Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past (26 page)

Raven has never left this place, but sometimes it feels like she has been negligent, maybe even a little dense. Raven shaped us; we are built for transformation. Our stories prepare us for it. Find freedom in the context you inherit—every context is different: discover consequences and change from within, that is the challenge. Still, there is horror in having had change foisted upon you from outside. Raven did not prepare us for the past 150 years. She must have fallen asleep some time around the first smallpox epidemic, when the Tsleil Watuth Nation nearly perished, and I am not sure she ever woke up.

The halls of this institution are empty. The bright white fluorescent bulbs that dot the ceiling are hidden behind great long light fixtures dimming its length. Not unlike the dimness of a longhouse, but it doesn't feel the same. The dimness of the hallway isn't brightened by a fire in the centre nor warmed by the smell of cedar all around you. There are no electric lights in the longhouse, and so the dimness is natural. The presence of lights coupled with dimness makes the place seem eerie. I trudge down the dim hallway; my small hands clutch a bright white envelope. Generally, letters from “the Queen in right of Canada” are threateningly ensconced in
brown envelopes, but this is from a new government—my own government, the Squamish First Nation government. Its colour is an irony. I received it yesterday, broke into a sweat and a bottle of white wine within five minutes of its receipt. It didn't help. I already knew the contents—even before Canada Post managed to deliver it; Canadian mail is notoriously slow. The television and radio stations were so full of the news that there was no doubt in my mind that this was my government's official letter informing me that “a deal had been brokered.” The Squamish Nation had won the Snauq lawsuit and surrendered any further claim for a fee. The numbers are staggering: $92 million. That is more than triple our total
GNP
, wages and businesses combined.

As I lay in my wine-soaked state, I thought about the future of the Squamish Nation: development dollars, cultural dollars, maybe even language dollars, healing dollars. I had no right to feel this depressed, to want to be this intoxicated, to want to remove myself from this decision, this moment, or this world. I had no right to want to curse the century in which I was born, the political times in which I live, and certainly I had no right to hate the decision makers, my elected officials, for having brokered the deal. In fact, until we vote on it, until we ratify it, it is a deal only in theory. While the wine sloshed its way through the veins in my body to the blood in my brain, pictures of Snauq rolled about. Snauq is now called False Creek. When the Squamish moved there to be closer to the colonial centre, the water was deeper and stretched from the sea to what is now Clark Drive in the east; it covered the current streets from Second Avenue in the south to just below Dunsmuir in the north. There was a sandbar in the middle of it, hence the name Snauq.

I lay on my couch, Russell Wallaces
CD
Tso'kam
blaring in the background—Christ, our songs are sad, even the happy ones. Tears rolled down my face. I joined the ranks of ancestors I was trying not to think about. Wine-soaked and howling out old Hank Williams crying songs, laughing in between, tears sloshing across the laughter lines. The ‘50s. My Ta'ah intervened. Eyes narrowed, she ended the party, cleared out the house, sending all those who had had a little too much to drink home. She
confiscated keys from those who were drunk, making sure only the sober drove the block to the reserve. “None of my children are going to get pinched and end up in hoosegow.”

My brain, addled with the memory, pulled up another drunken soirée, maybe the first one. A group of men gathered around a whisky keg, their children raped by settlers: they drank until they perished. It was our first run at suicide, and I wondered what inspired their descendants to want to participate in the new society in any way, shape, or form. “Find freedom in the context you inherit.” From the shadows Khahtsahlano emerged, eyes dead blind and yet still twinkling, calling out, “Sweetheart, they were so hungry, so thirsty that they drank up almost the whole of Snauq with their dredging machines. They built mills at Yaletown and piled up garbage at the edges of our old supermarket—Snauq. False Creek was so dirty that eventually even the white mans became concerned.” I have seen archival pictures of it. They dumped barrels of toxic chemical waste from sawmills, food waste from restaurants, taverns, and tea houses; thousands of metric tons of human sewage joined the other waste daily.

I was drunk. Drunk enough to apologize for my nation, so much good can come of this … So why the need for wine to stem the rage?

“The magic of the white man is that he can change everything, everywhere. He even changed the food we eat.” Khahtsahlano faced False Creek from the edge of Burrard Inlet, holding his white cane delicately in his hand as he spoke to me. The inlet was almost a mile across at that time, but the dredging and draining of the water shrank it. Even after he died in 1967, the dredging and altering of our homeland was not over. The shoreline is gone; in its place are industries squatting where the sea once was. Lonsdale quay juts out into the tide and elsewhere cemented and land-filled structures occupy the inlet. The sea asparagus that grew in the sand along the shore is gone. There is no more of the camas we once ate. All the berries, medicines, and wild foods are gone. “The womans took care of the food,” he said. And now we go to schools like this one and then go to work in other schools, businesses, in band offices or anyplace that we can, so we can purchase food in modern supermarkets. Khahtsahlano
was about to say something else. “Go away,” I hollered at his picture, and suddenly I was sober.

Snauq is in Musqueam territory, it occurred to me, just across the inlet from Tsleil Watuth, but the Squamish were the only ones to occupy it year-round—some say as early as 1821, others 1824, still others peg the date as somewhere around the 1850s. Before that it was a common garden shared by all the friendly tribes in the area. The fish swam there, taking a breather from their ocean playgrounds, ducks gathered, women cultivated camas fields and berries abounded. On the sandbar, Musqueam, Tsleil Watuth, and Squamish women tilled the oyster and clam beds to encourage reproduction. Wild cabbage, mushrooms, and other plants were tilled and hoed as well. Summer after summer the nations gathered to harvest, probably to plan marriages, play a few rounds of that old gambling game
lahal
.

Not long after the first smallpox epidemic all but decimated the Tsleil Watuth people, the Squamish people came down from their river homes where the snow fell deep all winter to establish a permanent home at False Creek. Chief George—Chipkaym—built the big longhouse. Khahtsalanogh was a young man then. His son, Khahtsahlano, was born there. Khahtsahlano grew up and married Swanamia there. Their children were born there.

“Only three duffles' worth,” the skipper of the barge was shouting at the villagers. Swanamia did her best to choke back the tears, fingering each garment, weighing its value, remembering the use of each, and choosing which one to bring and which to leave. Each spoon, handles lovingly carved by Khahtsahlano, each bowl, basket, and bent box had to be evaluated for size and affection. Each one required a decision. Her mind watched her husbands hand sharpening his adze, carving the tops of each piece of cutlery, every bowl and box. She remembered gathering cedar roots, pounding them for hours and weaving each basket. Then she decided to fill as many baskets as the duffles could hold and leave the rest.

Swanamia faced Burrard Inlet—she could not bear to look back. Her son winced. Khahtsahlano sat straight up. Several of the women
suppressed a gasp as they looked back to see that Snauq's longhouses were on fire. The men who set the fires were cheering. Plumes of smoke affirmed that the settlers who kept coming in droves had crowded the Squamish out. This is an immigrant country. Over the next ten days the men stumbled about the Squamish reserve on the north shore, building homes and suppressing a terrible urge to return to Snauq to see the charred remains. Swanamia watched as the men in her house fought for an acceptable response. Some private part of her knew they wanted to grieve, but there is no ceremony to grieve the loss of a village. She had no reference post for this new world where the interests of the immigrants took precedence over the interests of Indigenous residents. She had no way to understand that the new people's right to declare us non-citizens unless we disenfranchised our right to be Squamish was inviolable. The burning of Snauq touched off a history of disentitlement and prohibition that was incomprehensible and impossible for Swanamia to manage.

We tried, though. From Snauq to Whidbey Island and Vancouver Island, from Port Angeles to Seattle, the Squamish along with the Lummi of Washington State operated a ferry system until the Black Ball ferry lines bought it out in the 1930s.

Khahtsahlano's head cocked to one side and he gave his wife a look that said, “No problem, we will think of something,” as the barge carried them out to sea. We were reserved and declared immigrants, children in the eyes of the law, wards of the government to be treated the same as the infirm or the insane. Khahtsahlano determined to fight this insult. It consumed his life. We could not gain citizenship or manage our own affairs unless we relinquished who we were: Squamish, Tsleil Watuth, Musqueam, Cree, or whatever nation we came from. Some of us did disenfranchise. But most of us stayed, stubbornly clinging to our original identity, fighting to participate in the new social order as Squamish.

Khahtsahlano struggled to find ways for us to participate. In 1905, he and a group of stalwart men marched all over the province of British Columbia to create the first modern organization of Aboriginal people. The Allied Tribes mastered colonial law despite prohibition and land
rights to secure and protect their position in this country. He familiarized himself with the colonial relations that Britain had with other countries. He was a serious rememberer who paid attention to the oracy of his past, the changing present, and the possibility of a future story. He stands there in this old photo just a little bent, his eyes exhibiting an endless sadness, handsomely dressed in the finest clothes Swanamia had made for him. A deep hope lingers underneath the sadness, softening the melancholy. In the photograph marking their departure, his son stands in front of him, straight-backed, shoulders squared with that little frown of sweet trepidation on his face, the same frown my sister wears when she is afraid and trying to find her courage. Khahtsahlano and his son faced the future with the same grim determination that the Squamish Nation Band Council now deploys.

The wine grabbed reality, slopped it back and forth across the swaying room that blurred, and my wanders through Snauq were over for another day.

The hallways intervene again; I head for my office, cubby really. I am a
TA
bucking for my masters degree. This is a prestigious institution with a prestigious
MA
program in Indigenous government. I am not a star student, nor a profound teaching assistant. Not much about me seems memorable. I pursue course after course. I comply day after day with research requirements, course requirements, marking requirements, and the odd seminar requirement, but nothing that I do, say, or write seems relevant. I feel absurdly obedient. The result of all this study seems oddly mundane. Did Khahtsahlano ever feel mundane as he trudged about speaking to one family head, then another, talking up the Allied Tribes with Andy Paull? Not likely; at the time he consciously opposed colonial authority. He too studied this new world but with a singular purpose in mind: recreating freedom in the context that I was to inherit. Maybe, while he spoke to his little sweetheart, enumerating each significant non-existent landmark, vegetable patch, berry field, elk warren, duck pond, and fish habitat that had been destroyed by the newcomers, he felt this way. To what end did he tell an eight-year-old of a past bounty that can never again be regained?

Opening the envelope begins to take on the sensation of treasonous behaviour. I set it aside and wonder about the coursework I chose during my school years. I am Squamish, descended from Squamish chieftains—no, that is only partly true. I am descended from chieftains and I have plenty of Squamish relatives, but I married a Sto:loh, so really I am Sto:loh. Identity can be so confusing. For a long time the Tsleil Watuth spoke mainly Squamish—somehow they were considered part of the Squamish Band, despite the fact that they never did amalgamate. It turns out they spoke “Downriver Halkomelem” before the first smallpox killed them, and later many began speaking Squamish. Some have gone back to speaking Halkomelem while others still speak Squamish. I am not sure who we really are collectively and I wonder why I did not choose to study this territory, its history, and the identity changes that this history has wrought on us all. The office closes in on me. The walls crawl toward me, slow and easy, crowding me; I want to run, to reach for another bottle of wine, but this here is the university and I must prepare for class—and there is no wine here, no false relief. I have only my wit, my will, and my sober nightmare. I look up: the same picture of Khahtsahlano and his son that adorns my office wall hangs in my living room at home. I must be obsessed with him. Why have I not noticed this obsession before?

I love this photo of him. I fell in love with the jackets of the two men, so much so that I learned to weave. I wanted to replicate that jacket. Khahtsahlano's jacket was among the first to be made from sheep's wool. His fathers was made of dog and mountain goat hair. Coast Salish women bred a beautiful dog with long and curly hair for this purpose. Every summer the mountain goats left their hillside homes to shed their fur on the lowlands of what is now to be the Sea to Sky Highway. They rubbed their bodies against long thorns, and all the women had to do was collect it, spin the dog and goat together, and weave the clothes. The settlers shot dogs and goats until our dogs were extinct and the goats were an endangered species. The object: force the Natives to purchase Hudsons Bay sheep's wool blankets. The northerners switched to the black and red Hudson's Bay blankets, but we carried on with our weaving, using sheep's wool for a
time; then when cash was scarce we shopped at local second-hand shops or we went without. Swanamia put a lot of love into those jackets. She took the time to trim them with fur, feathers, shells, and fringe. She loved those two men. Some of the women took to knitting the Cowichan sweaters so popular among non-Indigenous people, but I could not choose knitting over weaving. I fell in love with the zigzag weft, the lightning strikes of those jackets, and for a time got lost in the process of weaving until my back gave out.