No Smoke Without Fire: Reimagining Women in Colonial Barkerville

On 16 September 1868, the gold-rush town of Barkerville, British Columbia burned to the ground. Weaving together archival records, rumours, and silences, this talk offers a new history of the fire, and the colonial society that sparked it. On one level, it illuminates the place of diverse women and violence at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia. On another level, the talk also reimagines the possibilities of history-telling itself. What can we do with an archive full of silences, fragments, and uncertainty? What stories might we be able to tell, and what difference can they make to how we understand this place and its past?

Laura Ishiguro is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty with the Asian Canadian & Asian Migration Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. An historian of colonialism in northwestern North America, she is the author of Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2019).

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Title: Barkerville - Williams Creek, Cariboo, "Gold Mines"

Reference code: AM54-S4-: Out P165

Date: [ca. 1865]