British Columbia

Enliven Your Visit With First Nations Visit

By Steve Bergsman

            Most of my journeys into British Columbia involve some sort of outdoor activity. That’s because I usually travel in winter and when I’m not skiing, I try for something different; snowshoe hikes, dogsledding, riding the zipline in Whistler. I even went ice fishing one year.

            This time my journey was in the warm months and I followed a historical route along the Fraser River, which gave a whole new meaning to my presence in this far-west Canadian province.

            Whenever I’m in Whistler, my one concern is usually the snow conditions on the mountains. On this trip, I took a different turn, walking into the Upper Village to find the newly opened Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Center, which is dedicated to two First Nation’s peoples that lived in the Vancouver/Whistler region beginning centuries before the Europeans arrived.

            The two related tribal groups, Squamish and Lil’wat, still populate the outlying regions of southwestern British Columbia.

            This is not a museum per se. The purpose of the Cultural Center is self-explanatory, it’s to introduce visitors to the culture of the Squamish and Lil’wat peoples – these are best shown through the traditional carvings, weavings and canoe building.

            Although I normally eschew museum and cultural center films, this one offers a good 15-minute documentary showing the Squamish and Lil’wat people of today and how they are trying to maintain their heritage, language and arts in the modern world. It’s worth taking the time to watch.

            Since so much of the arts and garments of Squamish and Lil’wat used native woods and wools, not much has survived through the centuries. However, there is a singular object, a blanket, from the turn of the last century that was used as a cape by one of the chiefs. There are even photographs of the chief with the blanket. After decades in a private collection, is now in the cultural center – one of the rare historical pieces on display.

If you take the scenic Rocky Mountaineer railroad journey from Vancouver to Jasper, one of the more memorable legs of that trip occurs just outside of the town of Lillooet because the train has to climb 2,100 feet from the Fraser River Valley floor to a high plateau, and the surrounding countryside almost immediately shifts from claustrophobically wooded mountain valleys to an arid open land.

            The train doesn’t stop to let passengers on or off in Lillooet, which is a shame because it’s a picturesque little place with a rich First Nation heritage. The town was built at the confluence of the Fraser River and Cayoosh Creek, and First Nation groups have been settled here for 10,000 years due to the excellence of the salmon runs on the two rivers.

            To this day, there are six First Nation “bands” that live in the Lillooet area and one of them, the Bridge River Band, offers what it calls Xwisten (Bridge River) Tours, which has multiple stages – fishing, food preparation, archaeology, music and culture -- and a person could do one or all.

            I was with a group that arrived late one day to Lillooet, but the Bridge River Band was very accommodating and about 7:30 p.m. hosted us at a site along one of the feeder streams to the Fraser that was near to their traditional fishing grounds.

            We were there for a dinner of barbecued salmon and other delicacies, perhaps the most unusual of which was the desert, which was an ice cream made from a local fruit, the soapberry. The desert looked inviting, a pastel pink dish served whipped and foamy in a cup, but it was an acquired taste.

            Proving myself a cultural fool, I asked one young woman of the band if the soapberry got its name because it tasted like soap. She looked at me, hopefully with no malice, took a deep breath, and in all measure of politeness responded, “no, it’s because in preparation it foams like soap.”

            OK, I’ll go crawl under the next rock.

            During the dinner, another of the hostesses demonstrated how the Bridge River Band cuts a freshly-caught salmon to prepare for drying.

 In southwestern British Columbia the general grouping of First Nation peoples falls under the term Salish. But, the Salish peoples who lived along the Pacific Coast and those inland, such as the Bridge River Band, have important cultural differences especially in regard to that invaluable food source, the salmon. Along the coast, salmon is smoked; in the drier, warmer interior of the province, salmon is sliced then hung and wind-dried.

            The preparation for wind drying is complicated with special placement of cuts to allow the meat of the fish to dry quickly and evenly.

            I suppose the oddest thing was, as we were eating and watching the food preparation, an eagle took interest, soaring steadily above. Meanwhile, on land, a marmot, a small furry rodent-looking animal, crept up from the riverbed, made itself comfortable on a rock and watched us. It was content as long as no one moved too close. While the salmon dinner was excellent, the real treat for me was the marmot, I had never seen one in the wild before.

            After dinner, one of the young woman of the band, whose English name was Laura John, but in her native language was known as Cwvlcwvlvpcen (there are some accents in there as well), which meant creating a breeze by the kicking and dancing of the feet, sang a song well known in her tribal group. She accompanied herself with a drum, so the tune, lightly translated as “It’s Good To See You,” was beat-driven, yet incorporated a lovely melody.

            Fortunately, this visit was in the late spring and the days were long, because after dinner we regrouped in cars and headed a couple miles down the stream bank to a very important archaeological site being excavated by the University of Montana.

            In their heyday, the Salish bands were large and although hunter-gathers built extensive villages of pit homes (partly underground with a wood roof) and there are numerous sites along the Fraser River that were once massive pit home villages.

            The location we visited was one of those. To the untrained eye, we were looking at a flat land punctuated by indentations in the earth. Those breaks in the surface were the remains of the pit homes and there were so many it was estimated that a couple of thousand of ancestral Bridge River Band wintered here at one time.

            With the sun finally settling beyond the surrounding mountains, visitors and guides regrouped once more as the lovely Laura John took out a drum and serenaded us once more, this time with a haunting beat that, again, encapsulated a very polite message; it was a tune of thanks.

            No, Cwvlcwvlvpcen, thank YOU for a wonderful experience.