TTT Logo

Line

Vol. 7, No. 3: November 15, 2000

http://web.uvic.ca/history-robinson/indexnn.html

Who Killed William Robinson? is an authentic "history mystery" conceived of and written by two Canadian researchers. Using primary and secondary sources -- hundreds of pages of documents and almost a hundred images -- this website invites us to reconsider the evidence surrounding the 19th century murder of a Salt Spring Island settler. It's an excellent introduction to historical methods, allowing users to "interpret the raw material of the past and to ask the larger questions like, how do we know what happened in the past?"

At the time of the incident, the authors tell us, three members of a tiny community in British Columbia were brutally murdered within a tw-year timeframe. The victims were all Black, and the murders were blamed on the island's Aboriginal people. Though two of these deaths remained unsolved, an Aboriginal man named Tshuanahusset was charged, convicted by an all White jury, and executed for the murder of the third settler, William Robinson.

Who Killed William Robinson? calls Tshuanahusset 's conviction into question. And it places emphasis on one's standpoint, in part by asking us to consider how contemporary historians with a variety of disciplinary biases reached differing verdicts when they examined these documents. A Teacher's Guide for the website can be obtained by contacting one of the site originators.

 

Return to TTT Home Page