The West End of Vancouver is the site of a tragedy, a crime against humanity. The Squamish People lived in a village in Stanley Park, at today’s Lumberman’s Arch. They were dispossessed and transported across the ‘Burrard Inlet’ to Indian Reserves on the North Shore. They formerly got much of their food from Lost Lagoon, an aquatic garden that drained itself every day so you could wade out and pick shellfish, seafood, and seaweed fresh for your supper.
Lost Lagoon was then cut off from the Pacific Ocean by the Stanley Park causeway, and all the sea life there died. It was 1925: build a bridge. This desolation of an Indigenous food supply was deliberate. It was not an accident. The extermination of the buffalo herds that had brought that food supply down to mere dozens of individuals was just as deliberately executed. The Plains Cree were forced onto government rations and Indian Reservers when their society collapsed. The Crown didn’t even bother with a treaty in BC, and accomplished the same end, dispossession and relocation away from the prime real estate.
The celebrated lumberman shaved the entire landscape in and around Vancouver down to the nub, took every tree for themselves, while the Squamish watched in disbelief as trees that stood for a thousand years were turned into lumber, and without ceremony. The same dismissive attitude was displayed with the construction of the Stanley Park Seawall, when all remnants of a society that had flourished there for over 14,000 years was dynamited into oblivion to pave a sidewalk, and build a retaining wall to keep the expensive real estate from sliding into English Bay.
I spent 2023, 2024, and 2025 painting the English Bay Seawall and Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park, Vancouver.
Emily Pauline Johnson
1861 – 1913
It is dusk on the Lost Lagoon,
And we two dreaming the dusk away,
Beneath the drift of a twilight grey—
Beneath the drowse of an ending day
And the curve of a golden moon.
It is dark on the Lost Lagoon,
And gone are the depths of haunting blue,
The grouping gulls, and the old canoe,
The singing firs, and the dusk and—you,
And gone is the golden moon.
O lure of the Lost Lagoon—
I dream to-night that my paddle blurs
The purple shade where the seaweed stirs—
I hear the call of the singing firs
In the hush of the golden moon.
2023. 18" x 14" oil on canvas. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 18" x 14" oil on canvas. En plein air.
2023. 14" x 18" oil on canvas. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 14" x 18" oil on canvas. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 18" x 14" oil on canvas. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 18" x 14" oil on canvas. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 14" x 18" oil on canvas. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 14" x 11" oil on canvas. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 29.5" x 24" oil on panel. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 25.125" x 20.25" oil on canvas, mounted on panel. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 16" x 25.25" oil on canvas, mounted on panel. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 23.25" x 14" oil on panel. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 30.25" x 19.5" oil on panel. En plein air, alla prima.
2023. 29.75" x 20.75" oil on panel. En plein air, alla prima.