A few excerpts from a substantially longer article:

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Road workers chopped away part of an occupied native house that was impeding the surveyors at the village of Chaythoos (pronounced "chay toos"), near Prospect Point. City of Vancouver historian J.S. Matthews interviewed August Jack Khatsahlano, who was a child in the house at the time.

"We was inside this house when the surveyors come along and they chop the corner of our house when we was eating inside," Khatsahlano said in that 1934 conversation at city hall.

"We all get up and go outside see what was the matter. My sister Louise, she was only one talk a little English; she goes out ask Whiteman what's he doing that for. The man say, 'We're surveying the road.'

"My sister ask him, "'Whose road?'"

Most of the native inhabitants at Chaythoos left the park at that time and went to live on the reserve at Kitsilano Point, which was later transferred by the province to the federal government and eventually sold.

"When they left they took the above-ground grave of their chief with them when they left," according to historian Jean Barman. The remains of Chief Supplejack, father of August Jack, had been kept in a cedar mausoleum at Chaythoos, the bones stored in canoe-shaped sarcophagus. ...

Of one lost site, August Jack told Matthews of a burial ground not far from Xwayxway -- now the site of Lumbermen's Arch.... ...

The largest settlement in the park in the 1880s, during August Jack's time, was at Xwayxway, which was razed when the road went through.

The big house of that settlement was more than 60 metres long and about 20 metres wide, according to the interview with Khatsahlano. The building was constructed from large cedar posts and slabs. More than 100 people in 11 families lived there.

A potlatch was held at Xwayxway (pronounced "whoi whoi") in 1875 in that longhouse, according to the commemorative integrity statement published when the park was declared a national historic site. The potlatch, held in the chief's longhouse "Tay-Hay," is also mentioned in the minutes of a city council meeting in which the medical health officer recommends destruction of the buildings at Xwayxway because of a smallpox outbreak, according to Eric McLay, president of the Archaeology Society of B.C.

Much of the native history of the park is shrouded in the mists of time. But Capt. George Vancouver encountered and wrote about people of the Squamish nation on those lands when he explored the area in 1792.

Spanish explorer Jose Maria Narvaez conducted a cursory exploration of the peninsula and the Burrard Inlet in 1791. But it was Vancouver who wrote about the area and its people at length in his journals.

Vancouver records it as an island, as the area from Coal Harbour west was submerged at high tide. He was met by 50 natives in canoes "who conducted themselves with the greatest decorum and civility," he wrote in his journal.

The "Indians" presented Vancouver and his men "with several fish cooked, and undressed, of the sort already mentioned as resembling the smelt."

He continued: "These good people, finding we were inclined to make some return for their hospitality, shewed much understanding in preferring iron to copper."

Barman, an expert on the native history of the park, said the size and depth of the midden heaps found in the park suggests native settlement goes back much further than the good captain's visit. ...

The documents suggest that the native settlements within the park boundaries are at least 3,000 years old.

"There's evidence that [first nations people] were there for a very long time," said Barman. "And this part of the history of Stanley Park has been acknowledged very little."

"They talk about it as a sort of mythic past as opposed to saying that they were there when Europeans arrived and visibly living there until the 1920s," said Barman, author of Stanley Park's Secret: The Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch and Brockton Point.

Midden heaps are scattered throughout the park, some of them close to the major trails that criss-cross the park today, Barman said. Their existence suggests that other village sites are likely waiting to be found, she said.

"There's more there than just the midden heaps," Barman said.

The site of Chaythoos village is noted on a brass plaque placed on the low lands east of Prospect Point commemorating the centennial of the park in 1988.

The apocryphal story has Lord Stanley spreading his arms and dedicating the park "to the use and enjoyment of peoples of all colours, creeds, and customs, for all time." In fact, he would not visit the park until the following year, as governor-general.

"They so much wanted to erase the fact of the aboriginal presence in the park that they held the park opening ceremonies on the site of Chaythoos after they chased out the people who lived there," Barman said. ...

While the Squamish Nation has the most recent history in the park, the downtown peninsula and much of the area of Vancouver is subject to at least five competing land claims, including assertions of historical use by the Sto:Lo, Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh and the Hul Qumi Num treaty group.

The Lower Fraser River region and Puget Sound were the centre of a thriving Coast Salish culture prior to European settlement, according to Bruce Miller, an anthropology professor at the University of B.C.

Stanley Park is part of the core Coast Salish territory, which includes the east coast of Vancouver Island, the Fraser River to Yale and in Puget Sound. It was one of the largest, most densely populated nations in aboriginal North America and unique because it did not depend on agriculture.

"These are people who travel by canoe, they are water travellers and this territory is part of a complex of waterways connecting places," Miller explained. The Coast Salish did not define ownership of places in the modern sense, although they have assimilated European notions of land ownership, which tends to muddy land claims.

"Any one longhouse group would have a winter house in one place and procurement stations in other areas," he said. Settlements, areas of stewardship and foraging areas were controlled by family groups and access was regulated through a complex network of kinship associations often built through marriage between clans.

"If you didn't have direct stewardship of a place and you didn't have access through kinship you just weren't going there," Miller said. "The key word is protocol; you could get access to these places but you have to do the right things, talk to the right guy and ask permission in the right way." ...

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