SNAW-NAW-AS | NANOOSE FIRST NATION
This information is from a photocopy of parts from a book titled “A History of Nanoose Bay”. Acknowledgements: Margaret Williams Nicholls, Compiler, History of Nanoose Bay, 1958. Barbara Prael Sivertz, Compiler, History of Nanoose Bay, 1980.
Nanoose Bob was the most famous member of his tribe. His exact age is not known. It varies from his own speculation that he was 108 years old to the reckoning of the Indian Affairs Department that he was 93 years old.
In his youth Nanoose Bob was a celebrated hunter. He was known to stay in the woods for days when tracking bear, deer or elk. His great strength allowed him to carry two deer at one time or a bear on his shoulders. In 1875 Nanaimo’s first mayor Mark Bare said that Nanoose Bob was a very determined person and would never accept defeat when in quest of game. At various time he presented the mayor with skins and elk horns. As a young man he used the bow and arrow for hunting and a spear for fishing.
When in his 90’s, Nanoose Bob still had sufficient strength to build a boat out in front of his house on the shores of Nanoose Bay.
Nanoose Bob married first at the age of 16. During his long life span he took seven more wives. He used to claim that all of them were celebrated beauties.
Little is known of Nanoose Bob’s immediate family. He was the son of Sel-see-mia and Jim Bob. Nanoose Bob had a son, Louis Bob and a daughter Ellen, who married Qualicum Jim. Tommy Bob, another son, was both a logger and a fisherman. Nanoose Bob’s great granddaughter, Peggy Edwards, remembers rowing with her mother up to Denman Island where some friends of theirs kept sheep.
The modern history of the Nanoose band perhaps begins when the Indians were move to this Reservation located on the south side of Nanoose Bay. The idea of a Reserve was unfamiliar to the Indians, as was the law which permitted the white settlers to pre-empt land for their own use, land over which the Indians previously had roamed at will. The government may have considered the land on the south sore suitable for farming, but again, this was an unfamiliar way of life for the Indians.
The Nanoose built two longhouses on the Reservation to help in maintaining their original culture. Neither of these longhouses stands today. In 1928, both burned to the ground.
