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- A History of the Gordon Head Campus Land from 11,000 B.C. to 1970, Claire Heffernan (B.A. Political Science, 1992): Five Original Exhibit Panels
We re-install select panels from an important student-created exhibit from 1992. It’s inclusion marks the critical questions students have been exploring about UVic’s history for decades and doing so in interdisciplinary ways.
Funded by the BC Heritage Trust, this 1992 archival exhibition explores the long history of the Gordon Head lands now occupied by UVic. Twelve two-sided panels weave colour photographs, aerial imagery, maps, and interpretive text to story this landscape: from the retreat of glaciers and earliest Indigenous presence, through Lək̓ʷəŋən stewardship, to colonial settlement, the militarization of these lands during the Second World War, and its mid-twentieth-century transformation into a modern university campus. Inviting critical reflection on how power, law, and cultural narratives reshape landscapes, the exhibit contextualizes decolonization and Indigenous resurgence at UVic today. We were drawn to this exhibit because it reflects a very early transitional moment of shifting awareness of Indigenous presence and land histories. Please visit the complete digital exhibit for much more.
Panel Highlights
Songhees Place Names for “Greater Victoria,” circa 1840: A map of Lək̓ʷəŋən local place names reflecting deep relations with land, water, and other-than-human beings in governance, harvesting practices, and cultural knowledge.
Songhees Village: Historic photos and maps showing the main Songhees village site on Victoria’s Inner Harbour before its forced relocation.
Early Residents of HBC Uplands Farm: Chronicles the dispossessive conversion of Indigenous homelands into so-called productive settler farmland that tried to erase Indigenous presence.
Gordon Head Campus Lands, 1955, 1964, 1966, and 1975: Aerial photos charting the creation of the UVic campus. We see open landscapes, then the gradual imposition of roads and infrastructure, showing the attempted colonial erasure of Indigenous geographies.
Gordon Head Military Camp 1940 to 1946: Documents the role of the lands as a Second World War army camp. This reclassification of the lands as wartime federal property laid the groundwork for their eventual transfer to UVic.
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