The Garry oak (Quercus garryana) is a species of oak tree native to North America’s Pacific coast. Its range in Canada is limited to the east coast of Vancouver Island, the southern Gulf Islands, and two isolated groves in the Fraser River valley. It is most widespread and conspicuous in Greater Victoria, the urban area centred around the city of Victoria, British Columbia. Garry oaks themselves and areas of relatively undisturbed land containing Garry oaks are threatened in Victoria by a number of factors including land development, the tree’s unpopularity as an ornamental species, and fire suppression. The Garry oak’s predicament provides rationale for the central goal of this thesis, which is to explore how people have known these trees in the 165 years since Fort Victoria was established. Using a range of print sources, I identify five prominent areas of knowledge about the tree, or Garry oak cultures. These are: Garry oaks as significant of Britishness, Garry oaks as known through science, Garry oaks as significant individual trees, Garry oaks as remnants of pre-colonial landscapes, and Garry oaks as advocated for by conservationists. From these, I draw three key themes. First, many people have found Victoria’s Garry oaks valuable or important and expressed that sense of value in a variety of ways. Second, people have used Garry oaks in narratives of national identity, though in divergent ways: for some Garry oaks have been symbolic of Britain and Victoria’s supposed connection with the mother country, and for others Garry oaks are to be regarded only as a native species. Third, scientific language and concepts have been used to understand Garry oaks with increasing popularity over the past few decades, especially as public awareness grows of the oaks’ ecological crisis. Following recent work in cultural geography, I contend that people negotiate connections to place through trees such as Garry oaks. Though these findings must be understood to be preliminary, they can help to explain the plight of the Garry oak by casting light on ambiguities and dissonances in the ways that Victoria’s diverse citizenry relates to the places they inhabit. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2008-10-08 13:47:50.049

In the process of carving a new England out of the southern end of Vancouver Island in the later nineteenth century, the population of Victoria, BC sought to forge a British identity for themselves through music and its associated rituals. They did this through the pursuit of purposeful acts of cultural meaning. In the social sphere, concerts, parades, religious services, and theatrical productions heightened and inspired loyalty to Mother England. Victoria’s upper classes could then dominate by excluding those people—including Jewish, Chinese, Indigenous, African-American, and Hawaiian residents—who did not conform to that identity. In late-nineteenth-century Victoria, music became more than just a way to celebrate, worship, and recreate; it defined social life for British and non-British peoples alike and shaped the physical space in which they lived. This dissertation explores late nineteenth-century Victoria’s creation of a British identity through music. Ensuring that their churches had a powerful organ and talented organists, Victoria’s religious community proved that they could undertake Britain’s highest social point of sacred musical performance: the choral festival. Positioning George Frideric Handel’s Messiah—with its strong connotations of Britain and her Empire—as their showstopper, these choral festivals served to cement relationships between those citizens who considered themselves British, while also proclaiming this identity as a mark of superiority to the community at large. Itinerant opera troupes further strengthened these imperial bonds by importing European and British opera to Victoria. Through the performances of these professional travelling musicians, Victorian Victorians were able to experience high art and popular operatic music of the Western world, joining the particularly British Pinafore and Mikado crazes of the 1870s and 1880s. These itinerant singers thoroughly impressed local musicians, who avidly tried to reproduce what they had heard, first in instrumental overtures and medleys in the 1860s and 1870s, then with vocal and instrumental operatic numbers in miscellany concerts in the 1870s and 1880s, and finally with full operatic productions in the 1880s and beyond. As with choral festivals in the religious sphere, taking part in opera productions also helped to create a shared sense of British identity among Victoria’s upper classes, during a time when other defining factors of social placement were not yet secure. Settlers in Victoria removed the Indigenous and natural impediments to the construction of their new metropolis, in effect silencing their cultural “voice.” Besides the Indigenous peoples of Vancouver Island, other recent settlers posed challenges to British hegemony, especially Chinese immigrants and “coloured” people of African origin, many of whom came from the United States. Even the gender demographics in the male-dominated frontier society posed challenges to the civilizing process. The Jews of Victoria, the majority of whom were of German or English origin, present an ambiguous case of a cultural and religious community at the crossroads in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. The butt of rising anti-Semitism in continental Europe, Victoria’s Jewish minority used music and ritual to establish themselves as members of the dominant class. / Graduate / 0413 / 0334 / 0357 / libby.concord@gmail.com

This thesis examines the beginning of Victoria, British Columbia’s, women’s movement, stretching its ‘start’ date to the late 1850s while arguing that, to some extent, the local movement criss-crossed racial, ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries. It also highlights how the people involved with the women’s movement in Victoria challenged traditional beliefs, like separate sphere ideology, about women’s position in society and contributed to the introduction of new more egalitarian views of women in a process that continues to the present day. Chapter One challenges current understandings of First Wave Feminism, stretching its limitations regarding time and persons involved with social reform and women’s rights goals, while showing that the issue of ‘suffrage’ alone did not make a ‘women’s movement’. Chapter 2 focuses on how the local ‘women’s movement’ coalesced and expanded in the late 1890s to embrace various social reform causes and demands for women’s rights and recognition, it reflected a unique spirit that emanated from Victorian traditionalism, skewed gender ratios, and a frontier mentality. Chapter 3 argues that an examination of Victoria’s movement, like any other ‘women’s movement’, must take into consideration the ethnic and racialized ‘other’, in this thesis the Indigenous, African Canadian, and Chinese. The Conclusion discusses areas for future research, deeper research questions, and raises the question about whether the women’s movement in Victoria was successful. / Graduate / 0334 / 0733 / 0631 / mlihmels@shaw.ca