, was the reason for the disease warfare, with hopes for the spoils of all Haida territory in their demise.  Ostensibly commissioned as a certified engineer for the Queen Charlotte Mining Company, a company fraught with colonial imperatives for gain from the Haida lands, Poole then traveled to Haida Gwaii.  But Swanky disproves Poole’s account of his timeline going Haida Gwaii, his purpose, as well as his self-stated skills.

With his repeated failure of establishing colonial authority among the Haidas in Victoria, Douglas then imposed practices that violated British law, specifically in regards to those infected with smallpox.  Instead of protecting and vaccinating the communities, Douglas instituted inoculations and exacerbated the infection rate as well as introducing infected persons to the Haida lingaay in Victoria (314).  Those who are vaccinated are not contagious, but those who are innoculated are.  Once Haida people contracted the disease, instead of letting them go the local “Indian hospital” or “pest house” for those infected with smallpox, colonial authorities banished infected Haidas from their settlements in Victoria back to Haida Gwaii.  Thus, the first wave of the epidemic arrived on Haida Gwaii.  The results, according to Swanky, amounted to more than 18,000 deaths on Haida Gwaii, devastating more than 90% of its population.  The second wave resulted from the passengers aboard the Leonede, one knowingly infected with smallpox but still allowed to board, who accompanied Poole to Burnaby Island on Haida Gwaii.  As a result, Poole confessed that the plague he started in the south “seems to be pursing me” among the Haida (258).  In a feigned effort to stop the disease from spreading, all local Haida residents on Scuttle Island having died and Poole having buried them, he ordered men to burn the dwellings in order to quell the spread of the disease, but the disease had run its course by that time.

The book begins with the mention of the Haida elders’ oratory of Bones Bay in which George T. Dawson, geologist and surveyor, warned Kakah, whom he befriended, to stay away from the canoes returning from Victoria because he knew those in them were infected with smallpox.   That story confirmed that James Douglas intentionally introduced smallpox among the Haida in order to gain control over Haida Gwaii.  Swanky ends the book with the importance of that oral tradition, that accepting it as history should culminate in recognition and accountability of BC’s “unjust and cruel” treatment of the Haida, which he adduces will heal and remove that cruel burden from “all of our children” (326).  Swanky’s research, claims and evidence sufficiently evince Douglas and Poole intentionally spread smallpox among the Haida and that it was a genocidal warfare tactic to gain Haida lands and resources.  While Canada has come to terms with its past regarding residential schools, Swanky’s book challenges further recognition of atrocities and crimes against humanity meted out simply for avarice of Haida land.