Here is a thread of 'interesting Vancouver maps'

This is a reconstructed map of what today is called 'Burnaby', showing some of the common trails Indigenous locals used (this waterbody in the middle is today mislabeled as 'Burnaby Lake')

src http://www.burnabyvillagemuseum.ca/assets/Documents/Teachers~Guides/Indigenous%20History%20in%20Burnaby%20Resouce%20Guide.pdf

Cranberry harvesting zones are marked on this map basically due to their strategic importance within this region: a critical source of vitamin C during winter months, since groups like the Musqueam did not rely upon what we'd think of as 'traditional agriculture'

One thing to understand about 'Vancouver' in the present day is that the peninsula on which it sits has become very 'important' in settler terms, due to the city now here; yet prior to settler world descending here, this peninsula was something like a shared resource between many

These societies weren't obsessed in the manner of e.g. England with things like 'value of rentseeking!' so it wasn't exactly a question of which individual person 'owned' this or that plot (although of course there was regional governance, of a different structure)

What we can see looking at maps like this is the huge importance of WATER, and bodies of water, for lots of reasons. One of them is personal transport! So instead of imagining where the LAND is & how it's shaped, it's important to kinda consider the water instead

Prior to all these settler people being here burning down forests and 'plotting out claims' in a capitalist style, some of the most important geographical features would have been what we call 'Burrard Inlet' and 'Howe Sound' and 'The Fraser River'

This kind of document got produced during the 1930s, when more history-conscious Vancouverites were mounting efforts to forestall the settler-driven mass-erasure of actual place names

We can see here that 'Howe Sound' is in truth something like a small province, unto itself

Today we have something called the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw or Squamish Nation, which was a confederation of groups that pre-settlerdom were not actually configured into so monolithic a form (I've read that this was done in the midst of it, for political survival basically)

But basically this inlet historically plays host to a variety of people, many united by language (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Sníchim in this case)

Near its north end is the power base for this confederation of people, where stands The Chief (one of the largest granitic domes in the world)

The last paper map up there also shows us 'The Burrard Inlet', which was another sorta important water body-slash-political-zone, and at the end of that one is a base of power for the Tsleil-Waututh, which is another of this place's important nations & language groups

The Tsleil-Waututh speak hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ or Halkomelem; indeed, hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ can fairly be thought of as 'the real language' of this peninsula on which Vancouver currently exists (although again, this peninsula prolly should not be thought of as 'owned by some nation-state')

If we travel counter-clockwise around the north shore of present-day 'Vancouver', around 'Stanley Park' towards the place where UBC is, we arrive at the mouth of 'The Fraser River' which actually is called Sto:lo

This river is in some ways, its own whoooole thing

I don't actually live in 'Vancouver'; I live in a different nearby place, actually the FIRST place where settler-world descended here, called 'New Westminster'. This place was built along the Sto:lo, a little in-land from the ocean, and the river keeps going for a very long way

The place where I live was in fact once a swampy/foresty zone located near to a site called sχəyəməɬ, which was one of more frequently-populated and important sorta living areas for one of the most populous Sto:lo nations/lineages, the Kwantlen

Most everybody who lived around here learned to master an exciting and complicated-sounding practice that in English is called "seasonal rounds"; you can think of it as being 'nomadic' although even with my miniscule level of education in this subject, it's more complex than that

Basically the agricultural technology of this part of the world did not involve massive mechanized/serf-powered planting & harvesting operations, but instead leveraged everybody's familial relationships as a way of migrating labourers from task to task based on the season

Rather than there being super-permanent 'settlements' where a person would spend their whole life, maybe farming, European-style, it was more like there was this network of a few hundred sites that each supported a variety of things (some for cranberries, some for salmon etc)

Going back up to like 6 generations within your family tree, you could derive a variety of permissions & responsibilities relating to which sites and resources you could/should utilize, during the time of year when that was most effective

So again, don't think of 'kingdoms'

The 'kingdoms' we know from Europe, I think they basically formed around a static farming agriculture. People didn't have to move around, thus didn't establish a good system of permissions for moving ppl around; it meant some asshole e.g. the Queen 'owned' specific land patches

But this peninsula around Vancouver, as I understand it, featured a lot of different sites cultivated sorta cooperatively between these various inlet and sound and river lineages

One we haven't yet mentioned is the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm or Musqueam, based towards the river's mouth

When we do territory acknowledgements in/around Vancouver it's conventional to thank the Musqueam, Squamish & Tsleil-Waututh! There are a lot of reasons for this & it's fucking complicated but basically the city stands ON TOP OF Musqueam's power-base and close to the others'

For settler-world people like me I think it's very confusing to try visualizing colonization here in terms of e.g. which city blocks are now occupied. It was always tempting & remains so today, to have some thought like 'well there was nothing here but forest???'

That's why I think, it can be helpful to visualize these water bodies and the social POWER that emanates from them, & the people who were responsible for them. This peninsula was a site of confluence between these water bodies, these languages etc, & the forest was needed

People from all across the damn region needed Sto:lo's salmon deposits in order to kinda technologically enable their mode of civilization, and the surrounding swamps were part of that, but also there were the cranberry patches in the forest, but ALSO there's the diplomatic angle

It was the sort of thing where when you came of age you'd attempt to go marry into some somewhat-distant lineage that provided valuable political connections to your own sorta fam (things like the right to utilize these various sites)

So the areas between power-bases mattered!

And as the settlers started swarming into this peninsula and basically wrecking the forest deliberately, this imposed a kinda stranglehold on this confluence point (despite not necessarily being built directly overtop of the existing civ, right?)