As part of my Stó:lō History class at the University of the Fraser Valley we went on a field trip to the Stó:lō Nation community in Chilliwack, B.C., which consists of different First Nations tribes who live in the Fraser Valley. The Stó:lō Nation therefore also call themselves “the People of the River”. In the 1960s the Department of Indian Affairs grouped twenty four different tribes living in the Fraser Valley between Fort Langley and Yale into the East Fraser District Council and in 1994 the Stó:lō Nation was finally formed on the agreement of all tribes included. The Stó:lō Nation is a facility in Chilliwack that serves different purposes, such as a daycare centre, an educational centre, an elders’ lodge, and a gallery. They describe themselves as an organization that focuses on the “social and economic development within the Stó:lō community through facilities and programs in the areas of education, human resource development, early childhood and youth services, health, elderly care, and social development”.
During our fieldtrip to the Stó:lō Nation our class was taken on a guided tour of the site by our teacher, who is a member of the Stó:lō Nation herself. First, we were invited into the longhouse of the nation, which did not have any windows and only small chimneys in the roof to release the smoke of the two fires that were burning inside. Longhouses used to be the homes of the families of a tribe and could literally become longer when they were extended for more families to move in. The longhouse on the grounds of the Stó:lō Nation in Chilliwack is still in use for traditional ceremonies that take place throughout the year. Our class was lucky to be invited to a singing and dancing performance in this longhouse during the fieldtrip. A member of the Stó:lō Nation drummed and sang while traditionally dressed teenage girls were dancing barefoot on the loamy ground. One of the girls was my teacher’s daughter, which exemplifies that the transmission of traditions still plays an important role among the members of the Stó:lō Nation. Furthermore, we watched a dancing performance of young boys and girls, in which they represented the traditional gender roles within the Stó:lō Nation. While the boys were in charge of representing the men’s duty of fishing, the girls demonstrated the Stó:lō women’s duty of collecting berries. Again, the drummer was proud to announce that one of the young boys was his son.
Similarly to this, a woman told us a traditional Stó:lō story, which had been passed on from generation to generation. Since she still knows many traditional stories, she can pass them on to today’s younger generation so that the traditions and the history of the tribe do not get lost. I suppose that in the educational centre of the Stó:lō Nation, children are taught about their history and also about the traditional dances, songs, and stories. This seems to be a successful way to revive the Stó:lō culture, which had been suppressed for several hundred years by the European colonizers. After being pushed to the margin of society by the colonizers and being taken away from their families and sent to residential schools as children in order to be assimilated, there finally seems to be a way for First Nations to revitalize their culture and to pass it on to their children. During the time of colonization, the First Nations of Canada were forced to live on reserves and therefore had to live in exile within their own country.
In our Diaspora core course “Culture and Theory of Diaspora” we read the essay “I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society” by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in which she describes the displacement of the Aboriginal people of Australia during colonization. This disrespectful and discriminatory displacement of Aboriginal people in Australia seems to have many commonalities with the displacement of the Indigenous people of Canada. Both were removed from their original territories to reserves or residential schools or missionaries in order to be assimilated into the White society. And both still struggle with the claim of land rights of their original territories today. Even though they are not members of a Diaspora in the classical understanding, they still suffer from displacement and living in exile within the same continent that has been defined as Canada and Australia by the European colonizers. Many Aboriginal people (both in Australia and Canada) have been forcefully removed from their homes and therefore had (and often still have) to cope with the feeling of not belonging because the White society suppressed them and their cultures. The European colonizers viewed themselves as the real owners of the land because they assumed (or pretended?) that they discovered empty land, namely a ‘terra nullius’.
The fieldtrip was a very positive experience to see an example of a First Nation that maintained their culture despite the assimilating intentions of the European colonizers. In my opinion the fieldtrip offered the opportunity to actually meet members of the Stó:lō Nation on a more personal basis than it is usually the case during public performances.
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