Q'sapi: A History of Okanagan People as Told by Okanagan Families (review)
- Q'sapi: A History of Okanagan People as Told by Okanagan Families
With its text composed mainly of excerpts from interviews with elders from the north Okanagan region of south-central British Columbia, Shirley Louis's innovative new book provides a rare First Nations perspective on a range of subjects including work, politics, intermarriage, and Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations. It focuses on the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Through photographs and stories, Louis introduces her readers to the diverse and unique individuals of the Okanagan Indian Band No. 1. Family and community ties are central throughout, and Q'sapi addresses controversial topics and includes stories of both failure and success.
The idea for this book came from Louis's desire to know more about her own Aboriginal family origins. She wrote Q'sapi to record the history of a group and to honour ancestors. The result gives the community a richly detailed starting point for further conversations and 'a record of family kinship lines and identity for the younger generations' (7).
Q'sapi is unusual because its editor and contributors represent the history of their own Aboriginal community. Unlike non-Aboriginal historians who situate First Nations people and their significance to community development in the margins, Louis and her contributors invert this picture and place Okanagan people in the centre of the story and non-Aboriginal settlers at the edges.
Q'sapi begins with a series of introductory essays on general themes such as the history of the Okanagan, the church, education, and the military, followed by thirty-four chapters organized alphabetically by family. A page of photographs at the beginning of each family section allows readers to familiarize themselves visually with family members. Most photos are cropped to include only one person, a technique that invites consideration of individuals, but that omits information about groups who posed together. Genealogical tables, brief explanations of the [End Page 822] evolution of individual families, and excerpts from interviews that contain stories about people in that family follow.
Family is key to the organization of Q'sapi, reflecting the centrality of family life to Okanagan culture (10). Stories about family illustrate loyalty, disruption, and reconstitution. Contributors discuss, for example, a woman taking refuge with older family members from an abusive husband, and an older man helping his daughter-in-law with household chores (64-9, 111). Couples separate, parents die, and children are adopted. Grandparents, often the primary caregivers of their grandchildren, leave lasting impressions. Q'sapi records a range of attitudes toward family history. Some people did not know who their relatives were, while others held extensive genealogical knowledge. When Edward Fred was young, he 'didn't care to know who was related to me' (96). Martin Wilson's mother pointed out his relatives but did not explain how they were related (191). Pierre Louis, chief from 1932 to 1959, kept a register of births and deaths in the community as a way of challenging federal government attempts to decrease the size of the reserve (165-6).
Part of Q'sapi's strength lies in its diversity, in the variety of narrators and subjects. As Arnie Louie notes in the introduction, 'There are many individual voices, male and female, young and old, scattered about me' (9). Because the interviewees talk about their experience of childhood and about their parents and grandparents, we learn about the entire life cycle, in contrast to traditional local histories that tend to focus on the achievements of adult men, and, to a lesser extent, women. Information about work patterns illustrates community diversity, gender differences, and continuities between traditional and modern ways of life. Okanagan people combined traditional work - hunting, trapping, processing hides, and harvesting berries - with ranching, farming, and seasonal wage work. Victor Antoine's grandmother supported the family by 'growing a big garden, and in winter, tanning hides and sewing gloves' (140-1). Riley Brewer's Uncle Amap and Aunt Sapelle, a medicine woman, picked strawberries in Seattle, worked at a blaster mine at Six-Mile Flat...
