Memory and the ValleySandra Shields and David Campion

The concrete-and-glass city we know as Vancouver sits in the deltaof the Fraser River Valley on village sites that date back to the time of Mesopotamia

The Fraser River rises in the Rocky Mountains in easternBritish Columbia, then runs 1,400 kilometres in a giant S shape:north, then south, and finally west from the town of Hope to thedelta known as the Lower Mainland. The flood plain along thisstretch of the river is known as the Fraser Valley.

A few years ago we moved to a farm on the side of this val-ley, about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver. The farm’shand-hewn timbers, stone fence and mountain view with nohuman beings in sight, all made us curious about the past—first about the farm itself, and then about the forest that sur-rounds it and the people who had walked these mountainpaths before us.

“My River of Disappointment” is what the fur traderSimon Fraser called the river in 1808; later it was given hisname by his friend, the explorer David Thompson. Fraserdidn’t do much naming. He was travelling with Natives andthey told him what the places were called. The people of thevalley called the river Stó:lo, and their lives were so shaped byit that they called themselves by the same name. The salmonruns were like nothing else in the world. On shore there wereelk and deer, roots, berries and greens in the early spring. In asingle day, the current could propel a canoe the same distanceit would take a week to walk. This land and climate are so gen-erous the people who lived here could spend most of the win-ter in ritual and celebration.

According to archaeology, the story of settlement in theFraser Valley begins ten thousand years ago when the glacierspulled out and the people moved in. In the memory of thosewhose families have lived here through the ensuing 350 gen-erations, the story that begins with Simon Fraser is one ofloss: first there was smallpox, then the land was taken andtheir children seized. For the millions of us who moved hereafter Fraser, the story is one of gain: trees the circumferenceof ten men, rich black soil, ocean views. Throughout the val-ley, these opposing narratives are written in the rocks andflowing in the river.

VancouverVictoria

BRITISHCOLUMBIA

FRASER RIVER

NewWestminster

Stave Lake

Mission

Hope

Sumas Prairie

Sumas MountainChilliwack

NicomenIsland

Fort Langley

Fall 2009 • G E I ST 7 4 • Page 37map: kate reid

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S X W O : Y I M E L H

New WestminsterIn the 1850s, the old Kwantlen villageof Skaiametl was chosen as the locationfor the capital of British Columbiabecause its position on a steep hillsideoverlooking a deep harbour offeredmilitary advantages in case of an attackby the United States. New Westminster,which served as the capital for eightyears (1858–66), sits on the north bankof the Fraser River, 20 kilometres east ofVancouver in what was once denseforest. This is where the Fraser Riversplits into the North Arm, the southernborder of Vancouver, and the SouthArm, the boundary between Richmondand Delta. According to Stó:lo oraltraditions, it was at a New WestminsterMay Day celebration in the 1860s thata promise was made by colonial officials:when lands outside their reserves weresold, British Columbia would receive athird, the Crown would receive a third,and the Stó:lo would receive a quarter ofthe proceeds. Today there are no reservesin New West; the few that were set asidewere taken over by the government inthe early 1900s.

N E W W E S T M I N S T E R

Stó:lo villages stood on opposing banks at the last easy place to cross the water. After that, the riversplit; each arm made its own way to the sea, and the boggy land in between was prime for birds andgreat for cranberries. The village on the south was called Qayqayt (pronounced “Kee Kite”). The oneon the north was named for a great warrior turned to stone whose spirit lived on inside the rock thatstood beside the water. Trees sixty metres high pressed in on the stone, and the forest rose steeply.

These trees were the first to fall in the clear-cut that became Vancouver. Stump City, it was called.Gold had been found during the previous spring, thousands of prospectors had flocked to the mouthof the river and already a miner could buy boots, booze and a shovel in the wooden shanties and tentsbetween the massive cedar roots. The colonel charged with clearing the townsite wrote to the gover-nor and reported incessant rain, half-thawed snow in the woods, thickets so close and thorny theymade trousers into rags, thorns as big and strong as sharks’ teeth. The colonel mourned the loss ofwhat he called “most glorious trees,” and he had a park set aside in a glen adjoining a ravine.

The Europeans in the new capital were enthralled with Queen Victoria, then in the middle of herseventy-year reign. They named the glen Queen’s Park, and on her majesty’s birthday in May 1864,

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the governor threw a party with food and canoe races and five hundred dollars in prize money. Stó:lofamilies from all along the river spent the night in the forest a few kilometres away, and in the morn-ing seven hundred Salish canoes pulled up to the wharf. Speeches were made, presents given. Eachchief got a hat with a golden stripe. Students at St. Mary’s Mission got ties. That was the same yearthat the local newspaper complained about “decent people” being subjected to the “intolerable nui-sance” of having “Indians as next door neighbours.”

Between then and now, smallpox came again, thinning out the young and the weak. The gov-ernment quarantined a nearby island and sent Natives there from up and down the coast. Twoother reserves were set aside: one at Qayqayt, another near Queen’s Park. Canada claimed bothparcels of land early in the twentieth century after the last couple living there died. Theirorphaned daughter in residential school in Kamloops came back to New West, and lived in China-town and married there. She hid her past until one day her grown-up daughter asked the rightquestion. Then the truth came out and her children and grandchildren eventually became againthe Qayqayt First Nation, the only band in the country without land.

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Q W ’ Ó : N T L ’ A N

Fort LangleyWhen the Hudson’s Bay Companybuilt the fort in 1827, 50 kilometresfrom the mouth of the river, theborder between Canada and theUnited States was not yet settled. Thisfirst colonial settlement in what is nowknown as the Lower Mainland wasestablished on the south shore of theFraser River to ensure that the Britishcould claim both sides of the river. AKwantlen chief located his villagenearby to facilitate trade. With thegold rush in the late 1850s, FortLangley’s importance as a shippingand administrative centre was soonusurped. Today, the fort has beenrebuilt and many of the buildings inthe surrounding village have beenrestored, making it a popular touristdestination and filming location for TV

and movies. The main Kwantlenvillage is still here, located on an islandacross a narrow channel from the fort.

F O R T L A N G L E Y

On a sunny November day in 2008, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, his cabinet and the televisioncamera crews walked into the Big House at Fort Langley, where B.C. had been proclaimed a colonyexactly 150 years earlier. These days Fort Langley is a tourist attraction, rebuilt in remembrance of howEuropean settlement began, staffed by men in top hats and women in long dresses who know the price ofa blanket in beaver pelts. Only one original building, a storehouse, remains. Its thick timbers are white-washed inside and out, and tanned hides hang from the ceiling. This is the oldest building in B.C., theyused to say, until it was pointed out that all over the valley archaeologists have unearthed pit houses builtthousands of years ago.

The fort sits here, in Kwantlen territory, because this was the farthest upriver that ocean-goingships could sail. In 1828, the Hudson’s Bay Company put twenty-five men ashore in dense forestarmed with trade goods: blankets, metal tools, rope. Within a year, they had married Stó:lo womenand enmeshed themselves in the network of wealthy families who managed the territory. A Kwantlenchief took ownership of the fort just as Stó:lö families always took ownership of resources like a goodberry patch or a rock that was well situated for fishing. He charged a toll when other tribes came totrade. His daughter married Chief Trader James Yale.

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It was beaver that brought the hbc men—beaver hats were in great demand in Europe—but it wassalmon that kept them here; that and the good growing season. The hbc was a multinational com-pany and the fort became a depot supplying butter to Russians in Alaska, cranberries to gold minersin California, and peas and potatoes to forts in the interior of B.C.—from which furs were carriedback. Then they were pressed tightly together so mice wouldn’t get in during the voyage, and wereshipped to London. The Stó:lo generally couldn’t be bothered to trap beaver, but they were happy totrade salmon. In late summer the river ran so thick with fish that you could almost cross on theirbacks. Barrels of salted salmon made their way to Peru and Australia but most went to Honolulu,where an idyllic bay was being transformed from a few grass huts into a busy port in which whalersand fur traders took on provisions and crew.

No matter how much fish the Stó:lo brought, the hbc men asked for more, and the newcomerscame to be called Xwelítem (pronounced “Whu-lee-tum”), the ones who are always hungry. TheXwelítem named their fort in honour of Thomas Langley, a Hudson’s Bay director who never setfoot in North America. For more than a hundred years, until they returned to their traditional name,the Kwantlen were known as the Langley Indians.

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S X W Ò Y E Q S

Stave LakeThe Stave River flows from its sourcein Garibaldi Provincial Park, downthrough the Coast Mountains and intothe Fraser River near Fort Langley. Itonce provided the Kwantlen peoplewith a route into the mountains to thenorth. The river valley drops rapidlyfrom steep forests into the rollinghillsides east of Mission. Today, theriver is blocked by two dams and thelower river runs free only in its lasttwo kilometres before its confluencewith the Fraser.

S T A V E L A K E

This valley, which cuts north from the Fraser River into the Coast Mountains, has two names, nei-ther of them the ancient one that nobody knows any more. The Kwantlen call it Skyuks: the placewhere everyone died. It was smallpox that took them: the disease passed from settlers to Natives indistant parts of the continent, then travelled along trade routes and arrived in the valley thirty yearsbefore the first white man; and it killed two out of every three people. Skyuks was hit hard. The valleywas abandoned, its name was forgotten and its neighbours knew it only by the tragedy that hadclaimed its people.

Stave is what the Hudson’s Bay men called the forest across the river from their fort. They wentthere to take the white pine, then floated the logs back, cut them into strips, and turned trees intostaves and staves into barrels. They filled the barrels with salmon bought from the Kwantlen, thensalted and sealed and shipped them to the Sandwich Islands. The fort shipped so much salmon thatsoon the stand of white pine, rare so close to the sea, stood no more. Stave was the name the settlersused for the valley they logged, the river they put sawmills along, the waterfall that plunged down to

A note on Halq’eméylem:The language that first named these places is spoken flu-ently by just a handful of elders these days, although manyyounger people are learning it through a language revivalprogram that started in the 1970s and has expanded intoHalq’eméylem programs in schools and evening classes atband offices throughout the valley. First Nations that hadbeen given English names have returned to their ances-tral ones. Halq’eméylem appears on street signs in thetrailer park. With the help of Naxexelhts’i, a Stó:lo cul-tural advisor also known as Sonny McHalsie, I havelabelled the places in this essay with their original namesas well as their more recent English ones.

The Halq’eméylem words with accents are standard-ized Halq’eméylem spellings now in use; the others arethe more colloquial or English-derived spellings that havebeen and continue to be in common use (such asKwantlen as opposed to Qw’ó:ntl’an, and Skyuks asopposed to Sxwóyeqs).

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join the Fraser and the dam built in 1911, one of the first in B.C. Water turned into electricity—itwas a novelty, according to ads in the Fraser Valley Record: a great convenience requiring only the turnof a switch. “Children can do it. Safer than matches, no foul odours, costs less than kerosene, candlesor oil.”

Today the old generating station is a tourist attraction, and downstream three newer power-houses continue to make electricity. Early in the spring, before the snow melts, there is still a timewhen the reservoir drops and the drowned forest comes up for air. Each year for more than a dozenyears now, the Kwantlen have come here when the reservoir is low and walked over mud scoredwith 4x4 tracks to pick up tools laid down thousands of years ago. Carbon dating puts these sitesamong the oldest in Canada. The artisans who shaped these stone and bone tools were well fed ondeer and elk, a dozen kinds of berries, fish most months. The archaeologist Duncan McLaren saysthis was once a well-travelled river valley, a route to the north that gave access to hunting groundsand to patches of high mountain berries that ripen under the summer sun.

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P E K W ’ X E : Y L E S

St. Mary’s MissionMission sits on the north bank of theFraser on a hillside that looks acrossthe valley into the United States. Thetidal bore of the river ends here, ahundred kilometres upriver from thesea. The city takes its name from themission established by an Oblate priesta few years after the gold rush of thelate 1850s. He chose the location for itslack of settlement, colonial or Aboriginal,in his determination to counter boththe sway of the miner’s alcohol and theinfluence of Stó:lo traditions. Todaythe mission and the residential schoolthat operated there for more than ahundred years exist only as foundationsvisible in the well-kept lawns of theFraser River Heritage Park.

S T . M A R Y ’ S M I S S I O N

Five generations of kids passed their childhoods in the mission school atop a bluff in the middle ofthe valley. Instead of waking to mothers’ voices, they woke in dormitories and listened to orders fromOblate fathers who silenced them when they spoke the language of their parents. The Oblates prac-tised a hard-working, love-the-poor Christianity with a sense of theatre—a flair for drama in ritual—shared by the Coast Salish. For about fifty years, many nations travelled to retreats at St. Mary’s,where the high point of the year was the Easter re-enactment of the last days of Jesus. In 1894, thesame year the town formed the Mission City Fruit Growers & Canning Association, a thousand dug-out canoes converged below the bluff, filling the river from shore to shore.

Only the stone foundations of the mission remain today. The bluff has been turned into a parkwith tidy lawns and a complicated past. At the information centre an aerial photograph shows theold school, the barns, the fields, the tennis court and the new school built in the 1960s when theold one was closed—used mostly as dormitories for Native kids from rural reserves who wereattending the high school in town. In Mission, the city that grew up around the corner, lacy

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suburbs stretch into the foothills. The downtown core is rough around the edges, especially on a Fri-day night in the blocks around the bank machines.

Everyone who walks between the carved cedar poles that mark the entrance to the FriendshipCentre on Main Street has been touched by residential school. Imagine the government showing upand taking your five-year-old son away. A mother in despair, a dad in the bar. Pain is something youpass on to your kids. The centre teaches parenting skills and holds weekly wellness workshops.

The bluff originally known as Pekw’xe:yles has a grand view of the river. To the south standsMt. Baker (named for one of Captain George Vancouver’s officers) and to the east lies the moun-tain the settlers call Cheam (“strawberries” in Halq’eméylem)—two peaks that stand like sign-posts orienting those who live in or visit this stretch of the valley. For a few days every summer,thousands come to the bluff to sit in the sun and listen to folk music. In the heat of the day, theyretreat to the shade among the old stone foundations. As the temperature rises, smog piles up andBaker and Cheam disappear into the yellow haze.

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L E Q ’ Á : M É L

Nicomen IslandNicomen Island lies just east ofMission between the communities ofDewdney, named for the early roadbuilder, land speculator and eventuallyMember of Parliament EdgarDewdney, and Deroche, named for theQuébécois mule skinner who swam hisoxen here from across the river inChilliwack in the 1860s and beganpasturing them on the island’s lushgrasslands. The first rural post officein B.C. opened on Nicomen Island inthe early days of the colony, when theriver was a highway and anyone couldhitch a ride on a steam-drivenpaddlewheeler by tying a white flag toa tree. Today, dairy cows grazebetween fields of corn.

N I C O M E N I S L A N D

The men who have fished around Nicomen Island all their lives can recall how, as kids, they couldreach into the river and pull out handfuls of eulachon (pronounced “hooligan”) as the fish fought the cur-rent to get back to their spawning grounds in nearby gravel bars. These skinny flashes of silver were sosaturated with oil they could be lit like candles when dried. They began running in the Fraser River inApril and peaked in May. Nicomen Island is sandwiched between the Fraser River and the first wildstretch of backwater sloughs east of Vancouver. This area, where the slow waters lie snug against themountainside, is a favourite haunt of waterfowl and destination for spawning salmon that brings baldeagles by the hundreds. With the slough on one side and the Fraser on the other, Nicomen Island is vis-ited regularly by men from the city with fishing poles and hip waders; “sporties” the Leq’á:mél fishermencall them. Peace between the two groups is a sometimes uneasy affair. Today, the Fraser River eulachonruns are nothing like they used to be, so low as to be labelled “depressed” by the government workers whoregulate fishing. The salmon are depressed too, and the Native fishermen, sitting in their powerboats,keep close watch on their nets to prevent the circling seals from grabbing the fish before they can.

The area around Nicomen Island is where Halq’eméylem was born; the language spread to

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become the tongue spoken up in the mountains, down in the delta and across the strait in Nanaimo,Chemainus and Cowichan. Cedar plank houses would have stood on the slough side of the island: thewaters here are calmer than those of the river, making the slough ideal for travel, and it was lessexposed to the dangers of raiders from coastal tribes, who came in big war canoes in search of slavesand goods such as the winter’s supply of dried fish. The meadow between the slough and the riveroften flooded in the spring and grew lush and green in the summer. The riches of Semá:th Lake lay ashort paddle away on the south shore of the river. It was a tribal hub—a natural place for familiesfrom up and down the river to get together.

The spring floods became a problem once settlers arrived, built farms and planted fields. Theflood in 1894 put the entire island under water, and the same thing happened again in 1948. Since thenmore dikes have been built, and the riverbank has been stabilized with rip-rap to keep more land fromwashing away. The slough is likewise constrained. People who grew up here in the 1960s rememberwhen the waters of the slough ran fresh and everyone swam in them during the summer. Trumpeterswans still winter here, salmon still spawn, but no one swims in the slough any more.

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S E M Á : T H

Sumas PrairieDuring the last ice age, glaciersretreating from the Fraser Valley leftbehind a shallow lake in the lowlandwest of what is now the city ofChilliwack. The place and the peoplewho lived around this rich ecosystemwere called Semá:th, which refers tothe big level opening of the lake and itssurrounding grasslands, an openingthat extended across what is now theborder between Canada and theUnited States. Nineteenth-centurysettlers named this area Sumas; thelake itself covered four thousandhectares and drained into the FraserRiver; every spring when the Fraserwas in flood, the flow reversed and thelake tripled in size. In the 1920s thelake was drained, and the lake bottomwas turned into farmland andrenamed Sumas Prairie.

S U M A S P R A I R I E

In the summer of 1858, when the men in the survey crew that was dividing Canada from theUnited States got to the lake called Semá:th, they learned just how bad the mosquitoes could be.They camped in the tall grass meadow along the shore. Deer were everywhere, and the men wentout for an hour at dusk and bagged forty ducks. Until June it seemed like a second Eden, but thenthe mosquitoes hatched and the place became a living hell. “We ate them, drank them, breathedthem,” wrote one surveyor. At night they got no rest. The only escape lay in the middle of thelake, because mosquitoes prefer land, so the surveyor sought the hospitality of the people hecalled “wily savages,” those Stó:lo families who, during mosquito season, lived on scaffoldingsbuilt over the shallow waters left behind when the glaciers receded. They moored their cedarcanoes to the scaffolds and climbed up ladders of twisted bark to platforms where they fished, vis-ited, ate and slept in mosquito-free comfort. “A North American Venice,” as the historian KeithCarlson says.

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The survey crew drew their line just south of the lake. Sixty years later, an Abbotsford politi-cian named Honest Abe declared the lake a public nuisance. Another politician named HonestJohn agreed. “It breeds mosquitoes,” they said. They were both farmers who must have imaginedthe wealth of the lake bottom. Rivers were diverted and dikes built. Twice they failed, but finally,after the biggest pump in the commonwealth pumped for a year, the lake was drained, leavingbehind hundreds of hectares of soil. Plows broke ground in June, and the first hops were har-vested in September.

The kids who lived along the vanished shore weren’t the only ones who missed the lake that sum-mer. Salmon couldn’t spawn. For years, huge flocks of ducks landed amid rows of potatoes. Accord-ing to local lore, farmers plowing the marshy edges of their new fields more than a decade later stillhit upon buried sturgeons, giant fish that were still breathing ever so slowly, grey ghosts in the resid-ual murk.

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H O P E

Thousands of gold seekers hurried upriver. Sternwheelers billowed smoke as they struggledagainst the current. Canoes went by—lots of canoes, some manned by Stó:lo guides. Every day moremen arrived bent on digging up every gravel bar they could, with no thought to where the salmonwould spawn. They even dug the land out from under Stó:lo homes. Stories were told of Stó:lowomen raped, of children shot at for target practice. B.C. Governor James Douglas came to keep thepeace, pointed north toward a mountain peak, swept his arm to the west and declared that landreserved for the people of the river.

Today, a gas station stands where miners once bought supplies from the Hudson’s Bay Companyat Fort Hope. Nearby a car dealership operates on the spot where a cluster of longhouses once stood.The salmon-spawning grounds that lie upstream made this large village a popular place to camp.Traffic on the river was heaviest in the summer months, when Coast Salish families from as far awayas Vancouver Island navigated cedar canoes to the steep-walled canyon, where the water was richwith fish and the hot winds could air-dry even the thickest sockeye within a week.

T S ’ Q Ó : L S

HopeHope sits at the top of the FraserValley, surrounded by the peaks of theCascade and Coast Mountains. At thisspot, after surging south through asteep-walled canyon, the Fraser Rivermakes a wide bend to the west andenters the broad flood plain thatextends 160 kilometres to the sea. InJune 1808, the fur trader SimonFraser canoed through here andstopped at a Stó:lo village, where heand his men were fed plenty of salmon,roots and raspberries. Fifty years later,when gold was discovered on the riverabove Hope, the village site became abusy transit point for miners andsupplies. Today it is a quiet town ofseven thousand people, beside the threehighways that lead to the interiorof B.C.

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Traffic through Hope is still heavy during the summer, only it’s not on the river any more but onthe highways that converge here. The riverfront property that was promised to the Chawthil is linedwith expensive houses behind cedar hedges. When a doctor dug his swimming pool he found rem-nants of the ancient village in his backyard. The only reserve in town is a campground on a sliver ofriverbank down the street from the gas station. Here tourists sleep to the sound of rushing water. Ifthey look closely at the far shore on a summer afternoon, they can still see Stó:lo families nettingsalmon at the same spots their families have fished for a very long time.

The award-winning writer Sandra Shields and photographer David Campion have collaborated on many projects, fus-ing text and images in a unique style of storytelling. They are authors of two books, The Company of Others andWhere Fire Speaks (winner of the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize), and many shorter works in Canadian Geo-graphic, Reader’s Digest, Maclean’s, Adbusters, the Globe and Mail and other periodicals. An installation of thework featured here can be seen at the Chilliwack Museum (chilliwack.museum.bc.ca) until November 12, 2009. VisitShields and Campion at fieldnotes.ca. To see their other Geist work, go to geist.com. “Memory and the Valley” is part ofthe Geist Memory Project and is made possible by assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development.