Big plans, vital history, and $750,000: the fight for the Yale Historic Site

Rough metal tools that once slammed a railroad into the Fraser Canyon’s rock walls were packed into boxes. Square gold pans that once dug for treasure in streambeds joined them. Precious cedar baskets woven by Indigenous women were taken from their shelves, some to be returned to the families that loaned them.

Last month, every piece of Yale’s history that wasn’t nailed down was photographed, catalogued, wrapped, and stored.

The priceless pieces were on display at the Yale Historic Site, where they told tourists and students stories of the lives, cultures, gold, and war that shaped the province’s settlement.

The non-profit that ran the site was formed by locals to preserve the town’s history. It had to move out at the end of April. The site itself isn’t closing. It’s under new management.

The site

North of Hope, Highway 1 quickly turns into a twisting rope of pavement that follows the rushing green water of the Fraser River. Twenty minutes up the canyon, Yale hugs both sides of the road.

Yale now has less than 200 people, but it wasn’t always a tiny wayside town. The land was once the site of an Indigenous village, one of several in the Fraser Canyon. Stó:lō people lived at the south end; Nlaka’pamux villages populated drier areas farther north.

The Hudson’s Bay Company established the first trading post in Yale in 1848.

Soon after, the Nlaka’pamux found gold up the river. The HBC began mining in secret but word soon spread. By 1858, the discovery had sparked a gold rush as men who dreamed of filling their denim pockets with the Fraser’s gold poured north into Canada.

The rush of miners hunting wealth and riches—and staking claims on Indigenous land to do so—brought conflict. American miners formed military companies to attack Nlaka’pamux peoples. The Fraser Canyon War had begun.

The war would last three months, from June 1858 to August, when the parties called a truce. To avoid further war, the Nlaka’pamux let gold-seekers access their traditional territories.

Now relatively peaceful, Yale soon became the biggest city north of San Francisco and west of Chicago. Construction started on the Cariboo Wagon Road to replace the treacherous trail that hugged the side of the canyon. It was later joined by the railroad, built largely by Chinese immigrants. Its construction was organized from Yale in the 1880s.

Yale’s heyday was a critical hour in BC’s settlement when transportation networks started to traverse treacherous terrain to connect farther-flung communities. More recently, historians have recognized the negative impact of this expansion on Indigenous peoples in the area and their relationships with settlers.

Preserving the stories from a keystone of the province’s history is not a small responsibility. Who gets that opportunity—and how that decision is made—shapes how those stories are told.

The Yale and District Historic Society was formed nearly 50 years ago by locals to preserve that important chunk of the province’s history in buildings and artifacts. A church and several homes have stood on the site—a small piece of land in present-day Yale across the road from the river— since the late 1800s.

The society sold the site—the land and the buildings—to the province for $1 in 1982 after hitting hard financial times. The society said it made a “good-faith deal” with the government at the time of the sale and stayed on to run the site.

Over the next 20 years, the province would hold competitions—called requests for proposals (RFPs)—to select the best operator for the site. The society won each one. In 2003, the society was awarded a contract for 15 years with a five-year option to extend. The province took that extension in 2018. That contract was up in March 2023.

The province issued a new RFP in March. The Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport said that applications were scored in an “unbiased, transparent and fair evaluation” based on criteria that included heritage experience, business plans, community connections, and an “understanding of building good relationships with local First Nations.”

The society submitted what it believed to be a strong application earlier this year, but it lost the site.

Instead, the province chose a small non-profit from out of town to run the site for the next five years. It will pay the organization about $110,000 a year.

The province said the non-profit it chose, the Forager Foundation, won the contract because it “best demonstrated extensive heritage programming experience, including experience with exhibit design, web development, education program development [and] innovative virtual reality development,” and had a strong stewardship approach. But it has never run a heritage site before.

The new guy

While the society packed up the Yale Historic Site, the man replacing them was packing, too.

Bryce Watts helped create the Forager Foundation about 10 years ago. He’s moving to Yale from Gibsons BC to run the historic site for the foundation.

Watts visited the historic site last summer. When he saw the RFP issued for its operation, he saw an opportunity to make a positive impact.

“We said ‘Here's a great opportunity to come in and make a difference in a small rural site that does have a great story to share, but doesn't necessarily have the same kinds of numbers as …the ones that are right smack in the center of big urban centers,” Watts said.

He also saw an opportunity to bring the Forager Foundation—an invention created alongside friends fresh out of UBC in 2013—back to life. The non-profit had been created to “preserve and promote national cultural heritage” in different ways. Watts and his compatriots used to lead wild plant walking tours, publish nature-focused magazines, and help create biocultural gardens.

But the dream started to fizzle when the foundation started losing members of its original team.

“Different career opportunities took people in different directions,” Watts said. “[the foundation] took a little bit of a hiatus for the last few years. Then, through this process of seeing different opportunities, decided now was the time.”

The RFP application marked the revival of the foundation. The province didn’t provide extensive details about the past management of the site, Watts said.

“When you see a [request for proposals], they don't give background of why it's up for RFP—if people are stepping away, if people are retiring, or if it's a competitive process. It's just an RFP.”

In other words, he said had no intention to unseat a previous operator.

When he arrived in Yale earlier this month, he said he planned to introduce himself and the foundation to the community by going door-to-door, hoping to dispel any shadows that linger around the organization.

“The added value of Yale being such a small community means that [introduction] is something that is actually realistically possible,” he said. “So [I] can go door to door and say ‘Hi, I'm Bryce, this is what we're all about. This is what our hopes are for the site.’”

A company of companies

The experience that gave the Forager Foundation a leg up in the RFP competition is not obvious, especially coming off a long hiatus.

But, Watts says the foundation is only a small part of Forager International.

During the non-profit’s break, Watts’ original ambitions for Forager ballooned into a series of different businesses in BC’s arts, culture, and heritage spaces. Those companies—including but not limited to Forager Education, Forager Media Group, and Forager Financial Services—sell specialized services to arts and culture institutions throughout the province. Forager International, of which Watts is the founder and CEO, is the overarching company. Watts said Forager has helped design websites, fundraise, designed campaigns, or otherwise worked with one-quarter of the province’s arts and culture institutions, ranging from the Dawson Creek Art Gallery to Victoria’s Craigderroch Castle.

Watts admits that this is the foundation’s “first foray into heritage operations,” but says he’s not worried about a lack of experience behind the site.

“Our board is experienced, [and] we're going to be hiring staff that all have experience in heritage management,” Watts said. One full-time staff member, a museum assistant, will be hired for the summer. Programs like Canada Summer Jobs could help provide more staffing in the future, Watts said.

New plans for the site aren’t finalized yet but Watt said they will include building up educational resources and virtual reality experiences for remote classroom learning. An IPad collection for self-guided tours will limit the need for a flock of tour guides who might be hard to hire in a small and remote place, Watt said.

The dream, he said, is to use Forager International’s specialized experience and technology to maintain the knowledge collected by the Yale and District Historical Society.

“[We’ll bring] the full force of the foundation and all the business services that we have to assist in developing new programs and continuing the legacy of the society that has been running it for the last 40 years,” Watts said.

“Obviously we don't want to come in and wipe the slate clean and start from scratch and erase everything that's been done there. There's obviously been some really great work done.”

But starting from scratch might be exactly what Watts and the foundation will have to do. The society doesn’t plan on transferring any of its knowledge or artifacts to the foundation.

Transferring knowledge

The society’s president, Karen Rushlow, learned that the society was losing the historic site in a meeting with Heritage BC representatives in early April. She was devastated.

“I put my heart and my soul into this,” she said. “This means so much to me, as it does to all the people in this community and the board. It's not just a site. It's not just a job. It's not that at all,” she said.

The site is not just an important link to the province’s past. It’s also the product of decades of family history provided by the society’s members—both Yale locals and members of nearby First Nations.

Rushlow said members have no interest in helping the site’s new guardians.

“[The province] wanted us to sign a contract stating that we would teach and train the new people, share all of our knowledge, and set the site up for them so that they could be successful,” Rushlow said.

Instead, the society has its own plans.

The society’s collection of artifacts was never included in the original deal for the site. And while they could have been leased to the site’s new operators, the society has declined to do so. The collection has been packed tightly into bins and boxes and neither it nor the society’s assistance will be available to Watts and his foundation.

In an interview with The Tyee, Minister Laura Popham suggested that Indigenous stories could be told better at the site under a new operator. But several artifacts previously displayed at the site were Indigenous pieces on loan from local families. And Spuzzum Chief James Hobart says those families may now ask for the artifacts back.

In a press release issued by the society, Chief Hobart said that members of the nation were not asked if they wanted their items included in any such transfer. The province said it notified the nation, but he said no one followed up on whether the message was seen, and no conversation happened.

“There was absolutely no Indigenous consultation, which is required for such transactions or transfers of historical data and artifacts,” he said in the release. “This doesn't have to include only First Nation items as all of the information is part of our collective history as well."

The chief told the Vancouver Sun that many of the families are taking their items back.

“A lot of people that donated their stuff on loan are taking their stuff back if it’s not continued to be managed by the same people,” he said. “Because that’s the people they trust, right?”

Margaret Stubson, the site’s manager and only full-time staff member, is employed by the society. She won't stay on at the site, either. Stubson agreed with many of the society’s members who declared that the society’s protection of the town’s history cannot be lightly ignored. She called the province’s decision getting “kicked in the head.”

“When you've taken care of something for 46 years… and you're told that you're just going to pass everything on and help somebody else and then get kicked out the door? We've been evicted. So what obligation do we have to pass on all of our knowledge?”

The perceived lack of consideration for the society’s work may have been the final straw for its willingness to work with the province’s new choice of operator. But the fissures between the province and the society surfaced in plans for the site’s future several years ago.

A $750,000 clash of wills

Three years ago, as COVID spread and prompted travel restrictions, Rushlow watched the visits to the historic site drop from around 5,000 a summer to 300 in 2020. No numbers were recorded in 2021.

Every tourist operation in the country struggled. Yale was no different. But during that slow summer Rushlow began digging for what gold she could, like so many of her predecessors in the tiny town. She started writing grant applications.

“I started writing some really big grants, and I was successful. That is a big deal in this town,” she said.

Her biggest success came in the form of a $750,000 grant from the province for post-pandemic tourism funding. The society had long hoped to build an entrance building on the highway so travelers would see it and stop as they were passing through town. (The site’s lack of visibility by highway passersby is such a clear concern that it’s also part of Watts’s plan for the foundation’s first summer on the site.)

The grant solidified those dreams into plans. Construction, to be eligible for the grant, was supposed to start in 2021.

But when Rushlow expressed ethical concerns about the way Heritage BC wanted to assign work on the building, she said the society’s future at the site was threatened.

“[I was] told that I should be using certain friends of people in the heritage branch as the architect or as the builder. And in fact…I was screamed at and told that we would not be getting the contract back, we would not be getting this building built, because I called somebody out on the nepotism,” she said.

Though $750,000 is a large pile of money, Rushlow worried every dollar would go to redoing plans, drawings, and designs—and then the site would end up with “a building with three walls." Other projects had gone similarly awry.

“We can't afford to be paying big, big bucks for something we've already done,” she said.

The ministry said the dispute over the project stemmed from requirements specific to building on provincially owned heritage sites—regulations that the society’s plans didn’t meet.

“Despite efforts made by the province to help the society align its project planning to the regulatory requirements, the society did not design a project that met those requirements,” the ministry said.

The province said it has authority over decisions about “asset development” on the site.

Rushlow believes the dispute over how to spend the grant (which had to be returned) led to the province’s decision to choose a new operator.

“They're very much linked together,” Rushlow said.

The plans

Back in Yale, the boxes stuffed with the riverside town’s history haven’t moved far.

Their new home—for the moment—is a series of shipping containers retrofitted with insulation, lighting, and locks on a piece of land two doors down from the historic site.

The buildings themselves are of historic significance, of course, but the collection is also a precious resource.

The storage containers are only a temporary solution. The society plans to build and open an interpretive centre on its property down the street from the historic site. But without the grant, it needs new sources of funding. While the society is working towards securing partnerships, nothing is certain yet.

The privilege of telling the stories that shaped the province can be an expensive one. While the provincial government plays a big role in funding historic sites, including Yale, its bureaucracy and processes can demand higher expenses, Rushlow said. That can make sustainability—and with it, local control of a site like Yale’s—harder to reach.

“Anytime any of the sites tries to push forward with something that would increase our income to pay our bills, we are just cut right off at the knees with it,” Rushlow said. “Their motto is that we become more self-sustainable. It's saying one thing and doing something completely different.”

She believes the efforts to keep sites, including Yale, under provincial control is intentional.

“It's all about control. It’s power and money.”