5 Simon Fraser's Native Guides

XATS'ULL - A faint, slightly pungent scent - maybe wood smoke, maybe sweetgrass - drifted up through the dense thickets that crowded the narrow, dusty track that led me down to where the Fraser River boils into a tight gorge.

The local Indian band at Soda Creek runs a heritage and cultural camp. Tourists have been known to follow the tantalizing aroma of traditional pit-baked salmon down to the site. There are authentic pit houses, drying racks for salmon and a nomadic people's simple and efficient summer shelters made from the wooden frames and evergreen boughs that observers from the time of Simon Fraser called "shades."

A row of tipis even graces the meadow. Although the people here were known to ride their horses beyond the Rocky Mountains to hunt buffalo, a fact which impressed Fraser in 1808, manager Rhonda Shackelly confesses the tipis are imported from Alberta, a necessary concession to the expectations of German visitors.

Shackelly, who lived 15 years in Merritt before getting her degree from Simon Fraser University and coming home to run the heritage site, has had more interesting problems than finding ways to market Xats'ull heritage to European culture campers. There's the occasional squatter to evict.

"There was a bear living in the pit house last winter," she laughed. "We had to kick him out."

Marketing demands aside, Xats'ull is no Disneyfied concoction. It's the real deal. For millennia, people have camped on dry benches just like this one above Soda Creek canyon, 580 kilometres north of Vancouver.

"There were once 1,000 to 1,500 people living here at Soda Creek, so many they used to have a bridge across the Fraser made of rawhide. Now there are only a few hundred," she said. "They got the smallpox and they all died."

Xats'ull had been a fishing site since time immemorial for several reasons. Migrating salmon concentrate in the huge eddies and can be caught with dip nets and the furnace winds of the cordilleran rain shadow are ideal for drying fish.

On this day, however, elder Minnie Phillips was only talking about fishing, or, more properly, about not fishing, while she gave grandson Kenneth Phillips, four, a lesson in how to scrape a deer skin for tanning.

She was lamenting the fact that so often the peoples who inhabit the upper sections of the Fraser seem to come last in line for allocations of the food resource that has sustained their families since time out of mind.

Legally and constitutionally but in actuality only theoretically, first nations have a right to harvest traditional resources for food and ceremonial purposes. That right is trumped only by conservation needs.

But once-numberless runs now dwindle in the face of climate change, pollution, habitat loss and over-harvesting. At the same time, a noisy clamor intensifies from commercial and recreational interests which need bigger shares of a smaller pie in order to remain economically viable.

This is paralleled by the growing risk that politically-influenced management decisions will create a culture which encourages miscalculations regarding stock abundance, run timing and the minimum escapement necessary for the survival of small populations co-migrating with healthy ones.

So, in reality, people on the upper river like Minnie Phillips often find their fishing opportunities restricted for conservation reasons long after commercial, recreational and first nations interests downstream have exercised their opportunities to intercept the salmon either at sea or in the estuary.

"They weren't allowing us to catch anything but spring salmon," the soft-spoken elder complained. "You'd catch 20 fish and throw them back just to catch one salmon you could keep because if they caught you fishing other salmon they'd take away your net and take your car, too."

While she grumbled about the ironies of greed and mismanagement on the other side of the mountains preventing her from fishing where her ancestors had fished, I observed that she didn't once miss a stroke in cleaning her deerskin.

A gracious chief

Preparing hides is an old and much-admired skill. Even Fraser, who after a life on the fur trade frontier had as educated an eye for good buckskin as anyone, commented on the quality of Secwepemc craftsmanship when he first encountered it in 1808.

"They had bows and arrows both extremely well made, which they laid down on coming to us," he wrote. "Most of their bows were of Juniper or Box wood and Ceader and covered with the skin of rattlesnake, which they say are numerous in this quarter, and their arrows are pointed with stone of flint kind but dark, and their clothing consisted of  dressed leather, leggings and shoes with robes of the Chivirease [buckskin], Carribo [caribou], Biche [doeskin] and Beaver skins most of which were dressed in the hair."

With the help of Kristen Sellars pulling the hide taut, Phillips swept her scraper in methodical arcs, taking the hair off the hide in slow, steady strips.

Kenneth seemed bemused.

"For the kids," his uncle, Ike Phillips, told me, "the only fun part of this is stretching the skin. When I was a kid, I used to do this but, really, the only fun is stretching."

In the background, the silt-laden river boomed and rumbled through the canyon. It was high water, the highest in many years, yet barely submerged rocks still scarred the surface with arrowheads of glistening white froth. Immense eddies formed and whirled away, sucking and hissing along the vertical rock faces.

At the quickest glance it was instantly evident why Fraser decided to pause in his journey, reconnoiter the rapids, gather local information about what lay ahead and try to find and talk with the slave he was told had been to the sea.

It was at Xats'ull that Fraser met with "the Great Chief of the Atnaugh," who welcomed him, spoke on behalf of the strangers to his followers and produced the man who had seen the sea.

More important for Fraser, said Shackelly, "he didn't want to risk the river from here and so one of the Soda Creek chiefs took him from here all the way down to Lillooet."

Fraser never names this powerful chief, who so graciously offered both to guide the party and to serve as an ambassador, smoothing their way with the next nations they would meet. Some argue that it's evidence of the fur trader's ethnocentric arrogance and bigotry, even racism.

Yet, after living with his journals for years I'm not certain this criticism isn't merely expedient. It enables someone with an agenda to justify today's revisionist point of view by retroactively applying judgments to people whose prejudices were shaped in the 18th century.

Time and again, Fraser and his men meet with first nations strangers, eat with them, negotiate with them, present them with gifts, defer to their superior knowledge in many areas, speak of them respectfully - if roughly, on occasion - and even with admiration. Certainly they seem fully aware of their own dependence upon first nations and their ultimate vulnerability, firearms notwithstanding.

Struggling with unknown languages, trying to express in his own alphabet unfamiliar sounds for which he had no orthography, trying to communicate through one and sometimes two interpreters without breaching protocols or giving offence, yet driven forward by the mission itself, seldom staying in any camp for more than a day, perhaps it's not surprising that Fraser's account often lacks names. Indeed, he often doesn't name his own men.

At Soda Creek, the explorer refers only to "The Chief," although Fraser clearly holds him in some esteem for his integrity, courage and kindness - "all the Indians in this place were very civil to us," the journal says.

But research by James Teit, an educated British adventurer who went to live among the Thompson Indians, took a native Indian woman as his wife and became an informant for the great anthropologist Franz Boas of the American Museum of Natural History, lifts the veil of anonymity for a man who, as much as Fraser, deserves credit for the expedition's success.

In an account of the Secwepemc published in 1908, Teit recounts an interview with Setse'l, who was then a very old man. He had been born at a place named Peq on Riske Creek although he was living at Alkali Lake when interviewed, his village being one of those obliterated in a series of smallpox epidemics.

"He was a small boy when Simon Fraser's party came down Fraser River with canoes," Teit reported.

"Xlo'sem, the Soda Creek chief, accompanied the party as guide and interpreted for them. Kolpapatci'nexen was at that time chief of the Canoe Creek band and Haxkw'est was a noted war chief and wealthy man. He had three wives and was tall and wore only a breech-clout, excepting in winter time.

"Some of the Soda Creek Indians were the only Shuswap who had seen white men prior to Fraser's party," Teit recounted. "Fraser gave presents of tobacco, beads and knives to almost all the Indians he met. The tobacco was black twist and much stronger than the native tobacco and many men who smoked it became sick.

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