Random Notes - Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History

Statement by Melinda Mollineaux with a response from Andrea Fatona

The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual past.

Stuart Hall

On that day all the coloured business houses would close up shop and everyone would go in carts or on horseback to Cadboro Bay where whole sheep would be roasted on spits on the beach.

James Pilton

Examining the colonial histories of Canada’s West Coast black settlers I learned that, from the time of their 1858 arrival from California, this community held annual Emancipation Day Picnics every August 1st at Cadboro Bay. The picnics represent for me a diasporic social space and enactment of history counter to official narratives of Victoria’s British colonial “History”. Like the picnics, I use photography to say that despite a certain amount of invisibility, our experience of a life in migration occurs within a sense of place.
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