FIRST NATIONS
A LITTLE GIRL
GETS HER NAME
The Lil’wat people of Mount Currie are reviving their
language one traditional name at a time.
B
efore the ancient ceremony can begin. Before the
elders can intone a nearly lost language and pass their
blessing down the generations. Before the summer sky
can flare and ricochet thunder across the valley. Before
all of this can happen . . . well, something must be
done about the orange-juice mustache.
Bryn Lee Nelson, who celebrated her second birthday only the
day before, has travelled to Mount Currie to take part in a ritual
long practised but lately revived by the Lil’wat people. As with little
girls everywhere, though, her imagination is intrigued by lesssolemn matters than adult speechifying—like being chased
squealing across the backyard by cousins and uncles, like gulping
from the orange drink that now highlights her round-cheeked grin.
Parents and grandparents have tried to scrub this fluorescent
half-moon from above her lip. Now, with only a hint of orange
remaining, the ceremony is ready to begin. It is time for Bryn Lee
to step forward before this gathering of clans. It is time for the
little girl to get her name.
Pelpala7wi’t
i ucwalmi’cwa
mu’ta7 ti tmi’cwa
The people and the land are one.
20
by DAVID LEACH
photography GARY FIEGEHEN
M
ount Currie, a community of
about 1,600, hugs an elbow along
the Sea-to-Sky Highway, where
the roiling glacial waters of the Lillooet and
Birkenhead rivers converge, a drive of just a
little more than two hours from Vancouver.
On the descent beyond Whistler, past Nairn
Falls and into the expanse of the Pemberton
Valley, shiny SUVs and alpine pleasure
palaces give way to muddy pickup trucks and
set-back ranch homes, although mountain
bikes and snowboards remain common
accessories.
Welcome to Cowboy Country. The
rodeo here hosts serious bronco-busting and
barrel-racing action. Riding and roping
form part of the phys-ed curriculum at local
schools. And if you ever wanted to try your
aim at horseback archery, this is the place to
saddle up and notch an arrow. For all the
frontier flair, you’re also on native land—
the traditional home of a proud and
independent people.
Mount Currie is situated in a transition
zone in every sense—geographically,
ecologically, culturally. Bisected by the
steep-faced Cayoosh Range, the region
defines the passage from B.C.’s rainforested
West Coast to its arid Interior. Winters here
are moist; summers, hot. The “Mount
Currie salute” is a habitual mosquito swat
to the neck.
In 1793, Alexander Mackenzie made
first European contact here on his overland
sojourn to the Pacific. In 1918, the railway,
laid along a foot-worn trading route turned
wagon road, linked the valley with the
growing metropolis to the south. The paved
lanes from Vancouver—Highway 99—only
a day after
•herJust
second birthday,
Bryn Lee Nelson joins
her extended family in
a ceremony at Mount
Currie to receive her
traditional Lil’wat
name.
B R I T I S H C OLUMBIA MAGAZINE: FALL 2010
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BRITISH COLUMBIA MAGAZINE: FALL 2010
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5
10 km
above: Tundra Lake at the
•headwaters
of the Stein River
in the high country above
Mount Currie, the home of
the Lil’wat people.
ROB STRUTHERS
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Bir
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FIRST NATIONS
map: The Lil’wat community
of Mount Currie sits at the
confluence of the Lillooet and
Birkenhead rivers, about six
kilometres east of Pemberton
along the Sea-to-Sky
Highway.
reached the area in 1970. More recently, the
Lil’wat stepped onto the world stage as one
of the Four Host First Nations (including
the Squamish, Musqueam and TsleilWaututh) for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic
and Paralympic Winter Games.
The Lil’wat like to tell two kinds of tales
about the history etched upon this land:
sqwéqwel’ (personal narratives) and sptakwlh
(teaching stories). You must reckon with
both to understand the relationship between
the place and its people.
Ask, and you’ll be told how the
Transformers—four brothers and one sister
who could turn herself into a canoe—
paddled north from Harrison Lake and
taught the survivors of the Great Flood,
who had tethered a raft to a summit, to
repopulate the valley. How the descendants
settled in the twin-peaked shadow of
2,590-metre Ts’zil (later renamed Mount
Currie for a 19th-century Scottish settler)
and became the Lil’wat, the largest of 11
bands in the St’át’imc Nation. How they
made peace with the Squamish to the
south, with whom they traded tanned pelts,
Saskatoon berries, and soapberry juice for
abalone, clams, and other delicacies from
the sea.
Ask, and you’ll learn how the Lil’wat
never signed away their traditional lands,
which form a nearly 8,000-square-kilometre
boot, with a heel extending south from
Whistler and a toe pointing west toward
Lillooet and Lytton. How in 1911 they
united with neighbours to forge the Lillooet
Declaration at Spences Bridge. How
sequestered on 10 small reserves, they rose
again to help halt plans to clearcut the
nearby Stein Valley and to build a ski resort
near Melvin Creek.
Ask, and you’ll hear how the
Ucwalmícwts language was nearly beaten
out of the Lil’wat. How men and women of
a certain age are half-deaf as a result of
strong-armed nuns and priests at the
mission school. How elders kindled the
flame of fluency within their homes and at
secret ceremonies. How the children of
Mount Currie are learning to speak these
words once more.
How all that was broken will be made
whole again.
above: Bryn Lee’s clan,
•including
her great-
grandparents, grandparents,
parents, and older sister
Danielle, gather at the
ceremony as a storm brews
on the horizon.
left: Two Lil’wat children,
Marin and sister Mikala
Aurora, listen to drumming
at a berry-picking ceremony.
23
FIRST NATIONS
L
ast summer, the Mount Currie band
council granted me permission to
attend a naming ceremony. The
invitation had been arranged by Lois Joseph—
a longtime council member, community
leader, and Bryn Lee’s grandmother—and
Gary Fiegehen, a Vancouver-based
photographer who has helped the Lil’wat to
document their cultural traditions, economic
revival, and the dramatic natural backdrop of
their home amid the Coast Mountains.
After I reach Mount Currie, I make a few
wrong turns before I find Joseph’s house.
(When you live on Love Street, you can expect
your road sign to disappear occasionally.) It has
been a hot, dry season across the province.
Blackcomb Peak was smouldering on the drive
up; farther east, fast-charging fires are harassing
the town of Lillooet. The Pemberton Valley
remains cloaked in a grey veil that tastes faintly
of mesquite.
As choppers and water-bombers buzz
overhead, I chat on the porch with members
of Bryn Lee’s extended family. I’m not quite
sure what to expect. Like the coming-of-age
“vision quest” and mílha7 “winter spirit
dances,” the revived naming ceremony often
mixes improvisation with tradition.
Naming feasts can be formal affairs full
of dance, song, and regalia. Others are
integrated into memorials or coming-of-age
rituals, with different protocols. Today’s
ceremony will be more casual—one part
potlatch, one part family reunion, with
speeches, gifts, a little drumming, and
enough salmon to feed a grizzly for a year.
“Kalhwa7acw!” says Lois Joseph, as she
welcomes several dozen guests and explains
that today’s recitation of ancestral names
will be recorded digitally for posterity. “Our
names tell stories. This is why we’re carrying
on the tradition and having a name-giving
ceremony today.”
Next, Mary James steps forward, speaks
a few sentences in Ucwamícwts, and
switches to English. James, who works with
Joseph at the Lil’wat7úl Culture Centre in
Mount Currie, has organized genealogy
evenings and helped to develop the
immersion program at the local school.
“It’s very important to remember when
you receive your traditional name, it’s yours
until you die,” she says. “You don’t say
24
you’re giving your name away—you’re
sharing your name.”
One after another, guests and family
members stand and describe the origins of
their Lil’wat names and English translations:
Lynx. Wolverine. Morning Crow. The Younger
One. Open Mouth. Woman Walks Far.
When Albert Nelson, Lois’s father,
takes the microphone, he looks every inch
the cowboy in his Stetson and redcheckered shirt, a pouch of tobacco tucked
neatly into the chest pocket. Even at 79, he
runs a herd of cattle on his property across
the river. His own ancestral name means
“It’s Always Ready to Go.” It suits him.
“It makes me proud when I hear little
kids talking our language,” he says. “Even
my dog understands our language!”
As I listen to the procession of names
and stories, I talk with Jonathan Joe, Lois’s
second cousin. Joe has been a carver for 23 of
his 39 years, but only full-time for the past
year and a half. The recent Olympic Winter
Games gave a huge boost to his artistic
career. The commissions he earned from the
Vancouver Organizing Committee, for
carved poles depicting everything from
grizzly bears to snowboarders, kick-started
his full-time carving.
BRITISH COLUMBIA MAGAZINE: FALL 2010
“If it wasn’t for the Olympics,” he tells
me, “I don’t know where I’d be.”
Life in Mount Currie has been tough
in the past for Joe and others. Nobody takes
for granted these opportunities to celebrate
Lil’wat culture—whether in front of an
international audience of television viewers
or among friends and family.
“When I used to be into this”—he
throws back an arm in the universal sign for
tying one on—“and a white man asked, ‘Do
you have a native name?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah . . .
Savage!’”
Joe laughs uproariously. Jokes aside, he
takes traditional names seriously. He has yet
to receive his own. It’s not something one
should expect or covet, he tells me. It’s an
honour for good deeds or a reminder of
family connections. He will get his name in
due time.
“Do you want an Indian name?” Joe
asks.
“Sure,” I say. Is it really so easy?
“Sama7,” he says, with deliberate
profundity.
Shama. I like it. It sounds like shaman.
“What does it mean?”
Joe smiles. “White Man!”
Well, if the name fits. . . .
WEB EXTRAS
bcmag.ca
Only online! See more of Gary
Fiegehen’s photography at www.
bcmag.ca/photogallery.
U
ntil the early 1970s, Ucwamícwts
(literally, “the language of the
people”) existed only in spoken
form. Around that time, a group of students
from Mount Currie refused to board the
bus back to the integrated secondary school
in Pemberton. Out of their protest sprang
the band school—and the need to develop a
bilingual curriculum. A team of four,
including Dutch linguist Jan van Eijk,
interviewed elders and developed an
orthography for a 48-letter alphabet, as well
as teaching materials and a 5,500-word
dictionary.
Lorna Williams, Lois Joseph’s aunt,
grew up in Mount Currie and worked on
that project. She is now the Canada
Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledge
and Learning at the University of Victoria
and a recipient of the Order of British
Columbia.
“From the very beginning, when we
started being able to write, people began
wanting to write their names,” she says,
when I visit her university office a few
months after the ceremony. “It almost got
lost, the tradition of passing on names.
Naming is crucial. Names are what
connects us to our ancestors, so there is an
unbroken chain beyond memory that we
can trace through our names.”
In many instances, she explains, Lil’wat
children are given a baby name until the
elders can observe their developing
personality and bestow a more suitable one.
“The name you’re given really challenges
you to live up to it,” says Williams. “Names
have been a real statement that we’re not
giving up who we are, and that Canada
must accept who we are.”
In this way, name giving is also a subtle
political act. “I didn’t realize how complicated
it was to get our Indian names registered,”
says Alvin Nelson, Lois Joseph’s brother and
one of the original high-school refuseniks.
At the ceremony, his own 12-year-old
daughter, Winona, will be receiving a
Lil’wat name along with Bryn Lee.
Back in 1981, however, Nelson applied
to register a traditional name for his eldest
son. “They tried to discourage me,” he
recalls. He kept re-applying. “It took us 10
years. They always said there was a problem
with the dash on the top or something.”
To smooth the process, van Eijk, the
linguist, had to explain the meaning of the
diacritics (the accents above letters) and
how to pronounce the “7” (a glottal stop).
Puzzled bureaucrats insisted that English
names couldn’t include “numbers.”
Registering Lil’wat names is now
more common but can still take effort. As
Williams confirms: “It’s an argument every
time.”
opposite: Bryn Lee shares a
•moment
with her grandmother,
Lois Joseph, whose own
traditional name, Mamáya7,
means “Mother of All.”
above: Lil’wat elder Gerald
Gabriel (“Sima7wi Apa7”)
wears a ceremonial headdress
made by Keith Andrew while
visiting a cultural exchange
camp of Lil’wat and Squamish
children. The camp teaches
youth about traditional dances
and stories to help them
appreciate their cultures.
B R I T I S H C OLUMBIA MAGAZINE: FALL 2010
t
FIRST NATIONS
SQUAMISH LIL’WAT CULTURAL CENTRE
A tale of two nations
One of the most impressive
legacies of the Vancouver 2010
Olympic and Paralympic Winter
Games has to be the Squamish
Lil’wat Cultural Centre in Whistler.
The three-level structure, which
opened in 2008, combines
T
Sue Nelson presents
•herabove:
nephew Nathan, Bryn Lee’s
father, with her handmade gift
of a cedar hat.
top: Lil’wat singer, dancer, and
drummer Bobby Stager rides
through a Mount Currie meadow.
26
he smoky sky darkens as we await
the naming ceremony’s main event.
Wind gusts rattle the big tent where
people seek refuge from a sudden
downpour. Up the valley, lightning stabs
the dry hills and sparks new fires.
“Maybe she should be called
Thunder!” quips Albert, Bryn Lee’s greatgrandfather.
Nathan Nelson, her father, grew up in
Mount Currie but now lives with his wife,
Erin, and two young daughters in
Edmonton, where he works as an executive
chef. Erin isn’t Lil’wat, so his daughters
have feet planted in different traditions.
(Danielle, age six, received her own
ancestral name at the age of six months.
Wearing Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and a
hand-woven cedar-root hat, Nathan looks
comfortable astride these two cultures. But
he still felt ambivalent about this recent
homecoming.
architectural elements from a
traditional Squamish longhouse
and an earthen Lil’wat pit-house or
ístken. The films and exhibits in the
spacious galleries reveal the
peaceable co-existence and diverse
cultures of these two First Nations,
whose traditional territories overlap
in the Whistler Valley. According to
oral tradition, they also shared an
“It was pretty emotional for me when I
first came back,” he says. “I won’t lie. It was
hard growing up here.”
Nathan, now 37, admits that his
mother Lois’s embrace of tradition once
tested his own teenaged impatience, his
longing to be free of the past. Now he
understands why she holds so strongly to
ceremonies that might seem out of step
with our digital age.
“We get wrapped up in the Internet
and making money and following the Bill
Gates dream,” he says. “Family doesn’t
matter anymore, which is sad. That’s why
my mom does it. That’s why her name is
Mamáya7—‘Mother of All.’”
Nathan joins relatives who stand as
witnesses with Bryn Lee. They have
accepted gifts as a reminder to invoke her
new name and its connection to this
community. At first, Lois Joseph wanted to
call her playful granddaughter The Faun,
ancient village near The Black Tusk
before the site was destroyed by a
volcanic eruption.
The cultural centre includes a
contemporary gallery with
revolving displays; cedar canoes
that can be raised to the ceiling
for ceremonies in the Great Hall;
an outdoor forest walk past
medicinal plants and other natural
but Nathan’s own Lil’wat name means “The
Day of the Deerhunter”—not an ideal
combination. Instead, Bryn Lee will share
the pet name of Georgina Nelson, her
great-grandmother.
As I watch the dancing and singing
that round out the ceremony, I am
reminded of the instructions that guests
received earlier. We were told that we must
return home and share all that we learn at
this gathering. We were reminded to
address this young girl—the one with the
orange-juice rimmed smile as bold as the
sun that sneaks through the clouds—not
simply as Bryn Lee but also as Tsinay’a7, a
translation of Georgina.
Chee. Nee. Ya. I let the syllables echo
in my mind before they slip away. Can I
remember her name? I have to. I’ve made a
promise. We all have.
Several people in Mount Currie
confessed to me that they sometimes forget
resources; a craft area where
clumsy fingers can attempt
bracelet making, weaving, or rock
painting; and a café with a menu
full of First Nations fusion food,
such as venison chili and salmon
chowder.
• Info: (www.slcc.ca; 866-4417522)
how to pronounce the ancestral names of
friends and family. They still struggle to
teach their own tongues the intricacies of
the unfamiliar sounds. But every name
revived and shared in ceremonies like this
one helps to bridge their rich past with the
promise of the future—and to keep their
living language on the lips of Lil’wat
young and old.
above: Staff at the
•Squamish
Lil’wat Cultural
Centre in Whistler, which
opened in 2008, start their
day with drumming and
singing.
WEB EXTRAS
bcmag.ca
Learn how to prepare Lil’wat
cuisine. Click STORIES and search
“Lil’wat.”
B R I T I S H C OLUMBIA MAGAZINE: FALL 2010
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