Jeannette Armstrong was a negotiator during the Gustafsen Lake stand-off in 1995.
“The role I have in my family is as an archivist, recorder of history and knowledge-keeper.”—JEANNETTE ARMSTRONG
Now the most influential figure in the Aboriginal writing community, Jeannette Armstrong made her literary debut at age fifteen when she published a poem about John F. Kennedy in the local newspaper.
“The process of writing as a Native person,” says Armstrong, born on the Penticton Indian Reservation in 1948, “has been a healing one for me because I’ve uncovered the fact that I’m not a savage, not dirty and ugly and not less because I have brown skin, or a Native philosophy.”
Influenced by the cadence of Pauline Johnson’s poetry, the mentoring of Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson and Summerland-based playwright and novelist George Ryga, Jeannette Armstong then released a slim story for young readers, Walk in Water (1982), about two girls named Neekna and Chemia who grow up in the Okanagan Valley before the coming of the white man.
Seven years later, in conjunction with Theytus Books and the En’owkin Centre in Pentiction, Armstrong oversaw the creation of the En’owkin International School of Writing for Native Students in conjunction with the University of Victoria’s Bachelor of Fine Arts Program and Okanagan College, a focal point for Aboriginal writing throughout North America.
Today Armstrong is widely known for her novel Slash (1983), reprinted nine times and frequently adopted for use in schools. It records alienation and militancy during the period from 1960 to 1983. Despite some ridicule from friends, its protagonist Thomas Kelasket enjoys speaking the Okanagan language and attending powwows, but eventually he’s forced to confront racism in a white-operated school. Sometimes angry and confused, he travels widely in North America to come to terms with himself and the world.
Although Slash features a male protagonist, its plot is not without some similarities to Armstrong’s own trajectory as an artist and organizer. Her Whispering in Shadows (2000) can be read as a companion novel to Slash. It follows the life and times of Penny, an Okanagan artist and single mother who has contracted cancer after her exposure to pesticides while working as a fruit picker in the Okanagan Valley. An environmental activist, she travels the world in support of other indigenous cultures, gradually developing her own political and social theories. While beset by “globalization and supremacy deceit and grudging paternalism,” Penny ultimately comes to accept her place in the universe, comforted to know she will be returned to the earth when she dies.
Armstrong’s best-known non-fiction book is Native Creative Process (1991), in collaboration with Aboriginal architect Douglas Cardinal. She has edited, or contributed to, numerous collaborative books that include This is a Story, All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction (1990); Aboriginal Perspectives of the Natural Environment (1991); Give Back: First Nations Perspectives on Cultural Practice (1992); We Get Our Living Like Milk from the Land (1993); and Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature (1993). Her other titles are Neekna & Chemai (1984), Breath Tracks (1991), Dancing with the Cranes (2004) and an audio book entitled Grandmothers (1995).
Jeannette Armstrong earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in 1978. A documentary film portrait, Jeannette Armstrong: Knowledge-Keeper, was produced by A.R.T. BookWorld Productions and premiered on CBC in 1995. She received the Mungo Martin Award in 1974, the Helen Pitt Memorial Award in 1978, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from St. Thomas University in 2000 and the Buffett Award for Indigenous Leadership in 2003.
Fluent in the Okanagan language, Armstrong recognizes the importance of her mother’s great-aunt, the novelist Mourning Dove, who once lived in nearby Oliver, B.C., and taught Armstrong’s mother in school. Armstrong grew up hearing first-hand stories about Mourning Dove, who died in 1936, twelve years before Armstrong’s birth. “Reading her stories had a great influence on me,” she says. “And I was really fortunate to have two grandmothers alive until I was well into my 20s.”
Born in Masset on September 15, 1896, Florence Edenshaw Davidson was one of the most influential and best-known female elders of the Haida. She was born on the north end of Graham Island in Old Masset before present-day Masset was established in 1907. Related to renowned Haida artists Charles Edenshaw and Albert Edward Edenshaw, she was married at age fourteen to logger, fisherman, trapper and carver Robert Davidson, Sr., a hereditary chief of the town of Kayung.
They had 13 children including Claude Davidson, himself a carver and the chief of the village of Masset, who, in turn influenced the careers of her grandsons Robert Davidson and Reg Davidson, who trained under Bill Reid. The great-grandfather of Robert and Reg Davidson was Charles Edenshaw, Florence Edenshaw Davidson’s father.
Florence Davidson has been credited with reviving the tradition of making button blankets among the Haida. She made her first button blanket in 1952 to console herself after her family lost their possessions in a house fire. She also made traditional woven baskets and hats.
As a revered conduit for her Haida culture, Davidson frequently collaborated with ethnologists, filmmakers and anthropologists such as Margaret Blackman, co-author of During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman (1982).
Florence Davidson and her husband Robert, 1961
Having been one of the last Haida women to undergo the traditional puberty seclusion and an arranged marriage, Davidson provided her biographer with keen appreciations of female roles in Haida society, including revelations about menopause and widowhood, derived from approximately 50 hours of tape recordings. A revised, enlarged edition appeared in 1992.
Partially as a tribute to Florence Davidson and other elders, Nancy J. Turner completed Plants of Haida Gwaii (2004), an ethnobotanical study of the Queen Charlotte Islands that Turner began with her first visit to Haida Gwaii in the early 1970s. Some of Nancy Turner’s information on plants was gleaned directly from Florence Davidson, who invited her to attend her ninety-fifth birthday celebrations. Florence Davidson is depicted on the cover of the book in a photograph by Robert D. Turner showing her removing cedar bark from a red cedar in preparation for weaving. Florence Davidson, who greeted Queen Elizabeth at Sandspit in 1971, died in Masset in December of 1993.
A year before he died, Chief Simon Walkus, Sr., orally recorded his people’s traditional stories in 1968 with Susanne Hilton, employed by the British Columbia Indian Advisory Committee, for possible use in local schools. These texts were translated by his daughter Evelyn Walkus Windsor of the Heiltsuk Cultural Education Centre in Bella Bella, with the assistance of Heiltsuk linguist John Rath, for Oowekeeno Oral Traditions as Told by the Late Chief Simon Walkus, Sr. (1982). The bilingual result is sometimes credited to Chief Walkus’ daughter.
Oowekeeno Oral Traditions contains twelve stories and three songs in the Oowekyala Wakashan language, with interlinear English translation and explanations, to illustrate the relations of the Oowekeeno people to the natural and supernatural worlds. Heiltsuk (Bella Bella) and Oowekeeno (Owikyala) are considered to be dialects of the same language. The stories arose from the Rivers Inlet, a 48-kilometre inlet southwest of Bella Coola where Simon Walkus, Sr., was the second-eldest son of Chief Charles Walkus, Sr., of the Wannock River people, and where he and his wife Lila were both members of secret societies.
Simon Walkus, Sr., died in Rivers Inlet Village in 1969, aged approximately seventy-seven. The Walkus family has remained prominent in the tiny Oweekeno First Nation that shares territory with the Heiltsuk, Gwa’Sala-Nakwaxda’xw on the central B.C. coast. With 207 members, it formally applied to the B.C. Treaty Commission in 1993.
Born at Bear River (now called Bedwell River), in Clayoquot Sound on October 3, 1908, Peter Webster overcame frustration, prejudice, alcoholism and poverty to attain a degree in linguistics from the University of Victoria while in his seventies. “I don’t think I had any shoes,” he once recalled. “There were no shoes, no pants. I don’t know what I wore before I got to know that I was in the world.”
Webster’s formal education within classrooms was limited to two years at the Ahousat School on Meares Island. “I didn’t even know how to say ‘yes,’” he later wrote, “and I used to get kicked or slapped or sent to bed without supper if the staff heard me use my own language.” His schooling ended with an unhappy, forced marriage due to an unplanned pregnancy.
At age twenty, Peter Webster married his second wife Jessie, who became known as a maker of cedar hats. Once arrested for possession of the fur of seals, then arrested and sent to Oakalla prison for refusing to pay the provincial seine boat tax, Webster became known as a singer and a collector of songs and Ahousat lore, but he was plagued by alcoholism.
“The death of my oldest son, Basil Webster… marked the point when I started to live in the world again…. The step-brother of my wife, Jessie, came to me and told me plainly that because of my heavy drinking I was blind, deaf and senseless. I was not myself. This woke me up.”
After Webster and his wife were featured in Ulli Steltzer’s photography book Indian Artists at Work in 1976, Webster recorded his versions of Nuu-chah-nulth songs and at age seventy he dictated an autobiography, As Far As I Know: Reminiscences of an Ahousat Elder (1983), illustrated by his nephew Ron Hamilton (Kwayatsapalth). The final third of the book contains his versions of Ahousat stories and history, including their war with the Oo-tsus-aht in the 1840s or 1850s as recalled by his grandfather. Peter Webster’s Nuu-chah-nulth name, O-Wo-Me-Yis, means Leader on the Beach.
“Why should the government be paying us welfare to do nothing when they could be paying us the same money under different legislative wording that would bring pride back to our people?”—STAN DIXON
First elected as Chief of the Sechelt Indian Band in 1983, Stan Dixon laid the groundwork for local Aboriginal self-government, which was formally achieved in Sechelt in 1986—the year he failed to gain re-election. His privately published memoir of those turbulent times is Self-Government, A Spirit Reborn (1986).
The Sechelt Indian Government District operates under some sections of British Columbia’s Municipal Act but it is not required, like other municipalities, to hold open meetings. Stan Dixon alleged a lack of openness for the self-government of the Shishalh Nation that has slightly more than one thousand members.
Born in 1942 as a member of the Sechelt Nation, Hunaechin tribe, Wolf Clan, Dixon attended St. Augustine School in Sechelt and St. Mary’s Residential School in Mission. He graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in North Vancouver as one of its first Aboriginal students. After working in the logging industry for 25 years, he was elected as a councillor of the Sechelt First Nation in 1972.
Stan Dixon
In 1992 he acquired proprietorship of the Aboriginal newspaper Kahtou and moved its headquarters to Sechelt. In 1993, Dixon was elected again as a Councillor to the District of Sechelt, and has been re-elected several times since.
A strong believer in private enterprise, he continued publishing Kahtou for more than ten years without a loan or grant. “The problem with grants,” he said, “is all that paperwork. And things take too long. Business is like fishing. You have to be there when the fish are running…. Successful aboriginal entrepreneurs are those who advertise themselves. These are the people who’ll turn a profit.”
According to ethnologist Brian Thom, Stó:lo Chief Richard Malloway (Th’eláchiyatel) was considered a direct descendant of the four original ancestors of the Chilliwacks: Th’eláchiyatel, Yexwpílem, Siyemchess, and Xwexwayleq. He lived in the Lower Fraser Valley from 1907 to 1987. Fluent in English and Halq’eméylem, Malloway was selected in 1932 by Chief Billy Sepass of Skowkale, Chief Albert Douglas of Tzeachten and Chief Albert Louis of Yakweakwioose to serve as the spokesperson for those three bands. In the early 1940s he became chief of Yakweakwioose.
Malloway was one of the originators of the Cultus Lake Indian Festival at which he served as Master of Ceremonies. Shortly before he died in 1987, Malloway recorded an undated version of the Sxwayxwey story, with the assistance of Norman Todd, a local medical doctor. Malloway’s storytelling has been distributed through the Coqualeetza Cultural Centre as part of Telling Stories: The Life of Chief Richard Malloway (1994), compiled by Thom with stories narrated by Mrs. Edna Malloway, Chief Frank Malloway and Chief Richard Malloway (1994).
Born in Sardis, B.C., on December 15, 1907, Malloway did not attend residential school due to illness. As a result, he was raised by his parents Julius and Mary Malloway, as well as by a shxwlá:m or medicine man named Catholic Tommy, who taught him to be a healer. Malloway was revered among the Stó:lo for his generosity and for maintaining winter spirit dancing during several decades when it was outlawed within the restrictions of the anti-Potlatch legislation.
Along with Charlie Douglas, Albert Nelson, Freddy Cheer, Aggie Victor, and Maggie Pennier, Malloway secretly held the winter dances on reserves, including the Sxwayxwey dance that could be performed only by members of the extended family of someone who “owned” the Sxwayxwey story. Although Malloway had received the story from his mother, he never himself used the Sxwayxwey mask in a dance.
Richard Malloway said, “My mother was born in Chilliwack, on the Skaw reserve in 1876, and this is her story — the Chilliwack story. I know the song of the Sxwayxwey and I recorded it. It says that the brother has a stomach of stone. That means that he is unfriendly and nobody likes him, and he doesn’t like women. We are trying to revive the Sxwayxwey here, and, you know the rules of the Indians are strict. You have to belong to the family which found the mask if you want to use it. This is one of the reasons I want to record this. Since the mask came up here to my family we have the right to use it.”
The story goes that two young girls from Harrison Mills caught the Sxwayxwey when they were fishing near the mouth of the Chehalis and Fraser Rivers. This creature had four spinners that were spinning as they pulled the Sxwayxwey out of the water. The Sxwayxwey escaped back into the water but they were left with the Sxwayxwey mask and spinners.
The spinners were affixed to a band at the top of the mask. They gave the mask to their brother. Once, when he was being pursued by a different tribe, he jumped into the water. The feathered headband he was wearing came off his head and it floated down the river, serving as a decoy. He escaped and his people began to treasure the feathers and use them on their spiritual clothing.
Mainly girls perform the Sxwayxwey dance because two girls found the Sxwayxwey. Richard Malloway knew them. He claimed one was married in Sumas and the other was married at Musqueam. The latter’s daughter went to live in Duncan; the former’s daughter lived in Chilliwack. In this way the Sxwayxwey story has spread to Vancouver Island and Musqueam.
As a student member of the UBC Ethnographic Field School, Brian Thom conducted research into the life of Richard Malloway in March of 1993. He benefited from interviews that were recorded with Malloway by novelist and legal consultant Gordon Mohs.
In keeping with the British legal tradition of defining women as chattels of their husbands or fathers, the Indian Act of 1876 decreed that Aboriginal women who married non-Aboriginals could no longer be defined as Indians, and they automatically lost their band memberships. Their children were also deemed “non-status.”
In essence, in order to be registered as an Indian in Canada, a person could either be defined as “a male person” or else “the wife or widow of a person who is entided to be registered.” This paternalistic system meant thousands of Aboriginal women, such as Mary Augusta Tappage, lost their Indian status as soon as they were married.
At age four, Mary Augusta Tappage was taken to a Catholic school in the Cariboo. “We were made to write on the board one hundred times, ‘I will not speak Indian any more.’”
The Days of Augusta (1973) is a mixture of Tappage’s prose and poetry, with evocative photos by Robert Keziere, which effectively tell her life story, as edited by Jean E. Speare. One of her stories was also posthumously edited for publication by Speare as The Big Tree and the Little Tree (1986).
Born in 1888 at Soda Creek in the Cariboo, Tappage was the daughter of a Shuswap chief and a Métis woman who had fled the prairies after the defeat of Louis Riel during the Riel Rebellion. She was sent to St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake where she was punished for speaking her Shuswap language. After nine years, she was permitted to live with her beloved grandmother. She was married, at age fifteen, to George Evans, the son of a Welshman and a Shuswap mother of the Sugar Cane Reserve. Declared non-status, she retained her self-sufficient Aboriginal ways as they pre-empted 166 acres at Deep Creek.
The birth of her own first child influenced her choice of vocation as midwife. In The Days of Augusta, she recalls, “I was out feeding the cattle when I felt my first pain. Well, I kept on feeding the cattle, feeding the calves…. I was still sick. When that was over I came back to the house. I had to chop my own wood. Well, I finally fixed my bed and I was getting ready. I made a big fire and I opened the oven so it would be warm in the house.
“I kept getting worse and worse. Finally my daughter was born. All alone, I got up and fixed her up…. I had to clean myself up…. Made some more fire. Well, I was there for three days in bed and I got up. Well, in the meantime my husband came home. He had been on a spree for three days and came back drunk.”
When her husband died, she decided not to re-marry. “Once is enough,” she said. As described in her memoir, Tappage made her own clothes, shared her grandmother’s stories, attended church, raised several homeless children and delivered babies. She taught herself midwifery from a book she bought in Regina at Eaton’s for three dollars. “I learned it by heart,” she wrote in a poem, “at night in my kitchen by candlelight.”
Mary Augusta Tappage died on August 16, 1978, and was buried on the Soda Creek Reserve.
On International Women’s Day, in March of 1984, federal Indian Affairs Minister John Munro announced Bill C-31 to allow Aboriginal women such as Tappage to regain their lost status. Not without its paternalistic trappings, this Bill would enable Indian bands, generally controlled by men, to determine which women could be reinstated. Bill C-31 received its royal assent on June 28, 1985, and directly affected some 16,000 Canadian Aboriginal women and their approximately fifty thousand children.
The first woman to be reinstated as an Indian in Canada was Mary Two-Axe Early on the Caughnawaga Reserve in Quebec. At age seventy-three, she had been leading the struggle for reinstatement for 20 years.
In 1949 Gloria Cranmer was identified in the Native Voice newspaper as the “First Indian Girl to Study at UBC.” She graduated in anthropology in 1956 and has since become an important linguist, filmmaker and author within the ’Namgis (formerly Nimpkish) First Nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw.
Born in Alert Bay on July 4, 1931, Gloria Cranmer Webster is a member of the influential Cranmer family that includes her brother Doug Cranmer, an artist. Their father Dan Cranmer and great-grandfather George Hunt both worked with Franz Boas who first came to Kwakwaka’wakw territory in 1886.
After the potlatch ceremonies were banned by the Canadian government in 1884, her father Dan Cranmer became famous for hosting one of the greatest potlatches in coastal history, on Village Island in December of 1921. After 17 years of preparation, the enormous gathering attracted white authorities under the direction of Indian Agent William Halliday who offered suspended sentences to 45 participants if they agreed to surrender ceremonial clothing and paraphernalia. Twenty men and women chose instead to go to Oakalla prison.
Gloria Cranmer as she appeared in a July 1949 newspaper story about her attendance at UBC
Confiscated materials from Dan Cranmer’s potlatch were sent to Ottawa from Village Island, Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, and some were retained by Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott for his private collection. Chief Mungo Martin eventually hosted the first legal twentieth-century potlatch in British Columbia in 1953, after the ban had been lifted in 1951.
After her graduation from UBC, Gloria Cranmer worked for two years as a counsellor for female prisoners who were first-time offenders at Oakalla Prison Farm. During her work for the John Howard Society she met and married John Webster, the executive director for the society in Saskatchewan, and their daughter was born in Regina. After 18 months in Saskatchewan, the family moved to the West Coast where Gloria Cranmer Webster worked as a counsellor at the YWCA in Vancouver, raised two sons, and became program director for the Vancouver Indian Centre.
In 1971, when Ottawa provided $2.5 million to build the UBC Anthropology Museum, she was hired at age forty to become an assistant curator at the new facility. While collating Northwest Coast artifacts for the museum, she became deeply involved in the successful repatriation of potlatch artifacts confiscated from her father’s 1921 potlatch.
In 1975, the National Museum of Man in Ottawa agreed to return potlatch materials with the caveat that a museum had to be constructed to properly display and maintain the collection. Two museums were built, one at Cape Mudge, the other at Alert Bay where Webster served as Curator of the U’mista Cultural Centre (1980–1991). Potlatch artifacts have also been retrieved from the National Museum of the American Indian.
Able to speak and write Kwak’wala, Webster played a key role in the creation of the U’mista Cultural Centre, a facility modelled on a traditional Kwakwaka’wakw Big House. The Centre has since produced at least 12 Kwak’wala-language books for schools, and several award-winning documentary films including Potlatch… A Strict Law Bids Us Dance and Box of Treasures. Webster has also worked with Jay Powell to develop a spelling system to transcribe the sounds of the Kwak’wala language.
To document the Kwakwaka’wakw show that was presented by General Motors at Expo ’86 in Vancouver, Webster supplied the text for The Kwakwaka’wakw and the Spirit Lodge (1986). The Spirit Lodge installation was so popular that it was recreated identically and installed at Knott’s Berry Farm in Los Angeles.
In 1991, Webster curated the Chiefly Feasts exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. She also contributed significantly to Kwakwaka’wakw Settlement Sites, 1775–1920: A Geographical Analysis and Gazetteer (1994) by Robert Galois.
Gloria Cranmer Webster received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of British Columbia in 1995.
“The term ‘Land Claims’ is really a misnomer, we’re not really claiming land because it’s our land. I would just say that we are redefining our boundaries.”—DOREEN JENSEN
Born in Kispiox in 1933, Doreen Jensen of the Fireweed clan was delivered by a medicine woman in her great-grandmother’s bedroom. She commenced her work as an educator and carver in 1951.
A graduate of the Kitanmax School of Northwest Coast Indian Art in Hazelton, Jensen is fluent in Gitxsan and a founding member of the ’Ksan Association and the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry. “The Kitanmax School was started because we needed to reclaim our traditional performance arts for a play we were putting on called Breath of Our Grandfathers,” she says. Work on the play began in 1953, but the Kitanmax School didn’t open until after the ’Ksan Historic Indian Village was established in 1968. Breath of Our Grandfathers was performed in 1972 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
Sister of Chief Walter Harris, Jensen curated the Robes of Power exhibit at UBC and co-wrote Robes of Power: Totem Poles on Cloth (1987). With Cheryl Brooks, she co-edited In Celebration of Our Survival: The First Nations of British Columbia (1991), a collection of writings and art for a special issue (#89) of BC Studies.
My Great-Grandmother with Lip Labret is a 1994 mask by Doreen Jensen, made of alderwood, horsetail, red-cedar bark, acrylic paint and abalone shell. In 1995, Jensen said, “We don’t have a word in our language for ‘art’ because art was all around us.”
A 1995 interview with Doreen Jensen by Lynne Bell and Carol Williams appears in a double issue of BC Studies (#115–116) and Jensen is one of four Aboriginal artists featured in Loretta Todd’s 1994 National Film Board documentary Hands of History. Her cousin Lonnie Hindle developed the phonetic system for the Gitxsan language with Bruce Rigsby, an American linguist.
“There were so many fish in Discovery Passage then you could walk on them!”—HARRY ASSU
A professional fisherman for over half a century, Harry Assu traced his family and tribal history in Assu of Cape Mudge (1989), co-written with Joy Inglis and with illustrations by Hilary Stewart. It recalls his father’s famous potlatch of 1911 and his first boat, a 12-foot cedar dugout fitted with oars. “I got paid fifty cents for each salmon at the cannery at Quathiaski Cove,” Assu told Inglis.
Assu’s father was renowned Lekwiltok chief Billy Assu (1867–1965) who brought the first gas boat to Cape Mudge, helped his sons outfit their first gill-netter, and convinced federal authorities to allow Aboriginals to become seine-boat skippers. The Assu family is well-regarded for guiding the Cape Mudge Band, the biggest of the four Lekwiltok bands in the Campbell River area, to prosperity and relative independence.
Harry Assu skippered his first seiner at age twenty-nine and bought his boat, the BCP 45, in 1941. Harry Assu took over the Cape Mudge chieftanship from his father in 1954. Five years later, when Assu was the oldest skipper in the B.C. Packers fleet, his seiner was selected to serve as the model for the engraving on the Canadian five-dollar bill. If you look carefully in the background of the “old” five-dollar bill, you’ll also see a second seiner, Bruce Luck, which was owned by Assu’s sons.
Harry Assu and Joy Inglis
The Assu family is known for favouring entrepreneurial management of Aboriginal resources, having helped to form the Pacific Coast Native Fisherman’s Association, forerunner of the Native Brotherhood.
“We were always able to take care of ourselves,” Harry Assu told Inglis. “Indians don’t join unions. I look at it this way. There is no help from the unions…. It’s the company that gave you the job.”
The indomitable Mary John, Sr., of the Stoney Creek Reserve was one of the founders of the Yinka Déné Language Institute and held the position of Permanent Honorary Chair. Tireless in her devotion to language preservation, she made by far the largest contribution to the Saik’uz Dictionary which now includes more than 8,000 entries. In 1980 she also co-founded the Stoney Creek Elders Society. A dignified survivor of racism and innumerable tragedies, she became Vanderhoof’s Citizen of the Year in 1979, the first Aboriginal to receive the honour.
Her memoir Stoney Creek Woman: The Story of Mary John (1989), co-written with Bridget Moran, chronicles the Carrier tribe from the arrival of missionaries and settlers in the Bulkley Valley to the present. Often reprinted, it received the Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing from the B.C. Historical Federation in 1990. For many years it was the bestselling title ever produced by Arsenal Pulp Press.
Born in Lheidli (Prince George) in 1913, Mary John was raised in Saik’uz. At the age of nine, she went to school in Fort St. James. She then moved to Lejac Residential School the next year when it was created. She left school when she was fourteen and married Lazare John when she was sixteen.
“Over the years, between 1930, when I was seventeen, and 1949, when I was thirty-six, I had 12 children, six girls and six boys. Some were born in the village, some on the trapline or at our hunting grounds. Not one of my children was born in a hospital. My mother acted as a midwife for me; when I lost her, my aunts or other relatives were with me. Some of the midwives practised the old ways of Native medicine. We call it the laying on of hands. We believe that some Native women have a gift of healing in their hands…. And oh, that cup of tea that was brought to me after each child was born tasted so good!”
Mary John, 1988
Mary John’s story was recorded by social worker Bridget Moran who first visited Stoney Creek Indian Reservation in 1954. Born in 1923 in Northern Ireland, Moran made headlines in 1972 when she was evicted from the visitors’ gallery in the Victoria legislature for staging an anti-poverty protest. Moran and Mary John met in 1976 at the time of an inquest into the death of another Stoney Creek woman, Coreen Thomas.
“I have vivid memories of Mary at that inquest,” Moran recalled. “I remember watching her gather some of the young people together, speaking softly to them, advising them to tell the truth…. Time after time, as we talked together, I have heard her reconcile the irreconcilables, and laugh at the doing of it. I attended the Roman Catholic Church in Stoney Creek village with her, for example, and I heard that wonderful voice of hers soar over all the other parishioners as she sang, ‘How Great Thou Art.’”
Mary John acknowledged the hardheartedness of the nuns and priests who controlled residential schools, and she believed the Canadian government and the church destroyed her people’s language and culture, but she remained a devout Catholic until her death on September 30, 2004. She was known as Mary John, “Senior” to distinguish her from her daughter-in-law, Mary John, Jr.
“I tell stories for 21 hours or more when I get started. Kind of hard to believe, but I do, because this [is] my job. I’m a storyteller.”—HARRY ROBINSON
A longtime rancher and member of the Lower Similkameen Indian band, Harry Robinson was born in Oyama near Kelowna on October 8, 1900. He devoted much of the later part of his life to telling and retelling Okanagan stories that he first heard from his partially blind grandmother Louise Newhmkin on her Chopaka ranch.
Other mentors included Mary Narcisse, reputed to be one hundred and sixteen years old when she died in 1944, John Ashnola, who died during the 1918-flu epidemic at age ninety-eight, as well as Alex Skeuce, old Pierre and old Christine.
Wendy Wickwire and Harry Robinson met in 1977 when he was living in Hedley.
“When I become to be six years old,” he said, “they begin to tell me and they keep on telling me every once in a while, seems to be right along until 1918. I got enough people to tell me. That’s why I know. The older I get, [it] seems to come back on me…. Maybe God thought I should get back and remember so I could tell. Could be. I don’t know. I like to tell anyone, white people or Indian.”
With the help of Margaret Holding, Harry Robinson learned to read and write English in his early twenties. Weary of itinerant ranching and farming jobs, Robinson bought his first suit from a second-hand store in Oroville and married Matilda, a widow about ten years older than him, on December 9, 1924. By the 1950s they had acquired four large ranches near Chopaka and Ashnola where Matilda had grown up as the daughter of John Shiweelkin.
Childless and burdened by a hip injury that occurred in 1956, Harry Robinson sold his ranches in 1973, two years after Matilda died on March 26, 1971. On August 24, 1977, Robinson was living in retirement in a rented bungalow in Hedley when he met a non-Aboriginal graduate student from Nova Scotia, Wendy Wickwire, who was introduced by mutual friends. On the evening before they all went to the Omak rodeo in Washington State, Harry launched into a story after dinner and continued until almost midnight. That experience drew Wickwire back to the Similkameen Valley for the next ten years, with her Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, transcribing and editing Robinson’s stories, narrated by him in English.
For part of the 1970s, Wickwire lived in Merritt and Lytton, immersing herself in Aboriginal culture for a Ph.D. dissertation on Indian song. “I went to Lytton, to Spences Bridge, to Spuzzum, and all over to get a bigger cross-section of songs. Then I got to spend the whole year in the Nicola Valley, near Merritt, living in a cabin and tripping out to find people to record. During this time Harry kept telling me his stories.”
Now a member of the Department of History and the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, Wickwire first broached the idea of putting Harry Robinson’s stories into book form in 1984 and he approved. “I’m going to disappear,” Robinson said, “and there’ll be no more telling stories.”
Harry Robinson telling a story in 1985
For years Harry Robinson would wait for Wickwire at the bus stop outside his home near Hedley, then invite her to climb into his old green Ford pickup truck so he could tell more stories. “We’d go out to dinner and he’d tell stories all night. The next day we’d drop around to all of the various places in town, buying groceries at the general store, or sightseeing or something, and I’d make him dinner, and then we’d spend another night telling stories. I’d come back and go to a rodeo with him, or go on a car trip, or something, and we’d always have a great time. Hanging out, we kind of became like a father and daughter.”
This collaboration has produced three volumes of stories: Write It On Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989), a finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize when Robinson was eighty-nine; Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (1992), winner of the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize in 1993; and Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory (2005), containing Coyote stories and material about the new quasi-monsters, SHAmas (whites), who dispossess Aboriginals of their lands and rights.
“The third volumes contains many of the stories I put aside earlier because they were just too weird for words,” says Wickwire. “For instance, Harry tells a story about a meeting between Coyote and the King of England. I saw nothing like them in the published collections.
“But after a detailed study, I have decided that Aboriginal folks a century ago were likely telling such far out stories—but the collectors weren’t recording them very often. They weren’t interested in them because they saw them as ‘tarnished’ stories. Franz Boas et al wanted the pure ‘traditional’ stories. Of course they were busy defining traditional in their terms, for their own purposes.”
In his stories Robinson differentiated between stories that are chap-TEEK-whl and stories that are shmee-MA-ee. The former explain creation from a period when the Okanagan people were animal-people. The latter are stories from the world of human people, not animal people. He was always willing to incorporate modern influences, including the Judeo-Christian God, within his evolving world view.
“A good example of Harry’s ability to incorporate current events in a meaningful way in his stories,” writes Wickwire, “is his interpretation of the landing on the moon of the American astronaut Neil Armstrong. When the news of this event reached Harry, it was not surprising to him at all because he knew that Coyote’s son had gone there years ago. The white people were naive, he concluded.
“Armstrong was not the first to land on the moon. He had simply followed the path that Coyote’s son had learned about long ago, which is recorded in the old story ‘Coyote Plays a Dirty Trick.’ In this story, Harry sees the earth orbit and the moon orbit of the Apollo mission as the two ‘stopping points’ so critical to Coyote’s son’s return to earth.”
Eventually Harry Robinson needed full-time medical attention for a worsening leg ulcer. He went to live at Pine Acres senior citizens home near Kelowna, in Westbank. “It was very sterile,” Wickwire recalls. “He was used to driving his old pickup truck into town and getting his mail, and having lots of visitors come to his house.” Robinson moved to a senior citizens home in Keremeos. Later his condition deteriorated when his artificial hip dislodged and caused serious infection. He had 24-hour care at Mountain View Manor in Keremeos until he died on January 25, 1990.
Born in 1942, Marie Annharte Baker is Anishinabe from the Little Saskatchewan First Nations in Manitoba. Raised as a neglected child in Winnipeg, a city she abhors for its racism, she was abandoned by her alcoholic mother when she was nine. After studying at universities in Brandon, Vancouver and Minneapolis (centre for the American Indian Movement), she left her husband and turned to social work and activism. Her poem “Me Tonto Along” from Exercises in Lip Pointing (2003) recalls the anguish and relief of her marriage break-up.
Annharte was touted as “the voice of today’s urban Indian” in 1990.
My old man was a good screw they say / all the ladies who changed his waylay / he took my money time any hour he pleased / cost me to see how his manhood freezed / kicked him out he kicked down the door / punched my face through the apartment floor / no way to stop him but once he caught zzz’s / had my chance to plot his murder with ease / I pretend I let him move onto a next wife / Me Tonto along what I got left—my life
In one of 15 “five feminist minutes” commissioned by the National Film Board, Baker examined racial and sexual abuse of Aboriginal women. With her first collection of poetry, Being on the Moon (1990), Baker adopted the penname of Annharte as she reflected the voices and concerns of urban Aboriginal women. Her other books are Coyote Columbus Café (1994), Blueberry Canoe (2001) and Exercises in Lip Pointing (2003). Co-founder of the Regina Aboriginal Writers Group, Baker now lives much of the time on the West Coast.
A rancher and professional breeder of horses, Garry Gottfriedson is the son of Aboriginal parents who were both at the forefront of community activism in the era of George Manuel. “When you’re born Indian,” he says, “you are born into politics.”
After living in the bush for eight years, Gottfriedson attended literary readings at the home of Jeannette Armstrong and at the En’owkin Centre in Penticton. After Armstrong submitted some of his poetry to a writing competition without his knowledge, he was awarded the Gerald Red Elk Creative Writing Scholarship by the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Feeling estanged from his Shuswap roots, Gottfriedson studied writing under Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and the pop singer/songwriter Marianne Faithful.
“I didn’t even know who Allen Ginsberg was,” Gottfriedson says. “When I got there I was shy. I was this bush Indian. I had hair down to my knees. I didn’t speak to anyone outside my culture.”
Garry Gottfriedson
Gottfriedson has since gained his MFA in Creative Writing from the Naropa Institute and a Masters in Education from Simon Fraser University. Born and raised in Kamloops, he has taught at Cariboo College and served as a councillor and consultant for the Kamloops Indian Band.
Gottfriedson’s historical work, One Hundred Years of Contact (1990), was followed by In Honour of Our Grandmothers: Imprints of Cultural Survival (1994), a collaborative coffee table book that included Cree artist George Littlechild and Reisa Smiley Schneider.
His poetry collection Glass Tepee (2002) contains cryptic and and lyrical perspectives based on his Secwepemc heritage:
Owl dance at Dukes / when the powwow season ends / wrapped in wannabe white girl clothes / labatts & between the sheets / they go all out / all the way / to the bee sting / arms slide around the shoulder / of the smiling drunk / Mary Kay caked faces forget / that home is a mountain of people / sitting in bunch grass / puffing on Red Stone / sending pitiful words / into the air / hoping / for a Round Dance.
In addition, filmmaker Loretta Todd commissioned Gottfriedson to write “Forgotten Soldiers,” a poem about Aboriginal war veterans in Canada, that served as the basis for a documentary. According to Gottfriedson, some returning Aboriginal veterans lost their treaty rights because a clause in the Indian Act prohibited them from taking up arms, for or against Canada.
He has also published a children’s book, Painted Pony (2005), illustrated by William McAusland, in keeping with his work as a rancher. Along with his brother, who raises bucking horses for rodeos, Gottfriedson maintains the family tradition of breeding quarterhorses which he sells to buyers throughout North America. Fluently bilingual, he has developed his own teaching method for the Shuswap language, one that requires physical responses to learning individual words.
Now known sometimes by her married name, Joanne Arnott-Zenthoffer, Joanne Arnott was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1960. A Métis writer who facilitates Unlearning Racism workshops, she studied at the University of Windsor, then moved to British Columbia in 1982. Much of her writing concerns family relations, such as “Like an Indian: Struggling with Ogres,” a pastiche of five prose poems to conclude My Grass Cradle (1992):
My Family / some of us are sitting around the table, getting on for a change, peaceable, friendly. My sister, who always thought that my father was beautiful, tells him so. He hears it. She goes on, strokes his arm lightly and says, your skin is beautiful. Like an Indian. He jumps up, afternoon shattered by a girl’s words saying the unsayable words, he storms from the room, a real electrical storm crackling and swirling through the rooms of our small house. Power of repression, power of lifetime and generations of denial, everything coming unhinged on an afternoon where he’d dared to relax for a moment with his children. Well you can’t trust children. Never relax with them. They are crazy, and you never know what they might say…
I am not the only girl or woman of my generation / in my family learning to find safety in the truth. We struggle to unsilence ourselves, and to stop silencing each other: Not easy. We write letters, poetry, songs, and tell each other stories, from a distance, over time. Am I an Indian? Like an Indian? Or, as a dream-man told me with a loud guffaw, ‘Better a little bit Indian than not Indian at all!’ I am a woman who was a girl, Native and European, a parent who was a child who struggles with ogres. Now and then.
Arnott’s first book of poetry, Wiles of Girlhood (1991), was written “for all the young women” and won the Gerald Lampert Award in 1992. Her other books include a children’s book on natural childbirth, Ma MacDonald (1993), illustrated by Mary Anne Barkhouse; Breasting the Waves: On Writing & Healing (1995), a selection of candid personal essays on writing, healing and motherhood; and Steepy Mountain Love Poetry (2004).
As a mother to five sons and one daughter, Joanne Arnott-Zenthoffer lives in Richmond.
As a Cree mother and lesbian, Connie Fife viewed Canadians as living in “separate homelands” when she published Poems for a New World (2001).
Redolent with anger and sorrow, Fife’s poems also extend an invitation for non-Aboriginals to sit “as equal partners at the banquet table of mother Earth.”
Born in Saskatchewan in 1961, Fife graduated from the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton. Her poetry titles include The Colour of Resistance (1994), Beneath the Naked Sun (1992) and Speaking Through Jagged Rock (1999).
The Gustafsen Lake standoff. The Oka crisis. The shooting of Connie Jacobs when she refused to give up her children to Social Services. These were some of the subjects for the poetry of Connie Fife when she was living in Victoria.
Her poem “A Mother’s Son” is dedicated to Jacobs and her nine-year-old son Ty who were shot to death on March 24, 1998, by an RCMP officer on the Tsuu T’ina Reserve in Alberta after Social Services attempted to apprehend Jacobs’ three children. No charges were laid, giving rise to Fife’s visceral and defiant poem of protest.
Connie Fife has recently moved from British Columbia to Winnipeg.
my son / I stopped the bullets / For as long as i could / until my heart was torn from my ribcage / and my shattered bone become flour on our kitchen flour / how I wept going down / down / to the moment when I could no longer withstand their bullets / your youth clearcutting a pathway / back into my arms when i held you up to the sun / singings praises for your birth
now i watch as righteous men / defend your murder / defend the onslaught of sliced corpuscle / and the tearing away of your muscle / and i sing / i sing your name into the mouth of every coming sunrise / and i will continue / until they know the significance of your birth / together with the act of stealing your life / and i will sing / and i will not stop
Louise S. Framst of the Tahltan First Nation was born on May 29, 1944, in Lower Post, B.C., and raised in northern B.C. where she lives on a farm at Cecil Lake with her husband. With her B.Ed. (5-Year) in History and Special Education from UBC, Framst has experience as a teacher in a multi-grade rural school, a librarian and a learning assistant teacher.
Prior to her retirement, she served as an itinerant teacher facilitating programs for children with special needs. Framst has also edited a community project entitled A Community Tells Its Story: Cecil Lake 1925–2000 (2000), and self-published three Tahltan cookbooks and a series of children’s titles, including Manny’s Many Questions (1992), Kelly’s Garden (1992), On My Walk (2001), But I Cleaned My Room Last Year! (2002) and Feathers (2004).
“The reason that I chose to become my own publisher,” she says, “is that it was important to me to have my own interpretation put on stories that I chose to publish. It seemed to me that if others edited my work, then somehow what was important to me might be ‘lost’ or misinterpreted.”
Self-publisher Louise Framst
Born in Mount Currie within the St’at’imx (Lillooet) First Nation, Lorna Williams trained at the B.C. Institute of Technology to become a nurse, but switched to education to specialize in First Nations instruction. In 1973, she became involved in the administration of the Mount Currie Community School, developing training for First Nations teachers to teach in their own language. Williams subsequently worked as the Native Indian Education Specialist with the Vancouver School Board and became involved in constitutional issues, both federally and in Europe, to ensure the representation of indigenous peoples. Lorna Williams received the Order of British Columbia in 1993.
Williams has served as director of the Cultural Centre and Curriculum Development for the Ts’zil Board of Education and she has created Lil’wat language curriculum materials such as Exploring Mount Currie (1982), adopted as a Grade Two text.
Lorna Williams
Illustrated by Plains Cree artist Mary Longman, Williams’ second book Sima7: Come Join Me (1991) describes the activities of a four-day youth gathering held on the banks of the Lillooet River. A Salteaux visual artist from the Gordon Band near Punnichy, Saskatchewan, Mary Longman Aski-Piyesiwiskwew is a Ph.D. candidate in Art Education at the University of Victoria who has also illustrated Beth and Stan Cuthand’s bilingual children’s book The Little Duck/ Sikihpsis (2003).
Mary Longman
The claim to ownership of approximately 22,000 square miles (or 58,000 square kilometres) in northwestern British Columbia by the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en peoples first entered the courts in 1984 with the filing of the statement of claim. This high profile case was brought before B.C. Supreme Court Judge Allan MacEachern in 1987 and was heard over 374 days, ending in the spring of 1990.
Partially due to a ban imposed on courtroom photography, Don Monet of Hazelton attempted to capture the soul of the three-and-a-half-year-long sovereignty case with a collection of cartoons, portraits and sketches. These were combined with the notes and transcripts of Gitksan writer Skanu’u (Ardythe Wilson) for Colonialism on Trial: Indigenous Land Rights and the Gitksan Wet’suwet’en Sovereignty Case (1991).
Lawyers Stuart Rush and David Paterson at first argued unsuccessfully on behalf of Ken Muldoe (also known as Delgamuukw) and the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en. Judge MacEachern ruled that Aboriginal rights in general exist at the “pleasure of the Crown” (accepting the Judgement in R. v. St. Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Company [1885]) and are therefore extinguishable “whenever the intention of the Crown to do so is clear and plain.”
Colonialism On Trial cover image
MacEachern dismissed the evidence of academic experts who included Hugh Brody, Arthur Ray, Antonia Mills and Richard Daly. “The anthropologists add little to the important questions that must be decided in this case,” he declared. MacEachern referred to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to characterize the lives of Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en ancestors as being essentially “nasty, brutish and short,” and therefore too primitive to constitute an organized culture.
“The unique thing about about our nations is that we weren’t nomadic nations,” Ardythe Wilson says. “We were settled in ancient villages.” Wilson’s viewpoint has prevailed with the ratification of the Nisga’a Treaty in 2000, invalidating Judge MacEachern’s earlier findings.
Containing reminiscences of the author’s father Chief Louis-Billy Prince, grandson of Chief Kwah, The Carrier, My People (1992) by Nak’azdli elder Lizette Hall recalls Carrier culture and history specific to the Stuart Lake Carrier people.
“All the information in this book was given to me by my father who was past ninety-three years of age then,” she writes, “who had an excellent memory and recalled everything with clarity. He gave me all the details in our Carrier tongue. If I don’t make myself clear to the reader, please bear in mind that English is my second language.”
Lizette Hall and her father
Hall’s material includes the history of Chief Kwah and his missing dagger, the establishment of the Stuart Lake Mission by Fathers Lejac and Blanchet, memories of Father Nicholas Coccola, origins of the name Carrier, photos of Carrier WW II army veterans and descriptions of customs and beliefs. “The Carrier’s method of showing contempt for another person is to approach the person with the back of the hand towards the victim’s face. The back of the index finger is then rubbed quickly down the bridge of the victim’s nose.”
Louis-Billy Prince (1864–1962), son of Simeyon Prince, who was the son of Kwah, was a constable who accompanied the Oblate priest Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice as a cook on some of his explorations. After Father Morice arrived in British Columbia in 1880, he became the first person to make extensive and accurate recordings of any Athapaskan language in print. After Morice left Fort Saint James in 1904, he corresponded with Louis-Billy Prince for many years, asking questions about his language in order to compose The Carrier Language, published in 1932. Written in English and the Nak’azdli dialect of Carrier, The Little Dwarves and the Creation of Nak’azdli (1996) is a children’s version of a legend told to Morice by Louis-Billy Prince.
“Photographs are not objective. Once this is recognized, one can see a portrait for what it is: a result of an interaction between two people.”—DAVID NEEL
A descendant of Kwakiutl carvers Ellen Neel and Mungo Martin, David Neel studied photography in the United States and returned to produce the text and photographs for Our Chiefs and Elders: Words and Photographs of Native Leaders (1992), followed by The Great Canoes (1995). His illustrations have also appeared in several other books, including Ellen White’s Kwulasulwut: Stones from the Coast Salish (1981).
David Neel’s uncle Mungo Martin created the world’s tallest (and skinniest) totem pole. Erected in Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park in 1956, the red cedar pole measures 127’ 7”.
According to Elijah Harper in Neel’s Our Chiefs and Elders, “public images of Aboriginal people have been almost completely negative,” ever since the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Neel agrees with Harper. “For well over a hundred years, we have learned to accept a false image of the people of the First Nations,” he says. “The tool used to build this image has been the camera.”
Influenced by photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, Cornell Capa and W. Eugene Smith, David Neel was critical of the photos by pioneer photographer Edward S. Curtis whose massive series The North American Indian greatly influenced North American attitudes about Aboriginals. “When viewed as art,” Neel concedes, “they are quite wonderful. However, they are very problematic when one starts to examine them for authenticity, integrity and general content.”
Curtis frequently used wigs on his subjects and dressed his subjects in clothing that belonged to other tribal groups. “This visual cocktail is comparable to photographing a French woman in a traditional Italian dress and offering this as an image of an ‘authentic’ European,” says Neel. Curtis’ pan-Indian approach, born of a colonial mentality and feelings of white cultural superiority, has been endemic in Hollywood films. “When depicted in popular culture,” says Neel, “we are either a ‘noble savage’ or a degraded heathen.”
David Neel
Recognizing that we all live in a time of the created image and “if you do not create your own, someone will create it for you,” Neel set out to photograph and interview elders, many of whom were the last witnesses to Aboriginal life before cars and gas-driven boats. In 60 duotone photos he provided dual depictions of his subjects, in both traditional dress and everyday dress. They included Harry Assu, Ruby Dunstan, Leonard George, Chief Joe Mathias, Bill Reid, Chief Saul Terry and Chief Bill Wilson.
“This body of work is intended to be the antithesis of the ‘vanishing race’ photographs of Native people,” Neel wrote. “This is a statement of the surviving race.”
David Neel was born in Vancouver in 1960 to Karen Clemenson, a non-Aboriginal, and David Neel, eldest son of Ellen Neel, one the few female carvers on the Northwest Coast. His Aboriginal name, Tla’lala’wis, meaning “a meeting of whales coming together,” was inherited from his father, who received it from his uncle, Mungo Martin. Mainly raised in Alberta, David Neel returned to British Columbia and opened a commercial studio in Vancouver in 1987.
Shirley Sterling fictionalized her 1950s stint at the Kamloops Residential School in My Name is Seepeetza (1992), perhaps the first Canadian book for children about residential schools. The following year Sterling became the first Aboriginal author to win one of the province’s top literary awards at the 1993 BC Book Prizes gala in Penticton.
The highlight of that evening was the presentation of the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize to Sterling for her portrayal of the Niakapmux (Interior Salish) girl named Martha Stone, or Seepeetza, who struggles with the cruel contrast between her uncomfortable life at the Indian Residential School and her nourishing Aboriginal life with her brothers and sisters at Joyaska Ranch. Several members of Sterling’s family from Merritt were in attendance at the ceremony.
“I genuinely didn’t expect to win,” Sterling told the audience. ”I have been writing since I was twelve years old and I thought perhaps when I retired at age sixty-five I would begin my writing seriously. But by an accident I ended up in Sue Ann Alderson’s class in 1992. And if Sue Ann had not encouraged me I would never have written the book. And if my daughter Haika had not encouraged me I would never have sent it to the publisher. It was just the thrill of my life just to have been published.”
During her acceptance speech, Sterling asked her mother to rise before the sold-out audience and acknowledge her integral role. “Mum, I want you to know that you’ve been the strength and the centre of our lives,” Sterling said, “and you are the reason we’ve survived, and the reason that seven out of seven Native children went on to university to get a university education.” Her mother also served as a role model for one of the main characters in Sterling’s story.
Egoff Prize-winner Shirley Sterling, 1993
Sterling’s story of Seepeetza closely mirrors her own experiences. Taken to a red brick building in Kamloops at age six, Seepeetza is forced to wear strange clothes, sleep in a dormitory with other Aboriginal girls, eat strange food and have her hair cut. The nuns call her Shirley instead of Seepeetza, or her nick-names Tootie or McSpoot. She is prohibited from talking “Indian,” but her life is not entirely bleak. She enjoys the dance practices for school concerts and she takes comfort from her memories of home, always looking forward to summer vacations.
Born on the Joyaska Indian Reserve in 1948, Shirley Anne Sterling moved to Vancouver where she trained as a ballerina. She obtained her Ph.D. in Education and twice received the Native Indian Teacher Education Alumni Award, plus the Laura Steinman Award for Children’s Literature. She died after a two-year battle with cancer on April 3, 2005, at Merritt, B.C.
Born in 1910 at Nieumiamus Creek, or “place of flies,” Clayton Mack was a descendant of Bella Coola chiefs. He attended residential school and worked as a logger, fisherman and a rancher before becoming a tracker and hunting guide. A walking encyclopedia of tribal knowledge, he spent 53 years on the B.C. central coast, guiding the rich and famous on trophy hunts that felled an estimated 300 grizzly bears. In the 1960s he was flown to Hollywood where he reportedly mesmerized the California jet set with his hunting tales. His storytelling abilities led to his two collections of memoirs compiled and edited by his physician Harvey Thommasen, Grizzlies & White Guys: The Stones of Clayton Mack (1993) and Bella Coola Man: More Stones of Clayton Mack (1994).
The story goes that when explorer Thor Heyerdahl was forced to remain in Canada in 1940, after Germany had invaded his Norwegian homeland, Heyerdahl befriended Mack who took him to see pictographs at Kwatna Inlet. Heyerdahl asked Mack if he thought it would be possible for his ancestors to have reached Hawaii in a dugout canoe and Clayton Mack suggested they might have used giant rafts of kelp. Later, Heyerdahl made his famous voyage in the South Pacific on a raft named Kon-Tiki. Clayton Mack suffered a stroke in 1988, moved into long-term care at the Bella Coola Hospital, and died in 1993.
Clayton Mack guided Thor Heyerdahl.
Fuently bilingual, Henry W. Tate was a Tsimshian who taught at the Methodist mission school at Port Simpson. With the support of missionary Thomas Crosby, Tate first sailed aboard the mission boat Glad Tidings in 1894 with Captain William Oliver to spread Christianity as a lay preacher.
From 1903 to 1913, Tate forwarded his own versions of Tsimshian stories, written in English, to Franz Boas, who “cleaned-up” his informant’s work and published it in 1916, with minimal credit to Tate, who died in 1914. When Simon Fraser University English professor Ralph Maud consulted the archives of Columbia University Library and saw the discrepancies between Tate’s vibrant storytelling and Boas’ revised texts for Boas’ book Tsimshian Mythology, Maud blew the whistle on the famous anthropologist, first in an article for American Ethnologist called “The Henry Tate–Franz Boas Collaboration on Tsimshian Mythology.” While criticizing the methodology that produced Tsimshian Mythology, Maud simultaneously resurrected the literary importance of Tate by arranging for publication of Tate’s original versions of ten stories, as well as an extensive Raven cycle, in The Porcupine Hunter and Other Stories: The Original Tsimshian Texts of Henry W. Tate (1993). In this way Henry W. Tate’s authority was acknowledged 79 years after his death.
Maud’s opinionated analysis of Boas’s relationship with Tate is recorded in Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology (2000).
Born at Spuzzum in 1904, Annie Zechtgo York was an important Nlaka’pamux cultural authority, healer and oral teacher whose explanations of red ochre rock-writings found in the Stein Valley were published in They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever (1993), co-authored with Richard Daly and Chris Arnett.
With ethnologist Andrea Laforet of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, York also examined how the Nlaka’pamux people developed their separate sense of history, in comparison to non-Aboriginals, in Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808–1939 (1998).
As well, she provided information for books by the ethnobotanist Nancy J. Turner and Lytton Indian Band ethnobotanist Darwin Hanna.
One of seven brothers and sisters, York was educated in Pitt Meadows and moved to Merritt in 1925. A trained nurse, she served as an official translator in courts and hospitals for many years.
In 1932 she returned to Spuzzum where she later worked with Laurence and Terry Thompson to develop a dictionary of the Nlaka’pamux language.
She died in 1991.
Botanical expert and historian Annie York
Raised primarily on the Capilano Reserve in North Vancouver, Simon Baker was the grandson of Joe Capilano. Born on January 15, 1910, he attended St. George’s Residential School in Lytton. His life is recalled in Khot La Cha: An Autobiography of Chief Simon Baker (1994), written with Verna Kirkness. With an Aboriginal name meaning “Man with a Kind Heart,” Baker served as a councillor to the Squamish Nation for more than 30 years, ten years as its chairman, and became the only Squamish member to be designated Chief for Lifetime.
Baker worked primarily as a longshoreman in Vancouver from 1935 to 1976, rising to the position of superintendent of Canadian Stevedoring. As a fundraiser and teacher, Baker played an important role in the First Nations House of Learning at the University of British Columbia where he received an Honorary Doctorate of Law in 1990. Ten years later he accepted the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Heritage and Spirituality. Baker was invested in the Order of Canada in 1997.
In the periodical First Nations Drum, Baker was later referred to as “the last of the great North Shore Indians,” a reference to a remarkable North Vancouver lacrosse team in the 1930s. Known as Cannonball Baker during his playing days, Baker was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 1999.
As a patriarch of nine children and 38 grandchildren, Simon Baker died on May 23, 2001.
Chief Simon “Cannonball” Baker
Born in Maple Ridge, B.C., into a Métis family of Cree, Scottish, English and French descent, Gregory Scofield never knew his father. “My parents were married in Whonnock, B.C. (a little town close to Maple Ridge), in 1964 under an alias name and spent the next two years in hiding, moving from province to province every couple of months,” Scofield has recalled.
“Mom was surprised to find out that my father was already married and had a young daughter. In spite of this she stayed with him, and in 1965, while dodging the police in Port Alberni, B.C., she became pregnant with me. Not wanting to raise a baby on the run, she finally convinced him to turn himself over to the authorities. They returned to Maple Ridge where he turned himself in. Ironically, he ended up having a heart attack on the stand and beating most of the charges.
“I was born in July of 1966, the very day my father stood trial.”
Gregory Scofield
Scofield was separated from his mother at age five and sent to live with strangers. He grew up in northern Manitoba, northern Saskatchewan and the Yukon, struggling with substance abuse, poverty and racism. A sense of loss, poverty, alienation and self-hatred led to a profound sense of loneliness that he has traced back to his Red River settlement roots in a memoir called Thunder Through My Veins (1998) and Singing Home the Bones (2005), his new volume of poetry.
His first collection of poetry, The Gathering (1994), provides insights into Canada’s Métis people and he received the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. Scofield later received the Air Canada Award in 1996, which is given annually to a promising Canadian writer under age thirty. In I Knew Two Métis Women (1999) he recalls his mother Dorothy Scofield and his aunt Georgina Houle Young. He is also the author of Native Canadiana: Songs from the Urban Rez (1996) and Love Medicine and One Song (1997). Scofield has worked with street youth in Vancouver and been involved in the Louis Riel Métis Council. He currently lives in Calgary.
A member of the Spallumcheen Indian Band, just outside Vernon in Enderby, Gerry William of Merritt is Associate Dean at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology. He has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Victoria in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies. He first published a speculative fiction novel called The Black Ship: Book One of Enid Blue Starbreaks (1994), regarded as the first science fiction novel by a Canadian First Nations author.
Gerry William
Having taught at the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, Williams, an avid “Trekkie” and sci-fi reader, believes science fiction contains themes and characters compatible with those used by Aboriginal writers.
In his follow-up novel, The Woman in the Trees (2004), the character of Wolverine meets the young priest Black Robes in the Okanagan. This novel also features the character/spirit named Enid Blue Starbreaks, aka the Woman in the Trees, the woman from the other side of creation. The Woman in the Trees and Coyote observe and comment upon the “contact” period that brought disease and devastation to the Okanagan and Shuswap First Nations.
Holding a Canada research Chair at the University of Victoria, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred has been cited as one of the most influential figures in a new generation of First Nations leaders. He is one of the few Aboriginal authors who have heeded the admonitions of Howard Adams and undertaken scholarly, historical work. His history of Mohawk militancy and nationalism, Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors (1995), was followed by an essay on ethics and leadership, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (1999), and Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (2005).
Also known as Kanien’kehaka, Alfred was born at Tiohtie (Montreal) in the Kahnawake Mohawk territory where he has since served as an advisor on governance and land issues. After being schooled by Jesuits, Alfred had a stint as a machine-gunner in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Gerald Taiaiake Alfred
He earned his doctorate from Cornell University and is known for his scholarly work on Native nationalism, Iroquois history and indigenous traditions of government. Born in 1965, Alfred resides in Songhees Nation Territory and works as Director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria. Taiaiake is a Mohawk name meaning “He’s Crossed Over from the Other Side.”
Son of Chief Dan George, Leonard George is a North Vancouver psychologist and lecturer who has published two books pertaining to unorthodox beliefs and experiences.
Topics in Alternative Realities: The Paranormal, the Mystic and the Transcendent in Human Experience (1995) include Apparitions, Ghost Rockets, Burial Alive, Possession, Old Hag Experience, Incubus Nightmare, Devil’s Jelly, Will-o’-the-Wisp, Zombification, Meditation, UFO abduction experiences and peyote.
Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (1995) is “a compendium of those who held unorthodox views of reality, and, as often as not, ended up roasting on a stake or swinging from a rope.” Topics include Gnosticism, Isochrists, Savonarola, Arius, Cathars, Free Spirits, Joan of Arc, Bruno, Rasputin, Paracelsus, Abulafia, Alistair Crowley, Mormons, Eckhart, the Great Witch Hunt, Alchemy, Kabbalah, Key of Solomon and Jesus Christ. George argues that heresy is necessary within society in order to provide provocative views of reality. “If one’s certainties no longer work,” he writes, “one may be forced to consider possibilities that one used to think were crazy.”
Having succeeded his father as an elected chief of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation in Burrard Inlet, George publicly confessed to severe problems with substance abuse and expressed a newfound determination to adopt a healthier lifestyle. Also a traditional singer and dancer, Leonard George served for seven years as executive director of the Vancouver Aboriginal Centre.
Optioned for a 13-part documentary television series on Aboriginal heroes, Honour Song: A Tribute (1996) by Barbara Hager profiles Susan Aglukark, architect Douglas Cardinal, athlete Angela Chalmers, Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come, artist Robert Davidson, health specialist Jean Cuthand Goodwill, actor Graham Greene, MP Elijah Harper, author Tom King, educator Verna Kirkness, hockey coach Ted Nolan, filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, artist Jane Ash Poitras, Manitoba judge Murray Sinclair and pop singer Shania Twain. The book is used in First Nations schools and colleges to inspire young people.
Barbara Hager produces a syndicated current affairs television program from Victoria.
Barbara Hager was born in 1959 in Edmonton, the sixth of eight children, to a Cree/Métis father and a Scottish mother, George and Judy Todd. Her father died when she was twelve and the family moved to B.C. when she was fourteen. She completed high school in Hope, B.C., and studied English at Fraser Valley College. At seventeen she moved to Vancouver and took writing courses at UBC. In 1978 she was hired to write media releases and newsletters for the Department of Fish and Wildlife in Nanaimo. She wrote freelance articles on Vancouver Island, enrolled at Malaspina University-College, edited the student newspaper, and worked on the college’s literary magazine.
After moving to Seattle and marrying musician Lee Hager, she ran a public relations company for the local music industry from 1980 to 1983, writing a Seattle music column for the Georgia Straight in Vancouver. She then moved with her (now former) husband to New York where she worked for one year at RCA Records and for five years at the city’s Art Commission. She managed the Tweed Gallery for the city and wrote some culture-related speeches for Mayor Ed Koch.
Moving to Kentucky for three years, Hager published and edited a quarterly lifestyles magazine and founded the Central Kentucky Writer’s Voice program at the Lexington YMCA. She returned to Canada and coordinated the 1993 and 1994 First Peoples Festival for the Victoria Native Friendship Centre. In 1994 she assisted in the delivery of the first National Aboriginal Achievement Awards which aired on CBC TV. This led her to write Honour Song.
For five years Hager worked as Aboriginal Liaison at the Royal British Columbia Museum. She then wrote her biography of Shania Twain, the country singer who was raised as an Ojibway. She conducted two interviews with Twain, one by phone and one in person, for a chapter in Honour Song called “Shania Twain: Buckskin and Cowboy Boots” and for her biography, On Her Way: The Life and Music of Shania Twain (1998).
In 2002, Hager was hired by CHUM Television to co-host The New Canoe, an Aboriginal arts and culture series on The New VI television station in Victoria. After the first season, CHUM sold the series to Hager. Since then she has produced the series independently through her company, Aarrow Productions. The fifth season of The New Canoe, airing in 2006, is co-hosted by Barbara Hager and Swil Kanim from the Lummi First Nation.
Born in 1968 on the Haisla Nation Kitamaat Reserve, Eden Robinson grew up near the mostly white community of Kitimat on the B.C. coast. Her uncle was author Gordon Robinson and her younger sister is CBC national news anchorwoman Carla Robinson.
Robinson first published Traplines (1996), a critically acclaimed collection of four short stories that she wrote in four months at UBC’s Creative Writing department. Not necessarily autobiographical and mostly concerning dysfunctional families, Traplines won the Winifred Holtby Prize for best work of short fiction by a Commonwealth writer. It was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book of the Year.
For many years Robinson struggled with Monkey Beach (2000), her first novel about a confused teenager coming to terms with her seventeen-year-old brother’s disappearance at sea, probably by drowning. Subject to premonitions, the narrator, Lisamarie—named for Elvis Presley’s daughter—explores Haisla community life on the central coast as the Hill family melds their Haisla heritage with Western ways. Lisamarie respects that her grandmother Ma-ma-oo is a guardian of tradition but she also has less tangible advisors—ghosts, sasquatches and animal spirits—as she journeys up Douglas Channel to Monkey Beach, a remote stretch of shore renowned for Sasquatch sightings.
There are forays up remote inlets, sasquatch sightings, bits of Haisla vocabulary and a two-page explanation of oolichan grease, but at the heart of Monkey Beach is family intimacy. The novel received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was nominated for the Giller Prize. Her follow-up novel, Blood Sports (advertised for 2006), is set in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Eden Robinson at BC BookWorld, 2000
The Lesser Blessed (1996) is Richard Van Camp’s coming-of-age novel about “skinny as spaghetti” Larry, a Dogrib teenager in the northern town of Fort Simmer. He sniffs gasoline, listens to Iron Maiden and copes with an abusive father, blackouts and an accident that killed several cousins.
“One time before the accident, I was hanging out with my cousins there. We used to play in the sand way down the beach. We’d take some toys down and build houses. We’d also sniff gas. I wasn’t too crazy about it at first, but after seeing my dad do the bad thing to my aunt, it took the shakes away. I could feel the heat on my back from the sun. Every now and then we’d stop to eat or take a leak. Me and my cousin Franky were good pals, even though he was demented. He was the guy who told me that if you touch gasoline to a cat’s asshole, the cat’d jump ten feet in to the air.”
Larry befriends a newly arrived Métis named Johnny Beck and forges a more optimistic future. A German translation of The Lesser Blessed by Ulrich Plenzdorf, entitled Die Ohne Segen Sind, received the Jugendliteraturpreis 2001 at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the juvenile category.
Born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, on September 8, 1971, Richard Van Camp is a member of the Dogrib (Tlicho) Nation from the Northwest Territories. Having gained his MFA from the University of British Columbia, Van Camp published a collection of short stories, Angel Wing Splash Pattern (2002), and two award-winning children’s books, A Man Called Raven (1997) and What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses? (1988), with Cree artist, George Littlechild. His collaboration with Littlechild was selected for an Our Choice designation from The Canadian Children’s Book Centre.
Three of Van Camp’s short stories have been turned into radio dramas with CBC and he co-wrote a screenplay for a short film, The Promise, for Neohaus Filmworks in the U.S.
Richard Van Camp
Also a graduate of the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton and the University of Victoria’s Creative Writing BFA Program, Van Camp wrote for CBC’s North of 60 television show for two months under their Writer Internship Program and was a script and cultural consultant for four seasons.
Published in numerous anthologies, Van Camp is a traditional and contemporary storyteller who teaches Creative Writing for Aboriginal Students at UBC and Aboriginal Media Art History at Imag(e).
In 1997 he received the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award for “Most Promising Canadian” under thirty. In 1999 he received the “Writer of the Year” Award for Children’s Literature from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for A Man Called Raven.
In 2002, Van Camp was honoured by the Northwest Territories’ Living History Society for his career as a storyteller. In 2003, he was presented with the Queen Elizabeth Golden Jubilee Commemorative Medal.
Based on input from the elders of Quatsino, Fort Rupert and Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw, Marion Roze Wright gathered materials for an instructional guide to Kwakwaka’wakw culture entitled My Elders Tell Me (1996), rendered as a season-by-season story about two nine-year-old cousins who live near Port Hardy. Illustrated by Judy Hilgemann, this wide-ranging volume provides some Kwak’wala language terms and educational sidebars.
The Hamatsa Society, for instance, is introduced as comprising the high ranking members of society, usually young men who were sent into the forest to fend for themselves without hunting gear. The Hamatsa must encounter the cannibal man at the north end of the world, Baxwbakwalanuksiwe, who tries to control his human spirit. The Hamatsa then returns to his people who must catch and tame him, attempting to gain control of the supernatural cannibal spirit within him. At tribal gatherings the Hamatsa dances wildly to exhibit the spirit of Baxwbakwalanuksiwe but he is calmed by the sound of rattles. Similarly, Wright introduces the wild woman of the woods, Dzunuk’wa, as a child-stealing giantess who dances at the potlatch with a basket to gather children.
Contemporary Hamatsa ceremonial dancer at Alert Bay
Long associated with Theytus Books and the En’owkin Centre as an administrator and editor (as of 1990), Greg Young-Ing is a member of the Opsakwayak Cree Nation in Northern Manitoba. In his poetry collection The Random Flow of Blood and Flowers (1996), he writes about Métis status, racism, exploitation and colonialism.
Young-Ing has a Master of Arts degree in Northern and Native Studies from the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University and a Masters of Publishing degree from the Canadian Centre for Studies in Writing & Publishing at Simon Fraser University. He has served as Chair of the Indigenous Peoples Caucus of Creator’s Rights Alliance and variously contributed to The Royal Commission On Aboriginal Peoples, Assembly Of First Nations and Committee Of Inquiry Into Indian Education.
Greg Young-Ing
Young-Ing has also edited three volumes of Gatherings, once described as the only journal of literary writing by Aboriginal people in North America. Gatherings – Volume III (1992) explores Mother Earth Perspectives; Gatherings – Volume IX (1998) is subtitled Beyond Victimization: Forging a Path of Celebration; Gatherings – Volume X (1999) celebrates the publication’s tenth anniversary. As well, he has co-edited We get Our Living Like Milk From the Land (1993–94) and IndigeCrit: Aboriginal Perspectives on Aboriginal Literature (2001).
In 2004, Anita Large replaced Greg Young-Ing as the publisher of Theytus Books. He is presently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Educational Studies at UBC.
The findings from the First National Conference on Residential Schools held in Vancouver in June of 1991 were published in The Circle Game (2002), in which Roland Chrisjohn and his co-authors Sherri Young and Michael Mauran cited punishments used at the schools.
“Residential schools,” according to Chrisjohn, an Oneida healer, “were one of many attempts at the genocide of the Aboriginal Peoples inhabiting the area now commonly called Canada. Initially, the goal of obliterating these peoples was connected with stealing what they owned (the land, the sky, the waters, and their lives, and all that these encompassed); and although this connection persists, present-day acts and policies of genocide are also connected with the hypocritical, legal and self-delusion needed on the part of the perpetrators to conceal what they did and what they continue to do.”
The punishments of children cited in The Circle Game include sticking needles through the tongues of children and other areas of children’s anatomy, often for prolonged periods; burning and scalding; beating to unconsciousness; breaking legs, arms, ribs, skulls and eardrums; using electric shock devices and forcing sick children to eat their vomit.
A list of more commonplace offences and punishments from an unnamed Oblate residential school has been provided in You Are Asked to Witness (1996), an excellent Stó:lo history edited by Keith Thor Carlson:
Communicating with girls: half hour of kneeling. Playing in school: kneeling down. Using tobacco: public reprimand. Late: confinement. Talking Indian: work during recess. Laziness: work during recess. Fighting: extra work. Talking in bed: extra work. Indian dancing: extra work. Playing forbidden games: extra work. Stealing apples: one day’s confinement. Truancy: confinement and humiliation. Breaking plaster: three lashes. Disturbance in dormitory: a few slaps. Runaway: five strokes of the lash. Breaking into girl’s dorm: expulsion. Setting fire to boys’ dorm: expulsion.
A Haudenausaunee who received his Ph.D. in Personality and Measurement from the University of Western Ontario in 1981, Roland Chrisjohn has worked for 30 years in First Nations education, “suicidology” and family services. His co-authors Sherri Young and Michael Maraun are specialists in Applied Social Psychology and Statistics respectively.
Ernie Crey and journalist Suzanne Fournier examined the devastating impact of large scale efforts to assimilate Aboriginals into mainstream Canadian society in Stolen from our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Rebuilding of Aboriginal Communities (1997), for which they received the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1998.
Crey was the executive director of the fisheries program for the Stórlo Nation and a former president of the United Native Nations. He had also worked as a social worker on behalf of aboriginal families. “As a child, I was forcibly removed from Stó:lo culture by social welfare authorities,” he recalled. “Our family life was shattered after my eight siblings and I were split apart into separate foster homes. We were never again to reunite as a family. In so many ways, the history of my family is the history of aboriginal children in Canada.”
Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey
As Harold Cardinal noted in a revised introduction to The Unjust Society, “The issue of ‘Indian’ and ‘Métis’ identity continues to be a contentious issue in Canada, particularly with regard to changes that have occurred since 1969 in the federal laws governing Indian status and in the self-description employed by the Indian First Nations and the Métis. The Métis, having secured express constitutional changes, have yet to sort out many issues related to how their citizens are to be recognized by the governments of the country.” Recognition for Métis within the Aboriginal movement throughout Canada can also prove problematic.
Métis poet Marilyn Dumont at the Havana Restaurant, Vancouver, 1998
Born in 1955, as a descendant of the Red River freedom fighter Gabriel Dumont, Marilyn Dumont is a writer of Cree/Métis ancestry who has continued the struggle to assert the legitimacy of Métis identity.
In support of Louis Riel, militarist Gabriel Dumont led the Métis during the North-West Rebellion of 1885.
In her prose poem “Leather and Naughahyde,” Dumont has evoked the frictions that can sometimes ensue between “Indians” and “Métis” on a private level:
So, I’m having coffee with this treaty guy from up north and we’re laughing at how crazy “the mooniyaw” are in the city and the conversation comes around to where I’m from, as it does in underground languages, in the oblique way it does to find out someone’s status without actually asking, and knowing this, I say I’m Metis like it’s an apology and he says, “mmh,” like he forgives me, like he’s got a big heart and mine’s pumping diluted blood and his voice has sounded well-fed up till this point, but now it goes thin like he’s across the room taking another look and when he returns he’s got “this look,” that says he’s leather and I’m naughahyde.
Marilyn Dumont has taught Creative Writing at Simon Fraser University and Kwantlen College, and worked in video production. She received the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for A Really Good Brown Girl (1997) and her second collection of poetry, Green Girl Dreams Mountains (2001), received the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry from the Writers Guild of Alberta in 2002.
Born to a single mother in Tonasket, Washington, Mary Lawrence was raised on the Vernon Indian Reserve where her grandmother was a full-blooded Okanagan. After a stint in residential school, she and her siblings were placed in a series of dysfunctional foster homes.
Lawrence studied writing at the En’owkin Centre and first published In Spirit & Song (1992). Her autobiography My People, Myself (1997) recalls how she overcame residential school, addictions, spousal abuse and incarceration in a California correctional facility. “For the troubled young woman who drifted into places that left her depressed and suicidal,” Lawrence wrote, “I honour her.”
Lawrence concludes by recalling her visit to the site of the Cranbrook Indian Residential School with her best friend Marge. “Thoughts and emotions flooded my body as I approached the large door. Then I felt the strongest emotion of all – RAGE! I visualized Sister Lois standing over me with her fat tummy bulging underneath her black habit as she held the strap with her right hand. I could see her round, fat face puffing up and getting ready to swing the strap upon me. I wanted to stomp on her shiny black shoes and run and hide.”
Mary Lawrence with her baby Michelle
The memoir was partially inspired by Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree, Shirley Sterling’s My Name is Seepeetza and Celia Haig Brown’s study of the Kamloops Residential School, Resistance and Renewal.
In 1997 Lawrence was pleased to report she had been able to “abstain from getting involved in addictive relationships with the opposite sex” for the past ten years. As of 2004, Mary Lawrence was living in Westbank, B.C., having raised her two daughters.
A member of the Métis Nation Northwest Territories, Heather Simeney MacLeod is a poet and playwright who came to live in the Thompson-Nicola Valley during the writing and publication of The Burden of Snow (2004). Having spent some of her teenage years in Carcross, she has recalled her northern past in a prose poem:
I know how to use an ulu; I’ve seen an Inukshuk in the midnight sun on the Barrenlands. Ask me anything. I have eaten whitefish, pike and char; I’ve served muskox burgers at the Wildcat Café. I worked the dishpit before the dishwasher went in and wore raingear and rubber boots and watched through the flapping of the screen door as Dave wind-surfed over Back Bay. I fed Tracy’s dog, Bug, scraps from plates, drank coffee with Baileys through my shift and went back in the middle of the night, after the bars closed, for wine, beer, a snack. Ask me anything. I swam nude in Long and Great Slave lakes; had picnics in the cemetery. Ask me anything. I remember The Rec Hall, the worn path between it and The Range; I remember Saturday afternoon jams with Mark Bogan singing Wild Thing (Wild meat, you make a great treat; muskox, I gotta get lots).
The Burden of Snow is a poetry collection in which she traces “bloodlines, trap lines and ancestral migrations” from Ireland, Scotland and Russia to the British Columbia interior.
“I used to live in the Arctic,” MacLeod writes, “a place where my Indian blood found room to live, elliptical it moved within me, solid as snow.” While living in Victoria, MacLeod published a collection of poetry, My Flesh the Sound of Rain (1998).
Heather Simeney MacLeod
Her other books include Shapes of Orion (2000) and The North Woods (2003).
Vera Manuel is a healing workshop coordinator who has also been the manager of Storyteller Theatre in Vancouver. As a playwright Manuel has dramatised accounts of abuse and helplessness in Two Plays About Residential School (1998), a dual publication containing stageplays by herself and Larry Loyie. Her Strength of Indian Women is about four elders preparing for a teenage girl’s coming-of-age feast. In the process, they share secrets of their incarceration in residential schools.
“I didn’t make up the stories told in Strength of Indian Women,” she says. “They came from pictures my mother painted for me with her words, words that helped me see her as a little girl for the first time. Each time we staged a performance of the play, I mourned that little girl who never had a childhood. I mourned the mother missing from my childhood, and I gave thanks for the mother who became my loving teacher in adulthood, who had the courage to say the words I’d longed to hear, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you when you were a little girl.’ Other stories came from feelings attached to the little knowledge I held of my father’s experience as residential school and tuberculosis sanitorium survivor, a world of violence and isolation.”
Vera Manuel is the eldest daughter of George Manuel and Marceline Manuel.
For the twentieth anniversary celebration of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) held in Kamloops in 1989, Vera Manuel prepared a brief history of the UBCIC, an organization that was created in reaction to the White Paper Policy of the federal government “that was intended to do away with Federal responsibility for Indians, transferring jurisdiction for Indians and Indian lands over to the provincial government.”
Vera Manuel’s 18-page history records that the UBCIC was formed in Kamloops after 150 delegates from throughout British Columbia convened at the residential school facility. That formative meeting was chaired by Chief Dennis Alphonse of the Cowichan Nation and Chief Clarence Jules of Kamloops. The first official headquarters for the UBCIC was on the Musqueam Reserve. Vera Manuel’s father joined the UBCIC for two terms as its president after he had resigned from the National Indian Brotherhood.
William Beynon’s name was first recorded in ethnographic literature in January of 1915 when Marius Barbeau wrote, “I am very fortunate in having gotten the services of Wm. Beynon, a very intelligent young half-breed Tsimshian, who proves more useful still in working directly with informants for me. He records myths quite successfully and with good speed.”
It would take another 85 years before Beynon’s writing would appear in book form, fully credited, despite his prolific career sending field notes to Barbeau in Ottawa. The notebooks of William Beynon are often considered among the most significant written records of Northwest Coast potlatching. They were published for the first time in Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon’s 1945 Field Notebooks (2000), edited by Margaret Seguin Anderson and Marjorie Halpin.
Born in 1888 in Victoria to a Welsh father and Tsimshian mother, William Beynon had an extensive career as an ethnographer of Tsimshian, Nisga’a and Gitksan communities. His grandfather on his mother’s side was Clah (aka Arthur Wellington) who taught the missionary William Duncan how to speak Tsimshian in 1857 and who has been credited with saving Duncan’s life when he was held at gunpoint by the highest ranking chief of the Tsimshian.
Schooled in Victoria, William Beynon was the only one of six brothers who learned to speak Tsimshian from his mother. He did not finish the equivalent of high school. After working for the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Department of Public Works, he went to Port Simpson for the funeral of his uncle, Albert Wellington, in 1913, and decided to stay among his mother’s people.
In the 1920s, Beynon began sending his field notes to Barbeau in Ottawa. Considered the founder of folklore studies in Canada, Charles Marius Barbeau was a native of the Beauce region south of Quebec City who first came to British Columbia in 1914. He later played a significant role in the “discovery” of Emily Carr by the fine arts establishment in Ontario. Although Barbeau incorrectly theorized that totem poles were only erected after contact with Europeans, he was one of the first ethnographers to attempt to document the accomplishments of individual Haida artists.
William Beynon
By 1948, Barbeau was paying Beynon $35 per notebook. Beynon otherwise supported himself by working in the fishing and canning industries of the north Pacific coast. In 1945 Beynon observed, and participated in, two weeks of masked dramatizations and potlatching at the Gitksan village of Gitsegukla, where the focus of the ceremonies was the raising of five totem poles, four by Houses of the Gisgahest (Fireweed) crest group and one by a House of the Laxsel (Frog) crest group.
By the time he died in 1958, Beynon had sent approximately 54 notebooks to Ontario between 1929 and 1956. The notebooks from 1945 were later edited by Margaret Seguin Anderson and Marjorie Halpin. In reference to the gathering at Gitsegukla they wrote, “We are left with a deep appreciation not only for the immense amount of work done by Beynon, but also for the profound debt owed to the elders of Gitsegukla, who saw so clearly that their ways are the continuing strength of their people and who, in 1945, brought the young people of their village from reluctant acquiescence in these events to a deeper awareness and celebration of their identity and heritage.”
“The best ship you can jump on is friendship.”—PETER JOHN
Born on July 20, 1925, in the Carrier village of Sheraton on Burns Lake, located about 25 kilometres east of the town of Burns Lake, Peter John told the story of his life to Burns Lake Secondary School teacher-counsellor Doris Johnson for Highu Yalht’uk / Elders Speak: The Story of Peter John (2000), developed with the assistance of the Burns Lake Band.
The son of a trapper and muleskinner, he was taken to Lejac School east of Fraser Lake in 1935 to learn English. At age twelve, he had to rise every morning at 4 a.m. to milk cows for 45 minutes. “I soon learned there was a benefit to it. Whenever I was hungry, I could drink fresh milk, straight from the cow. I would fill my mouth about a dozen times before my stomach was filled. I never let one cow get away from me without feeding me. I was the healthiest kid in the school! They didn’t know why, and I didn’t tell them.”
Peter John overcame demon alcohol to become a valuable community teacher.
He worked briefly for the CNR before working at sawmills throughout northern B.C. for most of his life. He retired to Burns Lake where he became involved in the B.C. Association of Non-Status Indians (BCANSI) and the Burns Lake Native Development Corporation with George Brown. In the 1970s they persuaded Babine Lake Forest Products to build a sawmill at Sheraton and employ more than 100 Aboriginal workers.
In the late 1970s Peter John changed his life by successfully renouncing alcohol and cigarettes. “I asked God to help me,” he said. “If I hadn’t quit smoking and drinking, I’m sure about it: I wouldn’t be here today. I’d be living on the streets in Prince George or Vancouver or somewhere. I’d be looking in dumpsters for things I could sell to get booze, to get drunk. Believe me, many people that I loved in this life are gone because of cigarettes and alcohol.” To preserve his Aboriginal language, Peter John became increasingly active in the Ymka Déné Language Institute.
Leonard Stephen Marchand became the first Aboriginal from British Columbia to be elected to Parliament in 1968 when he defeated Davie Fulton and became a Liberal MP for Kamloops-Cariboo. (Louis Riel, a Métis, was elected to the federal parliament in 1873 and 1874 but was not allowed to take his seat.)
Marchand became secretary to Jean Chrétien when he was Minister of Indian Affairs and also became the first Aboriginal to serve in the federal cabinet when he was named Minister for Small Business by Prime Minister Trudeau in 1976. The following year he became Minister of Environment and remained in that post until his defeat in the 1979 federal election.
After a stint as head of the Nicola Valley Indian Administration, Marchand became an honorary chief of the Okanagan Nation and a member of the federal Senate in 1984, remaining in office until his retirement in 1997.
Born in Vernon on November 16, 1933, in a family with eight children, Marchand lived on the reserve until age twenty-three. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1959 and the University of Idaho in 1964, having completed a Master’s thesis on B.C. sagebrush. During the 1960s he was employed at the Range Research Station at Kamloops and at the Agricultural Research Station in Smithers.
His co-written memoir entitled Breaking Trail (2000) appeared the year after he received the Order of Canada. Although hardly a Red Power advocate, Marchand, a Skilwh or Okanagan Indian, agreed the term Indian was absurd. “If it were up to me, I’d be called a Déné….” he wrote. “It’s a dignified sounding name; it’s easy to say; a lot of Canadians already recognize it; and it just means ‘people’ or ‘person,’ depending on how many you’re talking about. Maybe a generation or two from now, we Indians will have found a name for ourselves that we can feel good about.”
Len Marchand
In 2004, Marie Clements received the Canada-Japan Literary Award for her play Burning Vision (2003), which was also nominated for six Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. Burning Vision is an impressionistic drama about Aboriginal miners in the Northwest Territories who were told they were digging for a substance to cure cancer, but instead were helping to build the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1930, Gilbert and Charles LaBine staked a claim for high-grade pitchblende near Cameron Bay on Great Bear Lake, in the Northwest Territories. When this Eldorado claim began extraction procedures, Déné men were hired to transport the ore and ferry it to Fort McMurray. In 1941, the U.S. government ordered eight tons of uranium from Eldorado for military research purposes. In 1942, the year the Canadian government bought control of the mine, the U.S. government ordered 60 tons of Port Radium ore. The first atomic bomb was exploded in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
In 1960, the first Déné miner died of cancer in connection with the Eldorado minesite. As Burning Vision reveals, it was not until 1999 that the federal government signed a commitment to clean up and contain the Port Radium mine site, although a Canadian government publication had issued warnings about the health hazards of high-grade radioactive ores in 1931. Clements shows how race played a role in the miners’ deaths.
Marie Clements was born in 1962. She founded Urban Ink Productions, a Vancouver-based Aboriginal and multi-cultural production company that creates and produces Aboriginal works of theatre, music, film and video. As a Métis performer and playwright, she has explored the politics of race, gender and class in Age of Iron, produced at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver and published within DraMétis: Three Métis Plays (2001).
Clements’ surrealistic play The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2005) is another politicized reconstruction of the past, this time pertaining to a 30-year-old murder case involving female victims of violence on Vancouver’s Skid Row. After several women are found dead, all with high blood-alcohol readings, and all last seen with Gilbert Paul Jordan, a low-lifer known for his associations with primarily middle-aged Aboriginal women, a coroner lists these deaths as “unnatural and accidental.”
In the fall of 1900, young linguist John Swanton (1873–1958) took the steamer Princess Louise north from Victoria towards Haida Gwaii and received his first Haida lessons on board from master carver Daxhiigang, known in English as Charlie Edenshaw (1839–1920). Swanton’s way was charted by his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, who understood the need to document Haida culture in an era when the overall Haida population was estimated to consist of perhaps only one thousand people.
John Swanton arrived in Haida country from Harvard when the Haida were being ravaged by European diseases and assimilated by the missionaries. More than 90 percent of Haida villages were abandoned. When Swanton found approximately 700 Haida in the mission villages of Skidegate and Masset, he hired a teacher, guide and assistant named Henry Moody to help him accurately record Haida stories and oral history from an hereditary chief named Sghiidagits. Swanton paid his co-worker Moody $1.50 per day, six full days a week.
Swanton also paid poets, singers and storytellers 20 cents an hour and budgeted $35 per month, a princely sum at the time, for this purpose. “If we compare these rates to Swan ton’s own workload and salary,” writes editor Robert Bringhurst, “we will find that he was paying his Haida colleagues pretty much the same hourly rate he was making himself.”
During the year that followed, Swanton transcribed the oral work of Haida poets, most notably Skaay or Skaii (John Sky) and Ghandl (Walter McGregor), the so-called “Homer” of Haida literature, who was born around 1851 on the northwest coast of Moresby Island. The other three main storytellers were Kingagwaaw, Haayas and Kilxhawgins.
Bringhurst’s first critical explorations of Swanton’s work in his effort to revive the stories of Skaay, Ghandl and their Haida contemporaries was A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999).
He then went on to compile a series of stories in Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (2001). This volume features stories told by Ghandl, a Haida man in his fifties, blinded by either smallpox or measles. The name Ghandl means creek or fresh water. A missionary christened him Walter McGregor.
Swanton and Ghandl spent approximately a month painstakingly dictating and recording poetry. “Why Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaana of Qaysun has not also been adopted with full honours into the polylingual canon of North American literary history I do not know,” writes Bringhurst. “He seems to me a great deal more accomplished—and therefore far more worthy of celebration as a literary ancestor—than any Canadian poet or novelist who was writing in English or French during his time.”
Ghandl’s style was rhetorical and unfettered by overt cleverness, as evidenced by the outset of “The Way the Weather Chose to Be Born,” the opening selection in Nine Visits to the Mythworld. Bringhurst’s version begins:
There was a child of good family, they say, / at Swiftcurrent Creek. / And her father had one of his slaves / constantly watching her. / She said to the slave, / “Tell that one I want to make love to him.” / The day after that, / when she was out of doors with the slave, / she asked if he’d said / what she told him to say.
And the slave said to the young woman, / “He says he’s afraid of your father.” / But the slave had spoken to no one. / The slave was in love with her, they say. / When she had decided on somebody else, / she gave the slave the same instructions. / He failed again to deliver the message. / He told her again / that the man was afraid of her father.
After sending the message to each of her father’s ten nephews, / the one of good family made love with the slave, they say. / And her father found out what had happened. / So they all moved away from her, they say. / And no one but her youngest uncle’s wife / left food for her, they say.
She went digging for shellfish, they say. / After a while, she dug up a cockleshell. / The cry of a child came from inside it….
The third volume of Robert Bringhurst’s homage to Haida storytellers and tribal historians is Being in Being: The Collected Works of a Master Haida Mythteller SKAAY of the Qquuna Qiighawaay (2001), again based on the original ethnographic work by linguist John Swanton.
Born in the village of Qquuna around 1827, Skaay devoted his life to telling stories after he was crippled by an injury in middle age. Also known as John Sky, he lived most of his adult years in the village of Ttanuu. Both SKAAY and the other formidable Haida storyteller Ghandl belonged to the Eagle side of the Haida, as opposed to the Raven side.
With a Haida intermediary who spoke English, Skaay dictated the story of his maternal lineage to Swanton at Skidegate in October of 1900, as well as the most extensive version of the Raven story ever recorded on the Northwest Coast. Swanton also transcribed what Bringhurst calls “the largest and most complex literary work in any Native Canadian language,” an epic poem called The Qquuna Cycle, with 5,500 lines. It begins:
There was one of good family, they say. / She was a woman, they say. / They wove the down of blue falcons / into her dancing blanket, they say. / Her father loved her, they say.
She had two brothers: / one who was grown / and one who was younger than she. / And they came to dance at her father’s town, they say, / in ten canoes, / and they danced, they say, / and then they sat waiting, they tell me.
And someone—her father’s head servant, they say— / went out and asked them, / “Why are these canoes here?”
“These canoes are here for the headman’s daughter.” / The headman answered them, they tell me: / “Better look for other water.” / They left in tears they say.
They came to dance again on the following day, / in ten canoes, they say, / and again they were questioned, they say. / “Why are these canoes here?”
“These canoes are here for the headman’s daughter.” / And then he refused them again, / and they went away weeping….
According to Bringhurst, who estimates Skaay’s work amounts to 15 percent of Swanton’s Haida opus, Europeans had been visiting Haida Gwaii for more than a century prior to Swanton’s visit, but he was the first outsider to request stories told in Haida. “No outsider asked again for seven decades after that,” Bringhurst claims, “and by then there was no one alive who had actually known the pre-colonial Haida world.”
Among Swanton’s Pacific Northwest publications are Haida Texts and Myths, Skidegate Dialect (1905), Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida (1905), Haida Texts–Masset Dialect (1908), Social Conditions, Beliefs, and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians (1908), Tlingit Myths and Texts (1909), Haida Songs (1912) and The Indian Tribes of North America (1952). His unpublished southern Haida manuscripts were brought to the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia in 1942. A 1940 festschrift to honour his career excludes mention of his early work in B.C.
“Don’t let anyone steal a good story you remember. Write it down. The written word strengthens our oral tradition. “—LARRY LOYIE
Larry Loyie was born in Slave Lake, Alberta, where he spent his early years living a traditional Cree life. At the age of ten he was placed in St. Bernard’s Mission residential school in Grouard, Alberta.
“We had no more family life,” he recalled, “and we weren’t allowed to speak our language. Mostly what I learned there was how to pray and how to work and how to sing Latin at Mass. We got to go home once every school year, though many children stayed the whole year. It was basically worse than jail. Everything that was natural to a small child was a sin and we got punished for it.
“I didn’t know about sin and heaven and hell until I got there, and then I was always getting beatings from the nuns. I ran away twice and both times I was caught and severely beaten. After that I started reading everything I could get hold of. There were classics like Huckleberry Finn but there was exactly nothing about Native people. We were punished for the fact that hundreds of years earlier Jesuits had been killed by Native people. I lost all feeling about my Native heritage.”
The writing projects of Constance Brissenden and Larry Loyie include AIDS education.
At fourteen, Loyie left school to work on farms and in logging camps. At eighteen, he joined the Canadian Forces, living in Europe before returning to work in northern British Columbia and Alberta. “Through it all,” he says, “the longing for the traditional First Nations way of life I experienced as a child always stayed with me.”
Many years later, in Vancouver, he went to the Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings to upgrade his education and writing skills, and to learn typing. In 1991, he travelled around British Columbia to interview Native teachers for two radio documentaries. The following year he co-edited an anthology for novice writers called The Wind Cannot Read (1992), having travelled across Canada to collect material for a 1,000-page manuscript.
One of his writing instructors, Constance Brissenden, quickly realized she was learning as much from him as he was learning from her. Their partnership and mutual concerns led to the creation of a new writers group called Living Traditions, in which Loyie blossomed as an educator and as an author of several plays, short stories and a children’s story dealing with residential schools, native traditions and literacy.
Loyie’s first play called Ora Pro Nobis (Pray for Us) (1998) was based on his residential school years. It was first staged in Vancouver and five federal B.C. prisons in 1994, then at the Weesageechak Festival in Toronto in 1995. Excerpts from the play are included in Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1979–2000 (Heard Museum, 2000).
Loyie wrote two more plays: Fifty Years Credit, based on the media’s view of First Nations people, performed at Carnegie Community Centre in 1998; and No Way to Say Goodbye, a commission for the Aboriginal AIDS Conference in northern Alberta in 1999. All of his plays have benefited from his association with Brissenden.
For Loyie’s autobiographical children’s book, As Long as the Rivers Flow (2003), Loyie and Brissenden toured Canada to present more than 90 readings. As a result of Loyie’s voice ailment, Brissenden reads the text; Loyie responds to questions. This poignant memoir recalls Loyie’s last summer of freedom before he was forced to attend residential school.
It was Cree artist George Littlechild who suggested Loyie write the story for children. “I told George about the truck that picked us up and took us away,” Loyie says. “The sides were so high, we could only see the sky.”
Illustrated by First Nations artist Heather Holmlund, As Long as the Rivers Flow reflects Loyie’s perspective at age nine as he cares for an abandoned owl, watches his grandmother make moccasins, helps the family prepare for a hunting trip and receives a new name, Oskiniko—meaning Young Man—a name he still uses. Children are fascinated by the story of Larry’s tiny grandmother, Bella Twin, who reputedly shot the biggest grizzly bear in North America. First Nations communities are using the book in classrooms, at conferences, and for healing purposes. Some listeners are moved to tears.
In mid-September of 2003, Loyie was singled out for an honour dance at the Niagara Native Friendship Centre in St. Catherine’s where more than two hundred people lined up to shake hands with the writers, then gathered behind them as they danced slowly around the arbour while drummers sang a special song. “Being recognized by my own people this way,” says Loyie, “was the greatest honour I could have.”
Loyie received a 2001 Canada Post Literacy Award for Individual Achievement and the 2003 Norma Fleck Award for As Long as the Rivers Flow. His essay on First Nations people of the Lower Mainland appears in The Greater Vancouver Book, edited by Chuck Davis. Brissenden and Loyie have also co-written an AIDS educational story, The Gathering Tree (2005), illustrated by Heather Holmlund, in which a 21-year-old athlete returns for an Aboriginal gathering and educates his young cousin about his illness.
Chief Earl Maquinna George entered the University of Victoria at the age of sixty-four and earned a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Geography. His memoir Living On The Edge: Nuu-chah-nulth History from an Ahousaht Chief’s Perspective (2003) was written from his Master’s thesis to inform his children, grandchildren and all the people of Ahousaht about their past.
In Living on the Edge, he provides a detailed account of the whale hunt, beginning with the carving of the giant whaling canoe (over 40 feet long and six feet wide) from a special cedar log that has its own history. He also gives a step-by-step description of the ritual killing of the whale, and ends with the dividing up and sharing of the meat afterwards.
The section “The Gift of Salmon” records the special care taken in ensuring the continuing fertility of the salmon stock. The book concludes with Maquinna’s thoughts about the ongoing treaty process. Since many issues in the treaty process relate to ownership, he explains the word HaHuulhi: “It is not ownership in the white sense; it is a river or other place that is shared by all Nuu-chah-nulth-people, with a caretaker being hereditary chief of each site or village.” It is now a concept recognized in the negotiations, and has been written into the framework as one of the key issues.
Maquinna was taught Christianity during his early years at a United Church residential school where he remained full time because his mother died when he was young and his father worked as a fisherman. His education at school was complemented by traditional training from the elders of the Ahousaht First Nation, of which he is an hereditary chief. He also learned fishing and sea-going skills, worked with the Coast Guard, and earned his skipper’s papers. A stint as a logger gave him first-hand knowledge of the damage caused by logging companies.
Earl Maquinna George
Gloria Nahanee (second from right, back row) and family
When Gloria Nahanee attended St. Paul’s Indian Day School in the 1950s, she was taught Scottish, Irish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Spanish and square dances by nuns, but there was no Aboriginal dancing at the school. When the Squamish Nation held their powwows in the 1940s and 1950s, lasting up to ten days, she sometimes ran away and hid at the other end of the field.
“I thought I had to dance,” she recalls in Spirit of Powwow (2003). “The regalia and the noise scared me at first. But I can remember the stage where our ancestors Uncle Domanic Charlie and August Jack did the Squamish songs and dances.”
Powwows at Squamish disappeared for 30 years after 1958. It was not until Nahanee’s own daughter began spontaneously to dance at age six that she began to explore the traditional dances of her own culture. Nahanee travelled to powwows for two years and co-founded the Squamish Nation Dancers in 1987, then organized a revival of the Squamish powwow in 1988.
“The old spirits told me they wanted the powwow revived,” she says, “and that our young people would carry this on.” The annual Squamish powwow is now a three-day event that attracts some two hundred dancers and an audience of up to four thousand. Spirit of Powwow is Nahanee’s introduction to, and celebration of, powwow dances and traditions, co-written with Kay Johnston.
The son of Aboriginal rights activist Chief Philip Paul, co-founder of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and the National Native Brotherhood, Philip Kevin Paul grew up on the Saanich Peninsula where he still lives.
Paul received a B.A. from the University of Victoria. Prior to the publication of Taking the Names Down from the Hill (2003), winner of the Dorothy Livesay Prize for best book of poetry by a B.C. author, his writing appeared in various anthologies. Much of it concerns death and family relations, such as his short poem “Patient.”
I heal my mother / by sitting in this room / with her.
I heal her / in the prayer / of three slow cups of tea.
In the hospital / for two months, / she wants just / small details / about our house.
We close our eyes / and see each room / one by one.
Paul accepted his Livesay Prize on May 1, 2004, at Victoria’s Government House with a speech in English and his traditional language Sencoten. He described his debut collection as an elegy to Saanich and to his parents, while thanking his adopted “poetry parents” Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier.
As an amateur lightweight boxer, he was once ranked fifth in B.C. and 13th in Canada. Paul has worked as an instructor at the Saanich Adult Education Centre and he lives on his Aboriginal homeland in Brentwood Bay.
Kevin Philip Paul
As a mother and daughter team, Maria Bolanz and Gloria C. Williams have examined the significance of Tlingit carvings of interior house posts, portal entrances and free standing totem poles with their crests in Tlingit Art: Totem Poles & Art of the Alaskan Indians (2003). Although the Tlingit are primarily residents of Alaska, the Taku Tlingit (Inland Tlingit) are based in Atlin, B.C.
Maria Bolanz
Maria Bolanz is a descendant of the Blackfoot Nation and, through marriage to a Tlingit, she became a member of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation in Canada and a member of Cook Inlet Regional Corporation in Alaska. She received a B.A. from Western College in Oxford, Ohio, and an MA from Stanford University. After retirement, she secured a degree in anthropology from the University of Alaska.
Her daughter Gloria Williams is a member of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation in Canada, the Tlingit/Haida Tribe in southeast Alaska and the Cook Inlet Regional Corporation (a corporation that was formed in relation to the Indian land claims settlements made in Alaska). After studying at the University of Alaska, she has worked at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage.
The first autobiographical portrayal of a Kwakwaka’wakw matriarch, Paddling to Where I Stand, Agnes Alfred, Qwiqwasutinuxw Noblewoman (2004), recalls the life and times of Agnes Alfred (1890?-1992), a storyteller of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation who was jailed for her participation in a potlatch in 1922. It was translated and transcribed by her granddaughter, Daisy Sewid-Smith, along with Martine J. Reid.
Her extraordinary lifespan and her status as a Qwiqwasutinuxw noblewoman meant she had access to a vast store of traditional knowledge, especially in her role as a mediator between the natural-human-profane realm and the supernatural-sacred realm. Agnes Alfred did not speak English and she had no Western education, but she had skills in remembering and storytelling, as well as memorizing myths, chants and historical accounts.
The birth of Agnes Alfred was recorded on a rock on Village Island. She converted to Christianity as a child, but later took upon herself the task of passing her traditional knowledge to younger generations. In a chapter entitled “Myth Time,” for instance, she tells the story of the girl who was dragged into the underworld to live among the Halibut people. Years later this girl reaches for one of her father’s halibut hooks, and so returns to her parents.
After French-born Martine Reid came to UBC as a Ph.D. student in 1975, she began to participate in a program to preserve the heritage of Aboriginal peoples—and that led her to “Mrs. Alfred.” When Reid met Agnes Alfred, she was a widow of about eighty, but still independent and living alone in the big house built by her husband for her and their thirteen children in Alert Bay. It was her habit during the fall and winter to make a cycle of pilgrimages to visit her many relatives and descendants in Campbell River and elsewhere.
Reid would accompany Agnes Alfred on her annual visits, and thus she met Daisy Sewid-Smith, a Kwak’wala language instructor at the University of Victoria. The three women eventually formed a partnership—with Mrs. Alfred dictating her memoirs, Daisy Sewid-Smith acting as translator, and Martine Reid transcribing and editing.
Agnes Alfred’s voice—by turns authoritative, humorous, poetic, and gnomic—rings out clearly.
“Poor me; I was married at such a young age…. They sailed away with me right away, and they brought me to this logging camp…. I had not even menstruated yet. I was perhaps only twelve or thirteen. I was really young. I was married for quite some time before I menstruated.”
The chapter entitled “Becoming a Woman” describes the onset of menstruation and an elaborate ritual that marked Alfred’s passage into womanhood. She was secluded from the rest of her household for twelve days, concealed by a curtain in a corner of a room. During this time, she sat (wearing the hat reserved for nobility), and was cared for by her mother and the tribal elders.
Agnes Alfred
E. Richard Atleo, whose Nuu-chah-nulth name is Umeek, is a hereditary chief who teaches in the First Nations Studies Department at Malaspina University College. He has served as co-chair of the Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound. In Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview (2004), he introduces an ontology drawn from Nuu-chah-nulth origin stories. Tsawalk basically means “one” and it encapsulates an understanding of the universe as an integrated and orderly whole, expressed as “heshook-ish tsawalk”—everything is one. Chapters include Tsawalk: Origin Tales and the Nature of Reality & How Son of Raven Captured the Day; Utl-cla He-xwa: The Struggle for Balance; Xaata-tsa Thluch-ha: Getting Married; Muu Quis-hai-cheelth: One Who Transforms; Suh-tcha Thlawk-thlawk-qua: A Humble Petition; Nuu-Pooh Tloo-utl-ish-sum: Remember Me; Utl-Pooh Heshook-ish Tsawalk: Everything Is One.
E. Richaed Atleo, Ahousat, mid-1970s
A member of the N’laka’pamux Nation, formerly known as the Thompson people of the Spuzzum area, Chris Bose is a musician and artist who was born in Merritt, B.C., on March 27, 1970. Bose is a self-described very tattooed ex-vegetarian who does not drink alcohol, smoke or do drugs. For awhile, he quit drinking coffee when a friend told him Aboriginal people around the world are being displaced from their lands by coffee growers.
Chris Bose
He has been a cobbler, a radio DJ, a bookstore clerk, president of the student body at the local University College, a farm labourer, and homeless. He has lived in Stockholm, Sweden, and Austin, Texas. His creative non-fiction narrative, also described as a novel, is Somewhere in this Inferno (2004). It reflects the struggles of a young man who is troubled by existential questions and cultural adaptation. Bose’s writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, he has released several CDs of his music, and he is currently “surviving on grants, goodwill and urban hunting and gathering.”
A Shuswap member of the North Thompson Indian Band, Harold Eustache revisited a traditional story for his first novel Shuswap Journey (2004) about the abduction of Shuswap women by a tribe from over the Rocky Mountains during the period of early colonization. A chief’s daughter relates her predicament as her father looks for her in the Rockies. The idea for the story was passed along from Eustache’s great-great aunt. Augusta Tappage confirmed such abductions occurred in her memoir The Days of Augusta (1973).
Harold Eustache
Joseph O’Connor (b. 1948), Natasha Netschay Davies (b. 1971) and Lloyd Dolha (b. 1960) co-edited an anthology of First Nations Drum newspaper articles entitled Smoke Signals from the Heart (2004).
For the 800,000 Aboriginal people in Canada, First Nations Drum has been a vital link. During its 14 years as a national newspaper, First Nations Drum has run many profiles on Aboriginal role models such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, actor Adam Beach, hockey player Jordin Tootoo, artists Bill Reid and Robert Davidson, and guitarist-songwriter Robbie Robertson. A cover story in 2000 featured the missing women of Downtown Eastside—many of whom are Aboriginal—as a follow-up to the Drum’s 1997 coverage of the issue. Another cover design featured Premier Gordon Campbell with a Hitler moustache and Gestapo outfit, clutching Mein Referendum, in reference to the controversial public vote in response to Aboriginal land claims in B.C.
Smoke Signals from the Heart also recalls the confrontations at Oka, Ipperwash and Gustafsen Lake, the 1997 Delgamuukw decision, elders, wild horses, Mohawk Ironworkers, the Lubicon Cree’s boycott of the Calgary Olympics, powwows, Aboriginal gangs and the KKK in the Prairies. B.C. women profiled include Kootenay Chief Sophie Pierre, dancer and model Theresa Ducharme, filmmaker Barb Cranmer and psychotherapist Margaret Vickers—who hosted the first art exhibit by her brother Roy Henry Vickers.
A member of the Wolf Clan from the House of Wii Kaax, M. Jane Smith is a traditional Gitxsan storyteller and Simalgax language teacher who learned her narrative skills as a child while spending summers in a fish camp on the Skeena River. During the day, her grandmother would tell her stories about the trickster Raven and the Naxnok bird; in the evenings, when her uncles and grandfather returned home, she would hear more stories. “That is when the confidence was instilled in me,” she says.
Although Smith was initially uncomfortable with the responsibility of recording oral histories, elders encouraged her, explaining the need for the stories to be preserved and treasured like a chief’s regalia. “When you tell a story you credit your sources,” says Smith, “and the listeners realize they are hearing a story that goes all the way into the beginning of time.” Returning the Feathers: Five Gitxsan Stories (2004), reflects her respect for her elders, with the title referring to lost feathers from a chief’s headdress.
M. Jane Smith
“I used to have a scientific mind,” Smith says, “and thought [the stories] could never have happened… but when I took them and believed them and applied them to my life, I knew I was a storyteller. I come from storytellers and I want it said of me, she told a good story.”
Returning the Feathers is illustrated by Gitxsan artist Ken Mowatt, an instructor of silkscreening and carving at the ’Ksan School in Hazelton. He was also raised in Gitanmaaxs and is a member of the House of Djokaslee.
A “rememberer” among the Haisla, Louise Barbetti has worked with many linguists and anthropologists over the decades. In that process she has co-authored, edited and contributed to We are our History – A Celebration of our Haisla Heritage (2005).
In the preface to her dictated version of the “Haisla Nuyem,” the tribal traditional law, Barbetti writes, “My name is Amais Adec’. That’s my feast name. My retirement name is Ajigis. I was born on this reserve almost 70 years ago. This was a time when the Haisla people, young and old, were still governed by the nuyem, our law. I grew up listening to my great grandmother and, later, my mother teaching us the nuyem through the old stories. Nusi antlanuxw waxganutlanuxw; they told us the stories every night. Our nuyem is still important. Our young people need to learn our law, our nuyem. That’s the reason I’m putting it down. The nuyem will keep us as strong and capable as our ancestors were.”
Born in 1936 at Kitamaat Village, mujilh (chieftainess) Louise Barbetti, sister of chief C’esi, has also been a leader in the movement to preserve the Kitlope region.
Louise Barbetti
Commissioned by Western Canada Theatre and the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society, Tomson Highway’s play Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout (2005) is set in British Columbia during the visit of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier to the Thompson River Valley in August of 1910. The central characters are four women, representing the four seasons, preparing a feast for Laurier’s visit. Tomson Highway is not generally associated with B.C., but he came to Kamloops to help produce the cabaret style play that premiered with an Aboriginal cast in 2004. It was the subject of an hour-long Bravo! television documentary in 2004: Tomson Highway Gets His Trout, from Getaway Films, directed by Tom Shandel, who has described Highway’s work as being “at once light-hearted burlesque and angry agitprop.”
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout was produced to mark the importance of a treatise written in 1910 by James Teit, on behalf of 14 chiefs of the Thompson River basin, to assert their collective rights to land and resources.
Written in the spirit of Shuswap, a “Trickster language,” Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout was mounted in the style of Highway’s preceding play Rose (2004), the third instalment of his “rez” cycle set on the Wasaychigan Hill Reserve, the same venue for The Rez Sisters (1986) and its sequel Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989). His production notes for Rose advise, “Think of the exercise as just a bunch of kids, the kind you were when you were five years old, playing in and with a chest filled with old clothes and objects….
“And last, the old—and very tiresome—question: ‘should only native actors have the right to play native roles?’ (Which to me has always sounded a lot like: ‘should only Italian actors have the right to play Italian roles?’ Or: ‘Thought Police productions presents an all-German-cast in Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht. Only Germans need apply.’)”
Janet Michael and Lisa Dahling await Prime Minister Laurier in the Belfry Theatre production of Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, by Tomson Highway, 2005.
To make clear his feelings on the issue of “Aborginals Only” theatre, Highway has pleaded “in my Cree heart of hearts” for an end to political correctness, if, for no other reason, than it will enable him to have his plays produced more often.
The eleventh of twelve children, Tomson Highway was born in a tent near Maria Lake, near Brochet, Manitoba, in 1951. After six years in his nomadic Cree family, he attended a residential school in The Pas where his introduction to music escalated into ambitions to become a concert pianist. He composed music for Aboriginal theatres and festivals, joined the Native Earth Performing Arts Company in Toronto in 1984, and worked with his brother René, a dancer and choreographer. Both brothers were openly gay. Tomson Highway’s only novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), is based on events that led to his brother Rene’s death of AIDS.
Twice a recipient of the Dora Mavor Moore Award, Highway is Canada’s best-known Aboriginal playwright and the first Aboriginal writer to receive the Order of Canada.
In 1910, Chief Louis Xlexlexken of Kamloops addressed Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, reciting a speech written by James Teit. Here are some of his words:
“We welcome you here, and we are glad we have met you in our country. We want you to be interested in us, and to understand more fully the conditions under which we live. When the seme7uw’i, the Whites, first came among us there were only Indians here. They found the people of each tribe supreme in their own territory, and having tribal boundaries known and recognized by all. The country of each tribe was just the same as a very large farm or ranch (belonging to all the people of the tribe)….
“They [government officials sent by James Douglas] said that a very large reservation would be staked off for us [southern Interior tribes] and the tribal lands outside this reservation the government would buy from us for white settlement. They let us think this would be done soon, and meanwhile, until this reserve was set apart, and our lands settled for, they assured us that we would have perfect freedom of travelling and camping and the same liberties as from time immemorial to hunt, fish and gather our food supplies wherever we desired; also that all trails, land, water, timber, etc., would be as free of access to us as formerly.
“Our Chiefs were agreeable to these propositions, so we waited for treaties to be made, and everything settled.”
James Teit (centre, back row) accompanied [back row] Chiefs Eli Larou (Shuswap), John Tetlenista (Thompson), Thomas Adolph (Lillooet), William Pascal (Lillooet) and [front row] Chiefs James Raitasket(Lillooet), Johnny Chilitsa (Okanagan), Paul David (Kootenai) and Basil David (Shuswap) to Ottawa in 1916.
