‘Call Me Hank’: A Stó:lõ Man’s Reflections on Logging, Living, and Growing Old (review)

Near the end of his autobiography, Henry ‘Hank’ Pennier addresses an issue directly, which, until that point in the book, he had touched on only sporadically. ‘What’s it like being a half breed?’ he asks. ‘It hasn’t been easy,’ is his reply. Hank was born in 1904; both his father, George Pennier Junior, who died just months before Hank was born, and his mother, Alice Davis, were of mixed European and Stó:lõ ancestry. The youngest of eight children, Hank lived most of his life in British Columbia’s central Fraser Valley where he was raised by Stó:lõ people in a largely Stó:lõ environment. Despite this family history–his mother’s second husband was a Stó:lõ chief named August Billy–he was considered a ‘non-Native’ by the Canadian government. And therein, as this slim readable volume suggests, lies one of the defining features of this man’s life. ‘And all of us [in my family] are half breeds,’ Hank observes in the book’s preface. ‘Not white men and not Indian yet we look Indian and everybody but Indians takes us for Indian. It has been a complicated world and in some ways it still is I guess. And the damn government hasn’t helped any’ (4). Written in a punchy, anecdotal style, Hank’s autobiography explores the personal, social, and political complexities of being a ‘half-breed,’ an elastic racial categorization that brought with it dramatically different rights, opportunities, limitations, and dangers, depending on the context. ‘As we were half breeds and we could not live on the reservation, we were supposed to be white and we came under the white man’s status,’ Hank remarks in a subversively funny anecdote about going to residential school. ‘But the priests were very kind and they made an exception in our case’ (9–10).

Equally influential in Hank’s life was the time he spent working as a logger–a job he started at seventeen years of age and left when he was fifty-five, after accumulated work-related injuries forced him to hang up his caulk boots. ‘You name it and I done it,’ Hank concludes in his chapter ‘I Remember My 1940s and 1950s Days.’ ‘And as I think about it now if I was the same age again and you gave me a choice of what I wanted to work at the rest of my life I think I would still want to be a logger’ (58). During his labouring life, Hank supplemented the modest income he derived from logging by hunting, fishing, and working in the hops and strawberry fields of the Pacific Northwest. Thus, across five chapters, stories about ‘hoboes,’ ‘highballers,’ ‘old Swedes,’ ‘Mexican strawberry pickers,’ and ‘hunch backed cocky little whistle punks’ share space with tales about ‘tough braves’ and ‘Indian trappers’–a juxtaposition that effectively brings labour history and Aboriginal history together. For Hank, the link between being a logger and being half-breed was a deeply personal one, for the status, identity, independence, and sense of masculine accomplishment derived from being in the woods helped him neutralize the negative implications of being too Indian for some and not Indian enough for others. ‘Way back in the bush among the big trees doing a man’s work, I wasn’t a half breed, I was just good old Hank,’ the author writes. ‘Outside of my work I could not join white society, socially’ (86–7).

Originally published as Chiefly Indian: The Warm and Witty Story of a British Columbia Half Breed Logger, the new edition is generously supported by archival and personal photographs, a glossary of logging terms, and a map; a cogent introduction, written by Keith Thor Carlson and Kristina Fagan, effectively contextualizes the book. Reflective, humane, and funny in equal measure, ‘Call Me Hank’ could easily be...