The Promise of Paradise: Utopian Communities in British Columbia

The Promise of Paradise

The Promise of Paradise

Utopian Communities in British Columbia

Expanded Second Edition

Andrew Scott

Copyright © 2017 Andrew Scott

First edition published in 1997 by Whitecap Books

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, info@accesscopyright.ca.

Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

www.harbourpublishing.com

Cover design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe

Text design by Shed Simas / Onça Design

Front cover photo: Rob Wood. Back cover photos, left to right: Author’s Collection; University of British Columbia, Special Collections; James Skitt Matthews photo, City of Vancouver Archives Out N354.19. Author photo: Katherine Johnston.

Printed and bound in Canada

Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Scott, Andrew, 1947-, author

  The promise of paradise : utopian communities in British

Columbia / Andrew Scott. -- Expanded second edition.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55017-771-8 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-55017-772-5 (html)

1. Utopias--British Columbia--History.  2. Collective settlements--

British Columbia--History.  3. British Columbia--History.  I. Title.

HX659.B7S36 2017 335’.0209711 C2016-907079-4

C2016-907080-8

Other books by Andrew Scott

Secret Coastline

Journeys and Discoveries along B.C.’s Shores

Secret Coastline II

More Journeys and Discoveries along BC’s Shores

Painter, Paddler

The Art and Adventures of Stewart Marshall

The People’s Water (with Daniel Bouman)

The Fight for the Sunshine Coast’s Drinking Watersheds

The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names

A Complete Reference to Coastal British Columbia

for Shiane

Acknowledgements

Many people helped with this book. I’d like to thank the staff at BC Archives in Victoria, Special Collections at the Vancouver Public Library, and Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Library in Vancouver. I fondly remember the company of my deceased wife, Shiane Scott, on an early 1990 visit to Sointula. Katherine Johnston, who came with me on several later journeys of research and discovery, offered much encouragement. I’m grateful to the Canada Council, without whose financial help the project could not have been completed.

The following people all provided assistance. The list is alphabetical, and I apologize in advance if I’ve left anyone out. Thank you all so much: Anne Blaney, 100 Mile House; Vivien Bowers, Nelson; James Bowman, Calgary; George Brandak, Rare Books and Special Collections, UBC Library; Kate Brauer, formerly of Sointula; Liz Bryan, Rock Creek; Jan and Tom Bulman, Vancouver and Langley; Maureen Butler, Langley; Alan Carpenter, Langley; Brianna Cerkiewicz, Madeira Park, for her fine edit of this second edition of Promise of Paradise; Dawn Child, Cedar-by-the-Sea; Wilf Christensen, Bella Coola; Sue Collerman, Langley; Tracy Cooper, Victoria, for alerting me to the existence of Duthie; Maureen Cumming, BC Ferries, Victoria; Susan Davidson, Aldergrove; Kathy Day, Bernholz & Graham, Anchorage; Wallace Dergousoff, Grand Forks; Simon Dick, Mitchell Bay; Barb and Hugh Duff, Aldergrove; Larry Ewashen, Castlegar; Leslie Field, Rare Books and Special Collections, UBC Library; Laura Fisher, Bradner; Merroly Frostrup, Bella Coola; David Gluns, Nelson; Tom Gooden, Burnaby Village Museum; Peter Gritchen, Grand Forks; Gwen Hansen, Quatsino, who kindly gave me a tour and put me in touch with many old-timers; Ralph Harris, Sointula; Hugh and Agnes Herbison, Argenta; Fred Horkoff, Grand Forks; Jack Howich, Quatsino; Jack Hudson, Metlakatla, Alaska; Stephen Hume, who shared his interest in Walhachin; Nora Johnson, Quatsino; Gary Kent, Roberts Creek; Don and Marian Knoerr, who helped track down utopian communities in the Smithers area; Len Laurance and Taquan Air, for generously flying me from Prince Rupert to Ketchikan and over to Metlakatla, Alaska, and back; Patti Mackey, Ketchikan Visitors Bureau; Michael Marrapese, Glorious Organics, Aldergrove; Stewart Marshall, Sointula; John Masters, Vancouver; Elizabeth McLean, Shawnigan Lake, who edited the first edition of Promise of Paradise; Mark Mealing, of Castlegar’s Selkirk College, for reading the original chapter on the Doukhobors; Nan Meister, Calgary, for helping me develop patience and trust; Bob Mercer, Vancouver; Linda Mickle, Alaska Marine Highway System, Juneau; Anna and Robert Miles, Aiyansh; Alvin Nelson, Kincolith; Carl and Doreen Nelson, Sointula; Chief Harry Nyce, Gitwinksihlkw; Willie Olney, Sointula; Joan Payne, Sechelt; John Pearson, who showed me around Metlakatla, Alaska (and mayor Jack Booth for letting us use his car); Eli Popoff, Grand Forks; Annette Island School District superintendent Bob Pratt; Heather Pringle, Victoria; Gary and Anita Raaum of Innside Passage Bed & Breakfast, Ketchikan, for hosting above and beyond the call of duty; Fran Reece, band manager at Metlakatla, BC; Cathy Ringham, Langley; Tauno and Ruth Salo, Sointula; Lynn Sherrill, Smithers; Peter and Barbara Solhjell, Hagensborg, their hospitality; John and Helen Stevenson, Nelson; Kaz Takahashi, Vancouver; Betty Tillotson, Argenta; Catherine Traer, Victoria; Richard Van Cleave at Ketchikan’s Tongass Historical Museum; John Verigin, Jr, Grand Forks; Maureen Waller, Aldergrove; Lillian Weedmark at the Bulkley Valley Museum, Smithers; Al Whittaker, for letting me camp at Quatsino Lodge; Gloria Williams, Sointula; Doris Wold, Quatsino; Daniel Wood, Vancouver, for suggesting the original idea; and Rob Wood, Vancouver.

Preface to the Second Edition

The first edition of this book was published in 1997, twenty years ago. Much has happened since then. To my knowledge, no other survey or overview of British Columbia’s utopian communities has appeared since 1997, despite the fact that many people remain intensely interested in this subject. Bringing the original book up-to-date seemed a worthwhile project. I have revised and amplified the text, correcting some minor errors and adding several new sections. One concerns the Emissaries of Divine Light, who, considering their importance to intentional community development in BC, did not, I feel, receive adequate coverage in the first edition. A second section describes 1970s countercultural activity on the Sunshine Coast, which Weekend Magazine claimed was at the vanguard of the Canadian commune movement.

The most obvious change in intentional communities since 1997 concerns co-housing, which was just getting started at the time of the first edition. At least ten new co-housing complexes have opened, or are about to open, since then. And two refinements on the co-housing theme—senior co-housing and the ecovillage—have started to appear in the province. I have expanded the text accordingly. I was a bit surprised, at first, that more ventures hadn’t come to fruition since 1997. Back then I was predicting that the co-housing movement would catch fire. And so it has. But I failed to take into account how long each project would take to evolve and emerge. By its very nature, co-housing, with its many meetings and its need to forge consensus on every detail, is a slow mover. It would only ever appeal to a small percentage of the population. Despite the seemingly low numbers, BC continues to lead Canada in new co-housing starts.

It was a delight, while revisiting the ephemeral world of intentional communities, to discover that several of the places I had visited and written about twenty years ago are still intact. Quatsino, Hagensborg, Sointula and Argenta, in fact, are flourishing. The Doukhobors, while struggling to retain their culture, remain an exceedingly viable group. Kitsilano’s Community Alternatives Co-op is plugging along, as are the New Westminster Co-op and the Community Enhancement and Economic Development Society (CEEDS), formerly the Ochiltree Organic Commune, near 100 Mile House. The Emissaries, though severely diminished in number, have regrouped and are tenaciously clinging to their remaining strongholds.

As I prepared this second edition, however, it became clear to me that the creation of lasting, egalitarian human communities is an evolutionary process. Intentional communities will always struggle to survive. They are experiments, after all, and some experiments are destined to fail. Groups that endure seem to place a high value on co-operation and equality. Their members often support a consensual approach to decision-making. Successful communities are built on the shoulders and backs of unsuccessful efforts, and only exist because many before them have tried and failed.

British Columbia

Introduction

Promised Lands

Over the past 150 years, British Columbia has attracted its fair share of experimental communities. The model villages of the missionaries, designed to transform the bodies and souls of the province’s First Nations inhabitants, were in full swing by the 1870s. Before and after the turn of the twentieth century, idealistic Scandinavian and Russian immigrants established impressive colonies. The early 1930s saw the titillating, far-reaching scandals associated with Brother XII and his cult. The back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s led to a grand blossoming of communes. And in the 1990s, Canada’s first co-housing projects were making the news.

British Columbia is not unique as a proving ground for quixotic ideas. Cults, colonies and communes have come and gone elsewhere in North America and around the world. But the fact that Canada’s westernmost province has seen such an abundance of utopian settlement attempts, over a relatively short period of time, calls for closer scrutiny. This book examines some of the most significant alternative communities and looks at the impulses that inspired them.

Why is BC blessed with this rich history? Was it because the province was part of the last hospitable corner of the world to be explored and colonized by representatives of western civilization? To the European mind, preoccupied with the noble tasks of improving the human condition and getting rich, the Pacific Northwest was a vast remote space on the map, a blank slate where any number of ambitious schemes might take root and flower. The age of exploration—at least for the temperate zones—ended there.

The region attracted visionaries and schemers from around the world. Those who were chronically dissatisfied with the familiar and routine frequently ended up in British Columbia. Those who were used to moving on and starting anew stopped there as they searched for the kingdom of their dreams. They found they could move no farther. BC was the end of the road.

People came when times were good, to share the bounty of the land. They came when times were bad, to escape poverty and discrimination elsewhere. To many northern Europeans, BC’s landscapes appeared reassuringly familiar. The climate was mild, the terrain frequently spectacular. Caucasian newcomers were tolerated, even encouraged. Jobs were often available (albeit not very good ones). Governments offered incentives to settlers, and promised schools, roads and land grants. The appearance in BC of potential communitarians was not based on blind chance or mystical insight, but often had to do with economic and social imperatives. Economies are barometers of social health, and when one peaks or sinks to some new low, small, hardy bands of pioneers set off—sometimes far, far off—to try to create a better life.

Early intentional communities formed and flourished in BC for philosophical and religious reasons also. Some participants wished to perfect themselves, to attain a more spiritually evolved condition. Others wanted to create more equitable, sustainable and co-operative societies. A few, like the Doukhobors, were escaping social or political oppression. A constant thread over time was a yearning for deeper, richer human connections and a sense of belonging. More recent motivations include a desire for grassroots power, for harmony with one’s surroundings, and for safer, more productive and satisfying human networks and neighbourhoods.

The model Christian village of Metlakatla, BC, and others like it, were founded during a period of great colonial expansion. William Duncan, his missionary brethren and the English church societies that financed them were products of Victorian prosperity and moral certitude. But the resources of the frontier, which kept British mills running and made money available for missionary work, were extracted at a terrible cost to First Nations people. The degradation of the Tsimshians, which caused Duncan to come to BC’s north coast in 1857, had direct links to commercial avarice and corrupt trade practices. Ironically, the kind of community sought by many of those described in this book—one characterized by simplicity, environmental sensitivity, spiritual cohesion and a high degree of communal activity—was one that First Nations groups have had much experience with. They may yet lead us forward to a revised version of this old form of existence.

A depression in the United States in the early 1890s prompted the arrival in British Columbia of groups of Danes and Norwegians, who formed agricultural colonies in remote parts of the province. The Finns who followed at the end of the century were also economic migrants. All three groups chose to stay in BC because the government of the day offered them free land and other inducements.

The Doukhobors did not head west for economic reasons but because they felt betrayed by the Canadian government over the final settlement of land granted to them in Saskatchewan. They were able to develop their remarkable communal empire in British Columbia largely because of their agribusiness success before, after and during World War I. The same forces that caused their collective enterprise to decline during the Depression-era 1930s, and eventually fail, also attracted Brother XII and his disciples to BC. These Aquarians intended to hole up and wait out the coming global collapse, then emerge from the ruins and establish a new civilization.

After World War II, North America enjoyed an era of unprecedented peace and plenty, and the formation of utopian communities surged. Starting with the Emissaries of Divine Light in the late 1940s, the Quakers at Argenta in the ’50s and some early countercultural experiments in the ’60s, the wave of naive, optimistic activity reached a peak in the 1970s, when America’s children of affluence, the hippies, reached adulthood.

And today? As the third millennium and twenty-first century get off to a rough start, clouds of economic fear cast familiar shadows on the psychological landscape. The service sector is shrinking under the onslaught of technology; dwindling natural resources put other jobs at risk; the gap between rich and poor is rapidly widening. Yet our human population grows and grows. Globe-spanning corporations and giant bureaucracies grapple impotently with an ever-lengthening list of social and environmental problems.

In response to these threats, another cycle of utopian community-making is taking shape in British Columbia. Innovative living arrangements such as co-housing, where bands of people circumvent the traditional market to build their own custom-designed habitations, are just the beginning. User-designed neighbourhoods are the next stage. Other steps forward in this progression are ecovillages: small, planned settlements with an emphasis on sustainability, where human activities enhance nature rather than harm her. Ecovillages are springing up around the world and have begun to appear in BC as well.

To face the inevitability of change, many groups and individuals have turned quietly away from the dominant culture and its unfulfilling, wasteful emphasis on consumption. Some are thinking small, designing local land-use systems that integrate food production, housing, wildlife habitat and appropriate technology—a process called permaculture. Some are thinking large, applying the permaculture approach to bioregions. All are searching for enduring, decentralized alternatives that celebrate diversity and human co-operation. The future may depend on their efforts.

Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to clarify a few terms and sketch in some background. What exactly are utopian communities, anyway, and how did they get started? No universal standards exist for classifying such settlements. A number of adjectives are commonly used to describe them, including alternative, experimental and intentional. They are also called colonies, communes, collectives, co-operatives and cults. The places described in this book were all created with deliberate intent; none were accidental or haphazard. They were not necessarily isolated. They had a common purpose of some kind and were established as alternatives to the surrounding society. These criteria do not define them, though, but merely bring an illusion of order to bear on a changing social phenomenon.

The phrase intentional community, which originated in the US in the late 1940s and is now in widespread use, refers to a group of people who live together by choice, have collective goals and co-operate to create a way of life that reflects their shared values. Monasteries and ashrams, student housing co-operatives, communes—all are intentional communities. The term commune had a slightly sinister connotation forty years ago; today it designates an intentional community where income and assets are shared. Some degree of authoritarian control or manipulation is implied by the word cult, and, at the very least, the free will of a cult member may be restricted or interfered with.

It is the concept of utopia that gives the most trouble. Each person’s version is different. Those who have this dangerous word applied to their community unfailingly reject it. There is a world of difference, apparently, between utopian, a useful term describing the intention to achieve a better society, and utopia, the improved society itself, which is imaginary and can never be achieved, except in books. These days, utopian is often misinterpreted as naive and impractical, and utopia can mean just about anything. An advertisement in the Vancouver Sun defined it as a place where the sun always shines, where Mother Nature teaches surfers who’s boss, where a slice lands your ball in the ocean, and where Alaska Airlines gives you Double Miles.

The word was coined, of course, by Thomas More, that man for all seasons who was beheaded by Henry VIII for his adherence to the Catholic faith. Published in 1516, More’s Utopia is both a political essay and a fictional account of travel in a communistic island state where all men and women received an education and religious freedom was accepted. The title is taken from the Greek outopos, or nowhere, though it also plays on the word eutopos, or good place. Utopia is short but multi-layered: a satire on English laws and social conditions, a discourse on effective government, a parody of the explorer’s journal and a futuristic fantasy. It invented a new narrative form—the utopian novel.

Other writers before More had described ideal societies. Biblical interpretations of paradise on earth, from the Garden of Eden to the prescriptive visions of such Hebrew prophets as Amos and Ezekiel, have influenced Judeo-Christian thinking. One early utopian author was Plato, whose blueprint for an alternative society, The Republic, was published in the fourth century BC. Plato’s plan was far from egalitarian and outlined instead a rigid class system ruled by a caste of benevolent philosopher kings who owned no property, lived together in spartan unity and participated in a selective breeding program designed to encourage intellectual rigour.

A number of historic utopian communities are known to have existed. The Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that inhabited the western shores of the Dead Sea in the first century BC, dwelt communally, sharing possessions, agricultural production and meals. Biblical scholar Barbara Thiering has suggested that Jesus Christ may have grown up in an Essene settlement. After Christ’s death, his persecuted followers formed countercultural communes based on the principles of equality, common ownership of goods and shared work, food and ritual. These groups were the forerunners of the monastic movement.

As the Christian church grew rich and powerful, its communal foundations weakened. Hundreds of groups of heretics, disillusioned with ecclesiastic excess, broke away from the main body of the church and sought renewal in Christ’s teachings and a simple, co-operative way of life. A tradition of dissent began that would eventually include the Hutterites, Mennonites and Doukhobors. These sects, persecuted in their homelands, found refuge in North America, where they retained their utopian, collective lifestyles and flourished.

On the literary landscape, meanwhile, Thomas More had unwittingly opened a floodgate in the human imagination. A steady outpouring of social and political commentary, thinly disguised as travelogues to distant, wondrous lands, followed his Utopia. Jonathan Swift and Voltaire took the genre to new literary heights with Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and Candide in 1759. But it was not until the nineteenth century, with a flurry of communal experiments in the eastern US, that life seriously began to imitate art.

Several of these American communes became very famous. Some of the individuals who would help form utopian settlements in the British Columbia wilderness later in the century were certainly aware of them. New Harmony in Indiana was one of the earliest. Originally established by German Pietists, the entire village was purchased in 1825 by a Welsh social reformer and industrialist named Robert Owen, who tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a showcase of co-operative business and social practices.

Lutheran dissenters known as Inspirationists established the Amana villages, which still exist near the Iowa River. Nineteen Shaker communities, their inhabitants dedicated to lives of simplicity and celibacy, flourished by the mid-1800s. Nashoba helped slaves buy their freedom in Tennessee. The New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the founders of Brook Farm in Massachusetts, an agricultural co-operative based on the theories of French philosopher and socialist Charles Fourier. The Christian socialist collective of Oneida, founded in 1848, became notorious for rejecting exclusive sexual relationships in favour of complex marriage. Echoing Plato’s Republic, it endorsed what was known as stirpiculture, a form of eugenics where a committee decided who should procreate.

Successful novels by Samuel Butler (Erewhon, 1872), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888), William Morris (News from Nowhere, 1891) and H.G. Wells (A Modern Utopia, 1905) added fuel to the utopian movement in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. These books envisioned ideal societies free of the inhumane, unhealthy working conditions inflicted on Europe and North America by growing industrialization.

Experimental communities, both fictional and real, continued into the twentieth century. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) became bywords for the anti-utopian or dystopian novel. B.F. Skinner’s futuristic Walden Two, published in 1948 and based on his psychological theories about human behaviour, has inspired the formation of at least a dozen communities, including Virginia’s well-known Twin Oaks and Los Horcones in northern Mexico. Since the 1960s, the popularity of science fiction has allowed writers to create a torrent of imaginative literary utopias and dystopias. To date, Canadian author Margaret Atwood has set five novels in disturbing human societies of the near future. Utopian themes have found their way into the work of many BC novelists, including Jack Hodgins, Jane Rule, Audrey Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Marilyn Bowering, Pearl Luke, Douglas Coupland, Claudia Casper and Susan Musgrave.

In Canada, not all experimental communities got their start in BC. Mennonite and Amish groups started immigrating to Ontario in 1786. Nearly forty thousand Mennonites moved to the Prairies in the 1870s and 1920s, and large numbers of Hutterites arrived in 1918 from the US. These Protestant sects, born of the sixteenth-century Anabaptist movement, were systematically harassed for their beliefs, which were based on early Christian teachings. Only the Hutterites, with 350 colonies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, still maintain a comprehensive communal lifestyle.

Co-operative immigrant settlements were formed across Canada, especially on the Prairies, which needed farmers. A range of ethnic groups were involved: Manitoba’s New Iceland dates from 1876, while New Jerusalem and New Hungary were founded in Saskatchewan in the 1880s. In 1887, the first Mormon settlers established Cardston in Alberta. There are many other examples.

The idea of a utopian community could only have come to us from Renaissance Europe. Before Sir Thomas More and his fellow humanists, medieval society prevailed. Everyone subscribed to the medieval world view, which was framed by the great corporate monoliths of church and state. Everything had its place, even poverty and war. There were schisms within the church, but all agreed on the primacy of Christ and his teachings. Then along came Utopia, which described a new, alternative form of existence—one not based on Christian doctrine but on how men and women might improve the social contract that bound them together in everyday community life.

Christianity, however, continued to have a powerful effect on utopian thinking. Many idealistic sects subscribed to the belief that the kingdom of God would shortly be established on earth and that those who passed the entrance requirements would enjoy a thousand-year interval of peace and prosperity. These groups, which are described as millenarian or chiliastic, did not try to form deliberate utopias—that would come naturally in due course. Their Christian duty, as they saw it, was to follow simple, communal routines and prepare themselves for the joyous day.

Age-old millenarian convictions have been curiously mirrored by more modern, secular ones. Brother XII, for instance, thought that a two-thousand-year period of tranquil, universal co-operation would follow the dawn of the Aquarian Age. In the 1970s, some back-to-the-landers shared similar views of the future. The Texas Lake Community felt itself to be a part of the plan which will bring about the New Age on Earth. The Marxist Ochiltree Commune recommended BC’s hippie settlements protect themselves "against