Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808–1939 by Andrea Laforet, Annie York, and: Does Canada Matter? Liberalism and the Illusion of Sovereignty by Clarence Bolt (review)

414 letters in canada 1999 Andrea Laforet and Annie York. Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808B1939 University of British Columbia Press 1998. xiv, 282. $24.95 Clarence Bolt. Does Canada Matter? Liberalism and the Illusion of Sovereignty Ronsdale. 216. $14.95 These two books at first sight seem to have little in common. The Spuzzum book is a bicultural account of the encounters of an Aboriginal people in the Fraser Canyon with newcomers to their country B from the arrival of Simon Fraser to the Second World War. Clarence Bolt's book is a homily in the spirit of George Grant urging Canadians to recover a capacity to resist the evils of modernity. Though they belong to different genres, both books are about sovereignty B the loss or denial of it in the case of the Nlaka'pamux people of Spuzzum, the illusion of it in Clarence Bolt's analysis of Canada's failure to resist the homogenizing forces of globalization. But the books are united by a deeper theme than sovereignty. This is the importance of a sense of place, of being grounded in a very distinct location, in Canadians' sense of identity. Bolt builds on the idea drawn from his intellectual mentor, the British Columbian geographer Cole Harris, that from the earliest days of settlement Canadians defined their identity in terms of the `immediate horizons' of everyday experience B `the rhythms of the land, the traditional ways that earned a living, and the people that lived nearby.' From this perspective Bolt argues that the identity of the country as a whole, rightly conceived, is an archipelago of distinct, self-sustaining communities. Andrea Laforet's design of the Spuzzum project also bears Cole Harris's imprint. She follows Harris in combining Aboriginal texts and sources with the documentation of European historiography to build a rich account of the Nlaka'pamux people's experience of modernity. This is made possible by her collaboration with the late Annie York, a Nlaka'pamux woman who was born in Spuzzum in 1904 and lived there most of her life until her death in 1991. Together Laforet and York give us a deeply textured sense of this place Spuzzum and its hinterland, and their enduring centrality B despite all that has happened to them B to the Nlaka'pamux people's sense of identity. Annie York was educated by grandparents who were born and`instructed' before the 1858 gold rush brought the first flood of settlers into the Fraser Canyon. The narratives, laced with Nlaka'pamux words and phrases and drawn from Laforet's twenty years of conversation with Annie as well as other Nlaka'pamux and European sources, present a full and vivid account of how this people experienced and now remember the coming of these exotic strangers to their land. We learn how Simon Fraser, the first European to appear in their territory, was portrayed to the humanities 415 Spuzzum people by up-river neighbours as the `son of the Sun,' a supernatural being whose actions transformed the world. And then, from an entry in Fraser's diary for 27 June 1808, we learn how a camp of sixty`Indians' at Spuzzum `hospitably entertained' him with a feast of `fresh Salmon boiled and roasted, green and dried berries, oil and onions.' But Fraser also tells us how in showing off his guns and his party's canoeing limitations he justified the Nlaka'pamux's perception that he might steal their canoes. In their narratives they equated him with the trickster, Coyote, `who had the same paradoxical qualities.' The Nlaka'pamux found out just how paradoxical the white man could be when the discovery of gold suddenly supplanted the light encounter of the fur trade with an enormous influx of aliens `who saw food as separable from their immediate environment' and `Native people as inferior to Europeans and non-Christian religious belief as having negligible value.' It all happened so fast and so unceremoniously. The Nlaka'pamux fought a short war with the miners, killing seven Europeans and losing thirty-six of their own people, including five chiefs. They concluded the war by making a treaty of peace with the captain of the Europeans...