The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Saturday morning, 4 May, brought first a talk by Philip Shackleton on "The Marine Canoe in North America". Philip is coauthor of "Canoes", and if you are ever looking for a book to give to a loved visitor, this would be it.It is beautifully illustrated, and if Philip writes as well as he talks, it should be a joy to read. In his address he proved his thesis: "The canoe is the basic boat, which came first everywhere. It was not just convenient and valuable, it was essential". And the best of all canoes was that of the Haida. The morning ended with a talk on the pioneers of Galiano by Mrs. Mary Harding. On her father's side, Mary was the 8th generation on Galiano; on her mother's, something over the 200th, as the Indians can be traced back some 4300 years. Mary talked of the people she knew with affection and pride. Saturday afternoon was given over to the Annual General Meeting. The Federation will be in the capable hands of ten McCann, curator of the Maritime Museum in Vancouver. The finances of the B.C. HISTORICAL NEWS is a matter of some concern. Since the subscription was separated from the affiliation fee with the B.C.H.F., sales have fallen by some 300. But this explains only $1,200 of the $5,000 loss. A committee is to examine and report. Sunday 5 May dealt with the Archeology of the Straits of Georgia. John Dewhurst outlined the essence of archeology in the morning and took the group on an examination of the middens at Monague Bay in the afternoon. A fist impression is that it is incredible that five or six hundred people could have eaten so many clams, even in 4,000 years. The middens cover acres to a depth of as much as twenty feet. Out of this great garbage dump, the archeologist can restructure the nature of a people. From burned rocks found in the shell of a wooden box, for example, they determine that coastal Indians cooked food by eating rocks and dropping them in a water filled box. A recent innovation may enable them to determine what game the Indians hunted - blood traces on arrowheads 2,000 years old can now be analyzed and the species of bird or animal determined. While digging into middens without a permit is forbidden by law, areas opened up by natural forces can be examined, our group was able to look over sections washed out by tide. The one expert with us found a bone awl and a horn arrow head, the rest of us enjoyed ourselves in the sun. Matters of Moment 1. The B.C.H.F. has decided to create a fund to provide a yearly scholarship for a student entering fourth year in the field of Canadian Studies. Donations are solicited. 2. Vancouver will host the 1986 A.G.M. using the Gage Building at U.B.C. for meetings and accommodation. The time will be late April or early May - to be set so that people from out of town will be able to tie in a visit to Expo if so minded. 3. Dr. Kay Lamb, Dominion Archivist, has just published the definitive work oh Cpt. Vancouver's voyages. It might be advantageous to purchasette work for our own Archives. 4. At the conference, a biography of Galiano, produced in Spain shortly after his death in the Napoleonic Wars, was on display. The A.G.M. voted to have the work translated from the Spanish if at all possible. Again, if it is translated, ouryArchives should obtain a copy. 5. On 27-28 April, your president went to Victoria to sit in on a seminar of heritage cemeteries. A report on that will be included in the next issue of HISTORY-ONICS. 6. For your president, attendance at the B.C.H.F. A.G.M. was like old home week. The registrar to whom he had to report was a former student, Christine Farnan. His inn-keeper was the father of former students - Ron Caverly, who ran a T.V. repair shop on Marine Drive. Three other students also popped up.