175 years ago,
BC's government recognized, honoured, and bought their way into Coast Salish territories.
After that, the colony warred and Gold-Rushed
its way on to the lands, ignoring its treaties.
It's a history that's not well-enough known.
That's the goal of AQ: to share history, and build an archive to access and protect it.
What can the archive project do for you?
Travelling Exhibits
Specialized micro-collections are made up of docs and publications, the news-clipping albums, power point reels and more.
Hire exhibits on the subjects of: jurisdiction over children and families; roadblocks; the progress of Aboriginal Title in Canadian courts; international fora and reports; and the BC Treaty Process.
Check in to build your own custom packages to visit your classroom, conference, gathering, or workshop.
Online Archive
AQ is digitizing important documents which aren't found elsewhere.
Research Assistance Service
Digitization of The West Wasn't Won archive project has made hundreds of original documents accessible for the first time.
The archive is populated by collections saved by veteran Indigenous politicians, non-native allies, media strongholds, and life-long researchers.
Look inside AQ
Look inside AQ
First Year In Print!
Take a look at highlights from the first year in print, and forthcoming Special Issues.
This year, get into the archive
... a vehicle for The West Wasn't Won archive project
Collections
The West Wasn’t Won archive project comes out of decades of archival collection, many donated by life-long Indigenous political veterans. Archive Quarterly is the journal of this project, engaging public interest while publishing informative, curated, rare collections in every issue.
Housing and Digitization
The archive is currently housed by Electromagnetic Print, books that resonate, and EMP subsidizes the online archive space and digitization as well. The future vision is for a fully realized physical archive, open to the public. It's a project that will outlive us!
What's in an archive?
Imagine walking into a room where you can flip through news clippings from all the major roadblocks of the 20th century - and the grassroots Indigenous press releases, pictures, and interviews that go along with them but were never published.
Imagine a researcher with access to all the memos, the Inquiries, the working reports, and the ministerial letters in a cycle of state control of Indigenous children and families that has repeated itself at least five times since the 1980s. A researcher who can listen to your question and point you in the right direction.
The "BC Treaty Commission," the "New Relationship" and the "Transformative Change Agreement," where else can you go to read about these events, from different sources over time, side by side? There are conspicuous gaps online.
There have been centuries of conflict over fisheries and forests; there has been lawfare and community reoccupations. Imagine an archive that can receive collections in all these areas, and more, to provide a more complete history possible.
It takes a community to raise the next generation.
AQ can help carry these carefully preserved histories forward, and you can help AQ.
Thank you!
Your support by endorsement, donation, subscription, or promoting the journal - whatever you can do - will make the difference to this project's success.
We look forward to announcing a founding board and original governance structure. This group of contributors and advisors is made up of historians, former Chiefs, political veterans, academics, artists, media experts, lawyers, young social media savvy interns, families, students, film makers, roadblockers, analysts, social organizers, writers, publishers and specialized experts.
Will you join us?
Yours in healing, restitution, restoration and reparation,
Kerry Coast
Founding Editor
Archive Quarterly
and
Publisher
Electromagnetic Print
Chief William Scow of Alert Bay's testimonial on the Potlatch Laws is featured in April.