What really happened in the Chilcotin War, the 1864 conflict that just prompted an exoneration from Trudeau? – National Post

The Tsilhqot’in had just survived an epidemic on the scale of the Black Death, and had been threatened with a second

On Monday, prime minister Justin Trudeau offered an official exoneration for six Tsilhqot’in men hanged in 1864 for leading an uprising against colonial authority in British Columbia.

“We recognize that these six chiefs were leaders of a nation, that they acted in accordance with their laws and traditions and that they are well regarded as heroes of their people,” Trudeau said.

The prime minister joins former B.C. premier Christy Clark, who in 2014 offered her own apology for the “wrongful” executions.

Over the decades, the conflict has entered Canadian national myth as a struggle between good and evil: Indigenous warriors defending their land against rapacious colonists. As Clark said in her 2014 apology the executed chiefs were “leaders, and they were engaged in a territorial dispute to defend their lands and their peoples.”

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