On 05-Jan-2025 the VaMM Reconciliation Committee arranged the following talk by committee member Anna Stewart who discussed her work on the Welcome Post Gateways in Stanley Park.
In Anna’s words; “The commissioning of Point’s works for the Stanley Park site is a particularly important contribution to Indigenous public art in the city, and to the Central Coast Salish People on whose territory the Lower Mainland sits. What we now know as Stanley Park was the territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and the Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh), who had important burial sites, villages and cultural ties to the area, which the city not only failed to recognise when the park was put in, but which was actively overwritten. Villages in the area were razed and shell middens and burials upset to make way for (and in some cases were used as fill to create), roads and paths for the park. The attempt to erase Salish presences from the park, culminated with the eviction of the last remaining Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) inhabitant Rose Cole Yelton in the 1920s. With The Erecting of four Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw Totem Poles from northern Vancouver Island In the area where her house had been, coming to symbolize Indigeneity in Vancouver.”