Louisa Silva and Jane Degnen

Louisa Marelee Hoiowaat Silva and Jane Janimetga Jeameya Degnen represent two of the original families in which First Nations and Europeans joined hands in partnership, marriage, and cultures. Their impact on the early settlement of Gabriola was crucial in developing a life which respected and preserved the land, providing much bounty. While balancing agriculture, livestock, fishing and hunting with respect for knowledge and faith, they also built a school and provided land and a log structure for a church.

How they came to Gabriola Island

Picture of Louisa Silva Picture of Jane Degnen

Before the settlement of Europeans in the nineteenth century, Gabriola—and the Nanaimo region—had been home to the Snuneymux for 2000 years, perhaps longer. However, the fur trade, gold rush, and discovery of coal in Nanaimo brought newcomers of European origin. Many men met and some married First Nations women. Together, in the 1860s, they came to Gabriola where land was available, the traditional land of the Coast Salish people, the group from which Louisa Silva and Jane Degnen came. Both men and women were looking for freedom from outside interference. Gabriola provided an environment where they could raise their children without prejudice and also provided access to the women’s families for support. First Nations women like Louisa Silva and Jane Degnen contributed skills and knowledge essential to the surviving and thriving of the new settlement.{1}

Together, First Nations and Europeans created their own social structure on Gabriola, allowing them independence and equality. Louisa Hoiowaat, a young First Nations girl from the Lyackson Tribe, Valdes Island, met her husband, John Silva, in Victoria, where she worked for one the colony’s families. They married and moved to Mayne Island, Lulu Island and finally to Gabriola in 1883. Jane Jeameya, another young First Nations girl with family on Gabriola Island, which she would visit by canoe, invited Thomas Degnen to accompany her to the island. They eventually married and settled on Gabriola in 1862.

{1} “the grandson of an early...settler recalled how his grandmother gave her husband a canoe, taught him how to paddle, to catch fish, took him to visit her people, and ‘always spoke the Cowichan dialect’ with him so that he learned to understand and speak it fluently. This grandson explained how his grandmother’s brother, sister, and the rest of her family would come...each summer to dig clams, which they dried in racks on the beach, and then threaded on strings made of cedar bark.”

Dr. Jean Barman, “Island Sanctuaries—Early mixed race settlement on Gabriola and nearby coastal islands,” SHALE No. 2, March 2001, p. 10.



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