A Story in Stone
Walking in the woods recently with my friend, we spotted some old bottles and a cooking pot, half buried under moss and leaves. We enjoyed checking them out and carried on our walk. Even if these things were old garbage, we were excited to find something unexpected. When I worked at Point Ellice House Museum and Gardens, we regularly came across discarded items from the house – sometimes it was trash, other times it was treasure (well, treasure to a museum curator at least).
Unlike coming across an old bottle in the woods while hiking, finding an object as a curator or archaeologist brings with it a set of procedures and research questions: What do we already know about similar objects? How do we find out more? What’s the best way to care for it? These are the kind of questions Grant Keddie, former Curator of Archaeology at the Royal BC Museum, must have asked himself when he was alerted to a 100kg sandstone pillar in the low tide zone off Victoria’s Finlayson Point in July 2020.
Good News / Bad News
As Keddie notes in a blog post about this find, there was reason to suspect the stone was a First Nations belonging. Sandstone is not typically found along the water in Victoria and Lekwungen oral histories describe the presence of burial cairns and ritual stones in the area. Moreover, ‘Finlayson Point’ – directly above where the sandstone was found – is a Lekwungen defensive site, between 350 and 1000 years old.
With the help of museum staff and volunteers, the pillar – covered in seaweed but clearly showing signs of carving – was retrieved from the beach and taken for closer inspection. Six months later, in January 2021, the museum announced that the stone and its carved face represented a significant cultural belonging.
What happened next seemed to toss this theory out the window.
A few days after the museum’s announcement, Ray Boudreau came forward to clear up any confusion: he was the one who came across the stone on the beach in 2017 and carved a face into it. Boudreau provided pictures of his carving in progress, but noted that it disappeared from the location when he returned to it a few days later.
Media stories featuring Boudreau’s claim and pictures came at the same time as the museum attempted to deal with accusations of being a racist and unsafe workplace. For many people, the story of the sandstone sculpture became further evidence of the provincial museum’s failings. In 2022, Keddie retired as curator and a new museum CEO announced that the stone would be returned to Boudreau. The story went away.
A Reminder Carved in Stone
It is clear that the face in the stone was carved by Boudreau. However, that does not mean the stone itself is not a cultural belonging once used by the Lekwungen. Oral histories, archaeology, and geology provide strong evidence that the pillar may be connected to Lekwungen occupation. When the stone was returned to him, Boudreau noted that when he first came across it there was something about the shape that seemed unusual: “I would still like to lend to the idea that it could have actually been in the hands of First Nations people at one time because it was too perfect…”
For his part, Keddie remains confident that the sandstone pillar played a role in the lives of the Lekwungen peoples. It seems that Keddie asked all the right questions when he studied the stone, but the museum’s efforts to make headlines and then make the headlines go away left little room for a nuanced discussion of First Nations cultures and landscapes.
Settlers in Victoria have a history of disturbing and destroying First Nations burial cairns and markers. We may never know the true origin of this particular sandstone pillar, but it now has a new story that should serve as a reminder for every beachcomber and treasure hunter in Victoria:
You are on First Nations land.
Vinny The Lotto Winner
Chek News recently had a story remembering one of their long time reporters, Harry Manu. Manu died at the age of 73 and the station reflected on some of his great journalism. One story is just too good not to share. Please take three minutes and enjoy this report from 1999 about Vinny, the lotto winner from Zeballos.