Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 5, Number 6, 1 June 1988 — Hawaiians Left Mark in British Columbia [ARTICLE]

Hawaiians Left Mark in British Columbia

In British Columbia today, the legacy lives on of Hawaiians who first settled there in 1824 as workers for the Hudson Bay Co. Some of those who settled there intermarried with the loeal native peoples and became part of the tribes. Today their descendants ean be found throughout Canada and the United States. Even geographic features were named for the Hawaiians. One example is Kanaka Creek, the river and regional park near Fort Langleyin whatisnow the municipality of Maple Ridge. One early Hawaiian employee of the Bay as it is known today was George Apnaut who eame to the Maple Ridge area in 1824 with James MeMillan along with three other Hawaiians — Peopeo, Nahu and Joseph Mayo, the half-Indian son of Peopeo. Apnaut worked for a time on a large loeal farm

and was in the 1840s a laborer who helped rebuild the burned Fort Langley on the south side of the Fraser River. He took advantage of the Homestead Act of 1872 and was granted 160 acres of land to be cleared and improved. He was elected to the Maple Ridge Council on January 20, 1879. In the early days when rural settlers created their own entertainment, he played the violin and his sister "Mina" played piano or violin for dances. There was onee a good-sized settlement of Hawaiians at Albion in Maple Ridge, but they wound up settling upstream of Kanaka Creek, named for them. Some of the houses were destroyed when the Canadian Pacific Railroad went through the area of their settlement. The last house was gone by 1912.