The indigenous people of British Columbia do NOT need to be conquered. Their subjugation by the British Crown was completed over 150 years ago. Just ask the Chilcotin war chiefs who massacred a road crew in 1864 believing it to be an act of war. Governor Frederick Seymour marshalled 100 men, tracked them down, took them as prisoners, had them tried, convicted, and then hanged for murder under British law. Or ask the 200 Cowichan tribesmen who in 1853 grabbed their arrows and rowed out in war canoes in defiance of a colonial order to relinquish a man accused of murder. Governor James Douglas gathered 150 men on two warships and sailed under commission of the Crown into their village. It only took two hours. The man was handed over without a shot fired. Ask the Penelakut who, the following year, made the mistake of firing upon and killing a sailor aboard another Douglas gunboat arriving to arrest men accused of murdering two settlers. The village was shelled for 30 minutes and then burned. Within weeks, the culprits were apprehended, tried, convicted, and executed for the murders. There was never any need or desire among the colonial authorities to enter treaties after these skirmishes because the sovereignty of the Crown was abundantly clear. The few treaties on southern Vancouver Island that Douglas did enter early in his tenure were not offered out of necessity, but practicality. Sometimes you settle not because you accept the legitimacy of another party’s claim, but to avoid unnecessary conflict. What you did not see during the founding of British Columbia, however, was colonial malice or revenge. Slavery, torture, and retributive cycles of violence which had prevailed on the land since time immemorial quite suddenly came to an end. Crown justice was buttressed by the Mercy of the Cross. In 1872, Judge Matthew Begbie, who had sentenced the Chilcotin Chiefs eight years earlier, commuted the death sentences of four Metlakatla men, including the Chief, convicted for murder. They were returned to their village and trusted into the care of Anglican priest William Duncan. Begbie wrote: “When the head is white, the heart ought to be prudent and moderate.” Duncan reported in the years following that the men had become happy and docile under his instruction. When gold miners surged northward from San Francisco, colonial protection was provided. When smallpox broke out in 1862, thousands were vaccinated. These too were gracious acts of sovereign power. The natives are restless in British Columbia today. We don’t need to reconquer them. We don’t necessarily need treaties either. What we do need is to restore the peace, order, and good governance that colonial authorities established long ago through the sovereign exercise of the will of the Crown tempered by the wisdom and grace of the Cross.