Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
On National Aboriginal Day, we are thrilled to share the first excerpt from upcoming Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws, in which co-author Marianne Ignace recounts a particular encounter during the beginning of her research and gathering of Secwépemc stories.
Marianne’s Story (from Introduction)
In October 1985, in the season that I have since learned to call llwélsten (midfall), when I was a near-newcomer to Secwépemc life and communities, I took a trip by rail car with three Secwépemc elders, travelling the Canadian National Railway (CN) line that straddles the North Thompson River from Blue River to Clearwater. We were there to survey the impacts that CN’s proposed double-tracking of the rail line between Jasper in Alberta and Chilliwack in British Columbia would have on the Símpcwemc, who live in the part of Secwepemcuu’l’ecw that contains the mid and upper North Thompson River and the adjacent mountain ranges and watersheds. At a time when Aboriginal rights and title issues were just beginning to make their imprint on the Canadian legal system, CN’s corporate solution to trespassing on salmon fishing and spawning grounds by dumping rip-rap into the river to build up a new track was what was then called a “no net loss policy.” Its principles went something like this: “We can take away a salmon spawning ground here without causing a problem because we can replace it with a new one in another location.” If an Aboriginal salmon fishing ground was in the way of the proposed double track, it could be replaced by another one in a different location. Even Aboriginal graveyards were considered moveable and replaceable on those terms. At some point in the negotiation between CN and the Aboriginal occupants along the river, who insisted on their rights and title as Aboriginal peoples but were also defending their way of life and the existence of living resources, the leaders of the three nations opposing CN’s twin-tracking were reminded by CN rail, a Canadian Crown corporation, that its chief executive officer was “one door down from God.” CN’s corporate economic interests were couched in terms of national economic and energy policies of the early 1980s and were argued as being in the interest of Canadian society. As such, however, they were at the exclusion of Secwépemc rights, which had broadly been affirmed as “existing” in section 35 of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. In practical terms, the calculation of physical impacts on salmon, fishing grounds, and tangible heritage sites that could ostensibly be mitigated by moving them emphasized material impacts without understanding intangible cultural and spiritual impacts. It also denied the impacts on a way of life that had been curtailed, constrained, and outlawed for more than a hundred years – a way of life that had come into existence some 10,000 years ago and had thrived over the course of time until some 150 years ago. Last but not least, it denied the unceded rights of the Indigenous groups to the ownership of, and decision-making rights over, these places.
Travelling the railway tracks along the river, our team included a Canadian National Railway engineer, an archaeologist, a fisheries biologist, three elders of the Simpcw (North Thompson) First Nation – Lizette Donald, Ida William, and Angelique Joseph, all deceased now – and myself, a young mother travelling with a three month old but in my formal capacity a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia who had just started anthropological research with the Simpcw. The elders and myself, taking turns cradling the baby, sat in the rear of the three-row road-rail vehicle, and the others sat in front. As we passed along what had been identified as “points of interest,” the scientist jumped in and out of the vehicle, taking samples and measurements. The engineer followed, charts and maps in hand, taking note of the scientist’s measurements, commenting, and adding measurements. Since physically examining tangible heritage sites was his job, the archaeologist joined in, not one to be easily swayed by measurements alone. I was confined to the back row with my elders and my infant. While we travelled through the crisp, golden fall landscape of the mid to upper North Thompson River, past places such as Thunder River, Albreda, Blue River, Finn Creek, and Little Hells Gate, the elders’ remembrances of place names and long ago living in this landscape unfolded and coalesced. One of them pointed to a place not far from the railway line where she remembered picking berries with members of her extended family, and the other two joined in with their memories. While the elders bounced my infant daughter on their laps, telling her “étsxeme, étsxeme!” (“practice for strength!”), more memories emerged as they recalled the names of places like Cteqtíq’kwe (“milky or clay-coloured creek,” “muddy water,” Blue River), Pesqlélten (“has salmon,” Finn Creek), Sexqeltqín (“round top up high,” Wire Cache). Their stories and the place names they remembered told of places where they had camped, enjoyed the landscape, picked berries, and accompanied their husbands, uncles, aunts, and grandparents to fish for salmon and to hunt for deer, caribou, and moose. Their stories also spoke to the good times they had shared with family members teasing, laughing, remembering, and eating the fruits of the land. Joyful memories also connected to sad memories of the people in those stories who had passed on and to the three elders missing those people’s faces, voices, and stories. The stories that anchored experience and memories of places and people to the land, in turn, were interwoven with remembering the taste of sweet huckleberries and blueberries, as well as the recipes for jams they had made from them.
While I took cursory notes of the stories the three elders told, the engineer, biologist, and archaeologist jumped in and out of the car, continuing their measurements, taking samples, and poring over maps and statistical charts. The elders continued their storytelling, and it struck me how the conversation of anecdotes and jam recipes must have appeared as the very antithesis of the scientific and engineering “fact finding” expedition of the technical team.
We progressed to an area along the tracks near Wabron, north of Vavenby, where the CN engineer wanted to point out the only visible evidence of Aboriginal occupation he knew of anywhere along this whole stretch of the river we had travelled. He had previously noticed the well-delineated depression of a small Interior Plateau pithouse some 6 metres in diameter right by the tracks. He was excited about his find, pointing, gesturing, and motioning to the elders to join him by the depression in order to view his exciting discovery. To his disappointment, they did not share his excitement. Ida William remarked dryly, “Oh yeah” – implying, “so what?” – and added teasingly, “Maybe a Sasquatch did that.” Unlike the stories Ida had shared with Angelique and Lizette, the pithouse depression did not connect to her lived experience. The scientist and engineer were visibly disappointed that their physical “evidence” of Aboriginal occupation did not mean anything to these elders. The point that they missed, of course, was that the evidence these elders had engaged with throughout the trip derived from lived experience connected to the land by memories and brought to life in their stories. However, within an imbalance of power that valued tangible signs of occupation over oral histories of lived and handed-down experience that left no material signs on the land, the elders’ kind of evidence was misunderstood and underrated, its validity denied.
After the above encounter on the CN rail line, as I continued my research throughout the next three decades, extending it beyond the Símpcwemc to include many other Secwépemc communities, I was privileged to record the stories of places and people throughout this big and beautiful land that is Secwepemcu’l’ecw. With my husband, Ron Ignace of Skeetchestn, joining in this research since the early 1990s after he had lived these experiences for more than forty years, we connected more and more of the dots that represent the ancient emergence of the Secwépemc as a nation, its stories expressing not only moral teachings and historical connections but also the foundations of Secwépemc culture and customary law as they emerged out of lived experience throughout thousands of years.
No comments yet.