*Registration is currently full, but the lecture will be available for viewing on request to ahva.vrc@ubc.ca.
All are welcome to join AHVA Emeritus Professor Scott Watson, who will speak on his ongoing research project “The Engineered Smallpox Epidemic of 1862 and Its Subsequent ‘Erasure’ from B.C. History.” Professor and Head Dana Claxton will introduce Professor Watson and moderate the question-and-answer period following his lecture.
In 1862, a smallpox epidemic, originating in Victoria, then booming from the gold rush and the capital of a new colony, ravaged First Nations communities on the coast and in the interior of what was to become British Columbia. This weakening of the First Nations allowed the British to take firm jurisdiction of the territory. Evidence that the disease was weaponized to destroy the power of mainly the Indigenous communities in the north of the province is conclusive. Standard histories of British Columbia do not mention the epidemic.
Scott Watson is the former director/curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and former head and professor emeritus in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, where he co-founded the graduate program in Critical and Curatorial Studies. Watson has published extensively on contemporary art and, as a writer of fiction, in the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997. His exhibition projects include Image Bank (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2019), Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (Belkin Art Gallery, 2013), and Rebecca Belmore: Fountain (Canada Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2005) and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations (Belkin Gallery, 1995).
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
Image: Bird mask depicting smallpox, possibly from Triangle Island. Museum of Vancouver Collection, AA 84.
