Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism

6. "We Were Real Skookum Women”: The shishalh Economy and the Logging Industry on the Pacific Northwest Coast

chapter 6 “We Were Real Skookum Women” The shíshálh Economy and the Logging Industry on the Pacific Northwest Coast Susan Roy Ruth Taylor The name Sechelt comes from ch’at-lich or “going over logs.” —shíshálh elder Gilbert Joe, in tems swiya Museum display, Sechelt First Nation On prominent display in the Sechelt First Nation’s tems swiya Museum is a large photograph depicting a group of shíshálh women—Mary Joe, Violet Jeffries, Mary Anne Jeffries, Carrie Joe, and Madeline Joe—rolling cedar logs down the mountainside in the early 1940s (figure 6.1). The women hold sticks designed for the task, and Mary Anne Jeffries, who stands in the center, displays the large handsaw used to cut the tree into more manageable sections. Carrie Joe provides the explanation for the image: “We used to make our own wood in them days. We even cut the tree down, hand logged, sawed it by handsaw. We took all of the blocks down with these things rolling them.” She adds, reflecting on the power and strength of a previous generation of women and on her own youth, “We were real skookum women. Today I couldn’t do it” (tems swiya Museum).1 The image is part of a series of community-produced photographs that capture shíshálh people working in various capacities in British Columbia’s forestry and fishing industries during the twentieth century. Throughout shíshálh traditional territory , on what is now known as British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, the shíshálh participated in the logging industry, first as hand loggers and wage earners of small logging enterprises that operated along the coast, and later as employees in much larger industrial logging operations. “The Sechelt nation were hand loggers for many years because timber was so plentiful right from the edge of the water up,” explained Gilbert Joe. “The Sechelt Band members have production second to none in their modern high-lead logging industry. We’ve got records that have never been beaten” (tems swiya Museum). The shíshálh’s ongoing use of the coastal forest and contributions to the logging industry is a major theme of the community’s museum display. But for many non-Aboriginal museum spectators, the image of women engaged in forestry presents an unexpected history, to use Philip Deloria’s term (2004), and challenges the Western association of Indigenous peoples with a “traditional” economy in a pristine forest. Museum visitors are surprised to see women—especially ones who in other respects seem to comply with the mores of their time—out in the woods hauling logs. The photograph disrupts the Western dichotomy that separates economy from culture, workplace from domestic sphere, manly from feminine, and—importantly—forest from home. Instead, the photograph suggests a more complex relationship to the coastal rain forest and to the range of women’s economic and cultural activity. It is evidence of the persistence of a shíshálh economy organized by the specific relationships that connected shíshálh families to the territory.2 “We Were Real Skookum Women” 105 Figure 6.1. Mary Joe, Violet Jeffries, Mary Anne Jeffries, Carrie Joe, and Madeline Joe rolling large cedar sections at Sechelt, 1939. tems swiya Museum Photography Collection . #10.016. Reproduced with permission of the Sechelt First Nation. A second photograph, also from the tems swiya Museum, depicts an intergenerational group of women—Ellen Paul, Christine Julian, Janet Louie, and Mary Ann Jeffries—sitting on the grass in front of the Paul home, engaged in basket making, conversation, and child minding (figure 6.2). shíshálh women became well known in the Pacific Northwest as expert and sought-after cedar-root basket weavers, also a dominant theme of shíshálh self-representation in their museum. The scene suggests that basketry and other “handicraft” production fit easily and neatly into women’s daily, and largely domestic, lives. Such home-based production could be readily picked up while women were engaged with other “reproductive” work, such as caring for children. A viewer might see the image as clearly gendered female: “light” work perceived as supplementary to the family economy and, unlike logging, negligible to the provincial economy. But was this really the case? As these photographs suggest, the labor of women—and men, for that matter—and their role in the economic and cultural strategies of the shísh...