An original audio story series led by Jayme Collins
You can find Archival Ecologies on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Amazon Music and iHeartRadio.
Archival Ecologies is an audio story series created and produced by Jayme Collins as a companion to a book project. The series investigates how ecological events and natural disasters are affecting cultural collections and the artifacts and memories they preserve for diverse communities. As climate change leads to more extreme weather events, the interactions between archives and the environments where they reside are becoming more frequent and more fraught. Beset by floods, fires, mold blooms and other ecologies, the objects and documents that communities preserve are sometimes lost or damaged.
This series tells the stories of such archives, their stewards and their significance for communities at the forefront of climate change. What do objects and collections mean in the communities that steward them, and what does recovery from loss look like? How do cultural stories continue or change in the absence of objects and collections? Archival Ecologies will address these questions by exploring the ecological lives of cultural collections in states of disruption, documenting collections in crisis and researching their connections to geographies and histories. Each season will take listeners to a new environment to share community experiences of why archives matter, what their loss means and what recovery might look like.
Credits
Created and hosted by Jayme Collins with research, writing and production support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath and Molly Taylor. Music by Hamilton Poe. Sincere thanks to Kouvenda Media for their partnership on this project. A production of Blue Lab with support from Princeton University. Copyright 2023 Jayme Collins and Blue Lab.
Season 1: Fire in Lytton
You can find Archival Ecologies on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Amazon Music and iHeartRadio.
During the 2021 summer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the historic town of Lytton, BC and nearby First Nations reserves suffered a catastrophic wildfire that took local archives, museums and cultural collections with it. In this first season of Archival Ecologies, we’ll tell the stories of those collections and the communities who have stewarded them. Through the voices of those cultural stewards and knowledge keepers and the objects that have been lost (or salvaged), we’ll explore the interwoven histories and geographies of the region and the larger intersections between climate change, cultural preservation and recovery.
Episode 1: In the Burn Zone
Archival Ecologies Episode 1: “In the burn zone”
Full Transcript
JAYME: This is a ceremony to bless the ground. Lytton residents take turns scooping gravel from a mound and pouring it into a hole a few yards below. Two years ago today, on June 30 2021, a fire started by the railroad bridge just south of this site. Most of Lytton burned down. Hundreds of people lost their homes, and two died. Each person hands the shovel off to another. Most hesitate before releasing the gravel, pausing over the ledge to say a prayer. Some people drive the shovel upward so the gravel lifts in the air before it falls. Others simply rotate the handle, letting the gravel fall softly down from the blade.
ERNIE: It's like a funeral. You go to a funeral, you're throwing the dirt. You’re saying your final goodbyes to your loved one. Today that’s what we're doing. We're burying old Lytton.
JAYME: Just before blessing the ground, the community held a prayer walk through town.
We passed empty lots closed off by blue wire fences—two years after the fire in Lytton, nothing has been rebuilt. There’s some debris, but most lots have been cleaned, exposing just a concrete foundation or a hole where a building used to be. Only a few details indicate there was a fire: charred trees and lamppost shades that look like melted candles. It took ten minutes to reach the end of Main Street, where around 60 people have gathered on a gravel site for speeches and prayers. It’s dry hot, 33 degrees celsius, 92 Fahrenheit, and there’s a tent for elders and kids, but most stand in the sun. To the west, the site slopes down to the Fraser River. On the mountainside overlooking Lytton from the east is the railway. Its trains are running constantly during the ceremony.
JAYME: There’s a range of speakers. They’re from a disaster relief organization in Vancouver, the Anglican Church in Lytton, the Buddhist community in the neighboring Botanie Valley, and the Nlaka'pamux nation.
AMY: [prayer]
JAYME: This prayer by Amy is in Nkala’pamux, an endangered language that community members are actively working to teach and learn. Another Elder, Pauline, also offers a blessing.
PAULINE: I ask the water to protect and to hold all our people. That soonall our people come back home and we can all be together again. I love all of you and I can't wait for that day to come and we can have our community back home again.
JAYME: Most residents still haven’t been able to return to Lytton. Today, community members are coming from where they've been staying since the fire—places like Lillooet and Chilliwack and Kamloops, which are all at least an hour away. For the past two years, recovery has been mired in a series of government regulations and procedures. There was a lengthy soil remediation after the fire baked heavy metals into the dirt. Then there was an archaeological survey in search of artifacts from the First Nation people who lived there before it was Lytton. New net-zero building requirements demand approvals and inspections and high costs that most residents can’t afford.
After the fire, Mayor Denise O’Connor was elected on a platform to speed up recovery. At the ceremony, she shares a welcome update:
DENISE: We have all the approvals now to start the backfill, which means next week we're going to have backfill happening in the village here, so yeah, pretty exciting…
JAYME: Today, it’s clear that the blessing of the ground means several things at once. Some people hope for the return of the old Lytton; others look forward to a new community. Father Angus, from the Anglican church, invites community members to help “fill the holes” that were left by the fire.
ANGUS: Creator of all, you stand, you call us to stand together here today to fill the holes of the past with clean soil and water, the building blocks of a new community.
JAYME: Two years after the fire, the Lytton community is still figuring out how to recover. Part of the challenge has to do with the scale of the loss: not only were homes and buildings destroyed, but so were building codes, town bylaws, community centers, parks, archives, and museums. What does a community do when it loses everything from physical infrastructure to government documents, community gathering places, and cultural objects? How does it recover its culture and community, and chart a path forward?
This is “Archival Ecologies,” a new audio story series about cultural collections like archives and museums in states of disruption—when they are burned by a fire, flooded by a storm, or invaded by insects or mold. We’ll look at collections from across the world, in places like British Columbia, Northern Europe and the South Pacific, where ecological forces have reshaped collections and transformed their role in culture. The show is produced by Princeton University’s Blue Lab and led and hosted by me, Jayme Collins. This season, we’ll be telling a story of Lytton, a small town in the Fraser Canyon region of British Columbia that lost culturally significant collections when it burned to the ground in a 2021 heatwave-fuelled wildfire.
Archives can be many things: they can be official collections of documents and books, the kind of thing you might expect to find in a capital city or a university, or they can exist in museums and art galleries. But they can also be in people’s homes, in a living room or basement, or even in a personal notebook of observations and quotations. We might even think of the soil underneath buildings as an archive, a collection of physical, chemical, and cultural information about what has been there in the past. Archives can take many forms, but as collections of objects, documents, and other information, they provide the scaffolding for stories that carry meaning and cultural identity. In many different ways, archives are places where people turn to find identity and tell stories about who—and where—they are.
So how do communities grapple with the loss of objects and documents that let them tell stories about their culture? What happens to cultural identity when the objects and spaces that hold stories are lost or damaged?
PATRICK: Lytton first and foremost represents a form of identity. It's who I am
JAYME: This is Patrick Michel. He’s the retired chief of the Kanaka Bar Indian Band, which lies about a 15 minute drive down the river from Lytton. Patrick has lived in Lytton his whole life and lost his house in the fire.
PATRICK: To me it is a place, a geographical place that has provided my family with sustenance for more than 8,000 years. And while I, I can't say and speak beyond what I know in my own lifetime. What I am though is a product of 8,000 years of learning. So sometimes I'll speak about things that might have happened a thousand years ago, right? I remember when Simon Frazier arrived on June 20th, 1808. Why? ’Cause the stories that were told to me, weren't told to me, was told to my grandmother by her grandmother who was alive at the time. So what happens is it's really hard for me to separate out traditional stories that are handed down from real life experiences. So Litan becomes identity. It's, it's who I am, it's who my family is. So I, I didn't know if I can articulate anymore in that other than it's, it's my home.
JAYME: Lytton is a small village about three and a half hours northeast of Vancouver. The town’s located at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson rivers in a canyon that’s windy and arid. During the summer it can get quite hot. The Nlaka’pamux have inhabited the land for at least 7000 years. European settlers arrived in the area when Simon Fraser traveled down the river in 1808. Near the middle of the century, the area’s population boomed during the gold rush. After mining activity waned, settlers flocked to the area again around the turn of the 20th century. This time they came to build the railways. Before the fire, Lytton was officially the home of 210 residents. With the closest town nearly an hour away, thousands more relied on the town as a source of community.
MEDIA CLIPS: We do begin with the latest on a wildfire disaster in British Columbia. Its in the community of Lytton. // The town of Lytton was engulfed by flames. // Nearly 90% of the village burned to the ground. Its been a summer of devastating wildfires. // Devastating wildfires that tore through the village. // My hometown lost in less than an hour.
JAYME: Four major cultural collections were lost in the fire: the Lytton Chinese History Museum, the Lytton Museum and Archives, a collection of Nlaka’pamux baskets, and a collection of Anglican commemorative plates, though countless collections of personal significance also perished.
LORNA: Yeah, so the hole in the ground we see here is the remains of the museum. And it would've been almost right at the, at the front of this level ground. And then the back of the building would've been kind of where you see the edge of the concrete in the bottom about there. And then the rest was dirt before.
JAYME: Lorna Fandrich founded the Lytton Chinese History Museum in 2017 to tell the stories of Chinese settlers in Lytton and the surrounding areas. It was built at the site of a former Joss House just down the embankment from the railway tracks. A few blocks away across town, the Lytton Museum and Archives resided in an old railway workers house and was the municipal museum, collecting objects related to the Lytton area. These ranged from ancient fossils to artifacts evidencing histories of settlement. It is the second major collection lost in the fire.
RICHARD: we're walking right beside the museum right now, was a really nice little railway worker’s house. About 25 feet square, roughly, maybe 30 feet square, and main floor and a basement on half of it. That hole is where the half basement was, and over there there was the crawl space there.
JAYME: Richard Forrest spent decades stewarding the collection and is an expert on the history of the town. For Richard, as for many community members, Lytton’s archives didn’t only exist in the footprints of museums.
RICHARD: This is an old, um, drill that they used to use to drill the holes in track. These down here are hay tongs. All this paved out stuff here was called Caboose Park because we had a beautiful 1940s wooden caboose here.
JAYME: Lytton First Nation’s collection of Nlaka’pamux baskets also lived in many places, from personal homes to public institutions. It was the third major collection taken by the fire. John Haugen is an Nlaka’pamux knowledge keeper and lost his mother’s collection of baskets.
JOHN: Other than the Looking First Nation, the collection outside of that that was quite large was my mother and my own personal collection. People would bring my mother or I baskets saying that their family no longer wanted these and they wanted us to have them. So those were the two huge collections in town. And then from the homes that got burnt down, there were probably about 20 homeowners that had varying collections within their own private homes.
JAYME: When John was telling me about the baskets, he also mentioned a collection of Anglican Plates. They’re a type of commemorative dish made by churches to celebrate special events or milestones. The town’s Anglican Church started collecting them to celebrate its 90th birthday in 2012. The plates were the fourth major collection destroyed by the fire and, according to John, the church had a lot.
JOHN: And we knew we had a few of these Anglican plates around. So, we had suggested why don't we try to get 90 of these plates and just put them on display. And so, people brought out from their own home collections and some people had looked in thrift stores and we had gotten really close andmany people thought we had the largest Anglican plate flexion in Canada here in BC Lytton.
JAYME: Lytton is a place where its history is uncommonly present. Piles of rubble produced by mining still mark the landscape. Acacia trees once used to make wagon wheels during the gold rush flourish on the hillsides. Trains frequently pass on the railroad tracks above and below the town.
TRAIN AUDIO
JAYME: Many Chinese communities who emigrated to Canada worked on the railway. Lorna showed me a small green jar that had survived the fire. It is a so-called “ginger jar,” used by Chinese settlers to store pickles and food. The jar is cool to the touch, about four inches high and hexagonal in shape, collaring in from the shoulder to a smooth circular rim. The glaze is a dark jade green, though exposure to heat and ash during the fire has caused the glaze to crackle and change colour, turning it a deep rust in patches. Decorative images, faintly discernible through the layer of glaze, have been pressed into the sides of the jar, each encased in a rectangular frame. Lorna tells me the jar is missing its cork lid, which burned during the fire.
TRAIN AUDIO
JAYME: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Canadian Government built three railways through Lytton. First there was the Canadian Pacific Railway in the late 1800s. It was built to establish coast to coast nationhood in Canada. It was followed by the Canadian National Railway and the Pacific Great Eastern in the early 1900s. Together, they connected towns, encouraged trade, and brought crowds of workers to Lytton. By connecting settler outposts in the province, the Canadian Government used infrastructure to bring First Nations homelands under the nation’s control.
TRAIN AUDIO
JAYME: So let’s slow down for a second. Land is important to the telling of history and its worth being clear about what that means. Most of British Columbia sits on unceded First Nations land—about 95 percent. The Village of Lytton is part of that ninety-five percent. What that means is that across most of the province, treaties were not signed between First Nations and settler governments. Instead, in much of British Columbia, land was just taken from the First Nations people living there, who were told to live on much smaller reserves. This happened through a labyrinthine series of governmental policy and acts including the federal 1876 Indian Act, the 1879 Dominion Lands Act and the Consolidated Railway Act passed in the same year, as well as the provincial 1916 McKenna McBride Royal Commission, among countless others. Embedded in each are provisions of land for the passage and financing of the railway.
TRAIN AUDIO
MARIO SORIANO:
An Act respecting the Canadian Pacific Railway. (44 Victoria. chapter. 1—1881) Schedule—Contract, dated 21st October, 1880, Schedule A, referred to in the foregoing Contract. Section 12. The Government shall extinguish the Indian title affecting the lands herein appropriated, and to be hereafter granted in aid of the railway.
JAYME: To build the railway, railway companies needed money and they needed land. The government facilitated this by simply taking land from landholders and giving it to the railway company, who could then build on it and sell any extra to raise funds. These “railway belts” often eroded the already small portions of reserve land that were allocated to First Nations communities.
JAYME: The Railway Belt extended approximately 20 miles (32 km) on either side of the railway.
JAYME: In 1914, Billy Sigh of nearby Boston Bar testified to the McKenna McBride Commission. In a transcript of that testimony, he explains:
MARIO SORIANO:
“I have had some trouble with the C.P.R. They want to take my land—that is, the land I have been living on for some years. They told me I would have to leave there because it belonged to them. The C.P.R. has moved their fence right up to my house, and they have taken in the principal dwelling part. I am talking about [reserve] No. 2. and they say I will have to move away from there.”
TRAIN AUDIO
JAYME: When the train runs through the town, it’s hard to ignore. It hisses and screams and, if you stand close enough, the ground shakes. It's the feeling of friction: metal on metal. Today the train drowns out the sound of cars on the highway farther up the slope. The highways now follow a similar route along the river.
FADE TRAIN AUDIO
JAYME: When you drive into Lytton, you pass a sign welcoming you to “Canada’s Hotspot” before driving under a CN Rail overpass. Lytton does record the highest temperatures in Canada, and this has to do with its geography. Lytton sits deep inside the Fraser Canyon, which acts like an oven: as the mountainsides heat in the sun, they trap hot air by the valley floor. Sagebrush, Douglas fir and pine trees are fuel for wildfires.
British Columbia faces a fire season every summer. The risk is so high that the whole province is under a seasonal campfire ban. But some years are worse than others, and several factors determine how intense a fire season will be. And one of them is the heat. In 2021, the entire Pacific Northwest experienced a record-breaking heat wave.
Community members remembered the heat that summer.
LORNA: The two factors that were the big deal in this fire obviously were the extreme heat, but also Lytton is always windy or almost always.
JAYME: That’s Lorna, who started the Chinese History Museum.
LORNA: The day of the fire, I was out just keeping my yard spiffy. When I went home, I said to Bernie, it's the weirdest thing because the, even the acacia trees don't like this heat. Their leaves were crumbling, like a dried herb.
JAYME: On June 30th, the day after Lytton reached 49.6 degrees Celsius—that’s 121 in Fahrenheit—the conditions are just right for fire. As Mike Flannigan, the research chair for predictive services, emergency management, and fire science at nearby Thompson Rivers University explains, it was hot, and this created the perfect conditions for wildfire.
MIKE: The previous all-time record high temperature for Canada prior to the 2021 episode was 45 degrees Celsius. Lytton broke that on the 27th, broke it again on the 28th, broke it again on the 29th, 49.6 degrees Celsius.
The wind is blowing strong. The fields are crispy. You walk them and you go crunch, crunch, crunch.
Then you get little burning embers. It's almost like a leapfrog process. And then it starts building a column. And it just moves in the direction of the wind most intensely and most rapidly.
And ire is opportunistic, it's probing, it's searching for something to burn. If it finds something, away we go.
JAYME: Once there was ignition, the fire burned fast, reaching town in under 20 minutes.
RICHARD: One of the worst things about the fire was it happened so darn quickly.
RICHARD: I came into town to pick my wife up at about 10 to 5.
JAYME: This is Richard from the Lytton Museum and Archives.
RICHARD: And there was smoke at that end of town. And I drove down to have a look and see what was going on. And the fire came over the edge of the road and jumped across the road where the railway tracks are. I went up and I turned around and came back and by that time, a friend of mine’s house was burning at the end of main street, right there, couple of doors from Lorna’s museum.
LORNA: My daughter phoned me and said, mom, there's a fire in town. And then all my husband and I could think of was, the whole town is going, we knew it already. I didn't think about my two sons' houses, I didn't think about the museum, I didn't think about her store. We just went and got our daughter, got her to get her staff outta town and, and then we left.
It was so quick. The whole town burned in 26 minutes.
JAYME: Residents chose between three evacuation routes from Lytton: northwest to Lillooet, northeast to Kamloops, or southeast to Merritt. Most people stayed with friends and family. The fire kept burning for days.
PATRICK: I checked, oh shit, I've lost my house. Holy shit, I've lost my hometown. We lost our data, we lost our survey pins, we lost everybody.
JAYME: This is Patrick Michell again.
PATRICK: It wasn't just a portion of the town, it wasn't just a house. An entire town that is a catastrophic loss that had never happened in Canada before.
JAYME: The Lytton fire was unique in its total destruction of the community: after the fire, there was nothing to return to, nowhere for residents to gather. But there are many ways to measure the scale of a fire. That same summer, the Sparks Lake Fire near Kamloops caused a kind of fire-thunderstorm—called a pyrocumulonimbus—that generated thousands of lightning strikes. In 2016, the Fort McMurray Fire in Alberta forced 88,000 people to evacuate. And in 2003, the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire consumed 239 homes in Kelowna and threatened the town, forcing the evacuation of 27,000 residents.
I grew up in Kelowna, which is just a couple hours from Lytton, and spent about three weeks evacuated from my home that summer. I had many friends that lost their houses, their family photographs, all their clothing. I remember checking the news daily to see if my family’s home had been taken; and I remember the night the wind changed, blowing the fire from within a few hundred feet of our home back into the mountains.
And since 2003, wildfire seasons are getting worse. Since the 1970s, the area burned in Canada has doubled, and in the western United States, it's quadrupled. Just three years prior in 2018, the most destructive fire in California's history leveled the town of Paradise, killing 85 people. This past summer in 2023, a wildfire destroyed the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, killing 98 people.
MEDIA CLIPS: Dozens of wildfires continue to torch the western US and Canada. // The snake river complex is the highest priority wildfire. // Cornville fire. // California, the Caldor Fire // Telegraph, Mezcal, and Slate Fires // the Hoover Ridge fire // thousands of evacuees in limbo // whipping winds will again fan ferocious flames today // experts are having to find new ways to convey just how extreme the situation is.
I asked Mike Flannigan, the fire expert, about the relationship between climate change and wildfire. He says that there are three ways that climate change impacts fire season.
MIKE: The warmer it gets, the longer the fire season is. Fire season starts earlier, ends later.
Second, the warmer it is, the more lightning we expect. All things being equal, more lightning means more fire. 50% of the fires in Canada are started by lightning, but they're responsible for most of the area burned. Third reason is probably the most complicated, but probably the most important. As the atmosphere warms, the ability of the atmosphere to suck moisture out of those dead fuels on the forest floor increases almost exponentially. The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start, the easier it is for a fire to spread, and it means more fuel is available to burn.
JAYME: When I talked to Mike, in the summer of 2023, Canada was experiencing its worst wildfire season on record.
MEDIA CLIPS: Tens of millions of people have been warned about potentially dangerous air quality as intense wildfires burn across Canada // Today, the sun rose over the Northeast shrouded in smoke. Haze covering Manhattan’s skyline and bridges and the Washington Monument in D.C. // Forest fires are a reoccurring nightmare // and with the heat rising and no rain in the foreseeable future, conditions will remain ripe for more fires.
While the Donnie Creek Fire burned in northern British Columbia, the eastern provinces like Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario also faced record-breaking fires. The fires were so bad that smoke was changing the air quality across the continent.
MIKE: I've done research in climate change and fire for over 30 years. And, you know, some of the models that I produce suggest the west would be where we see the signal first, and then kind of mid-century we'd see it in eastern Canada. Perhaps we're seeing it a lot earlier than mid-century. Perhaps this is the start of what's coming.”
JAYME: On the global scale, climate change is driving more intense and more frequent wildfires. But to Lytton residents, the fire isn’t exactly a climate change story. Residents point out that they live in a fire ecosystem. The Fraser Canyon has always been dry and hot, and it has always burned. But many residents do blame what they believe to be the source of the spark.
On the day of the fire, multiple people saw sparks beneath a CN Railway train as it headed toward Lytton. The first report of the fire happened twenty minutes after the train passed through town.
PATRICK: The first witness was Chief Jordan Spinx from the Kanaka Bar Indian Band. He saw the fire, he was on 911, he's running, and before he got to Lytton, the town was on fire. A dynamite fuse.
JAYME: An investigation by the Transportation and Safety Board of Canada found no evidence that the train started the fire. Still, the Village of Lytton is suing the national railways for running during the heat wave despite the extreme fire risk. The case will go before the BC Supreme Court.
This disjunction between the official and the community account of the fire can feel like another scene in the long history of the railroad where governments and companies neglect the railway’s effect on the local communities who live alongside its tracks.
Even if the fire wasn’t started by the train, the railway company is responsible for caring for weeds and debris along the tracks. Community members like Richard and Patrick point out that the condition of this property is a real risk point for fire.
RICHARD: The railways are terrible. They're just terrible. It used to be that they would, they would take and they would just spray weed killer all the way along. And then the environmental people said, no, no, you can't do that. So the weeds grew up and then there's sparks because it's machinery, heavy machinery, eh?
And there's sparks all over the place and you end up with fires being caused.
PATRICK: Did a spark from that train cause that fire? We can't prove it. Was the ember so hot that just a piece of soot could have fallen off the diesel locomotive and started that fire? It’s a possibility. Lytton burned down, but we don't know the cause yet. Do we need to? It doesn't matter how the goddamn fire started, what matter is it started on your property and burnt my house.
JAYME: What caused the fire isn’t the topic of this story. But as I spoke to people in the community, I came to understand that how one defines what caused the fire has a huge role in how recovery happens. If the train caused the fire, the railroad company might be liable for the damage. If climate change caused the fire, as the government said, then the solution would be to build back “net zero,” which has massively delayed rebuilding. If the cause was simply because it is a fire ecosystem and the community did not fully implement so-called “fire smart” practices, then “net zero” is not necessary, only an improvement of fire-aware planning and maintenance. Stories matter: they have an important role in how communities recover—not just their physical homes, but their local cultures and connections too.
MUSICAL BRIDGE
JAYME: In 2021, Lytton lost four major collections in less than an hour. The plates, the baskets, the Lytton Museum and archive, the Chinese History Museum. Almost nothing remains. Even the town’s bylaws were burned, as was the backup—which was stored in the basement of the Lytton Museum and Archives—and they’ve needed to be rewritten from scratch. These losses are in many ways irrevocable—many of the objects and documents simply can’t be replaced.
Two years after the fire, stewards are still grappling with how to rebuild. Their commitments to their collections show that archives are not inert repositories of documents and artifacts but community collections that connect generations and carry histories forward. As they move forward, stewards are facing big questions. How can these archives and museums continue when most of their objects are gone? What gives archives like the ones Lytton lost meaning to the people who steward them and to the communities around them?
MUSICAL BRIDGE
Part 5
We tend to think of archives and museums as separate from regular daily life—they are cleaner than other spaces, more regulated, they are climate-controlled, and have extensive mechanisms for protecting objects from security guards to glass casements. However, archives and museums are still ecological spaces: a spider might build a web in a corner, dust might gather, a pipe might burst and mold and mildew could grow in a wall. As much as they might try to be outside of ecological processes, they are very much embedded in them, and as climate change leads to more frequent extreme weather events, the risk of a flood, a fire, or some other ecological crisis invading the pristine space of an archive is growing. We’re seeing examples unfold in real time, and across large and small institutions. In 2017, melting permafrost caused a flood at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and imperiled seed samples. In 2018, a fire at the National Museum of Brazil resulted in Alexandria-level losses of cultural material. In 2020, a fire at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City led to fire losses in the display collection and extensive water damage in the archives.
In Lytton, it wasn’t just part of a collection that was lost: it was everything from the four main collections—not to mention the personal collections that live in trunks and on bookshelves in peoples’ houses. Consider the scale of the loss:... not only were these collections lost, but everything down to the town’s bylaws, tax documents, and financial records were gone. The fire incinerated the material that would provide the foundation for recovery.
As a place-based, research-driven story series, Archival Ecologies will look at how communities move forward from events like the 2021 fire. This first season will tell the stories of Lytton’s cultural institutions through the voices of the people stewarding its four main collections, and through the places and histories surrounding them. You can expect a deep dive into objects and their histories, an introduction to the multicultural geographies of the Fraser Canyon, close-up looks at each collection and the people stewarding them, interviews with archive and preservation experts, and a range of perspectives on what collections mean and what recovery from loss looks like.
As stewards and conservators grapple with the loss of collections, they talk about what was lost, describe the many challenges of recovery, and consider the broader implications of how to protect and carry forward the stories that archives and objects hold in the face of continued risk. The new collections stewards imagine sometimes look quite different than the ones they had—instead of a collection, for example, perhaps a community center for teaching cultural practices, instead of an object, digital repositories of photographs, documents, and 3-D scanned objects. In these differences stewards show a variety of approaches to what it might look like to recover from an event like the Lytton fire. These differences also signal important cultural transformations that are becoming more pervasive as extreme weather events become more frequent and widespread.
As researchers, we’re really interested in how climate change is changing our relationship to cultural material, to the stories we tell about who we are. If archives and collections let us tell histories to better know ourselves in the present, and to imagine where we might go, what happens when those objects are no longer there? What kinds of stories do we tell and how do we tell them? How do we imagine the futures we might move into?
In the coming episodes we’ll dive into the archival ecologies of the Lytton area and its cultural collections. Stay tuned for more on how our cultures are changing with the weather.
Archival Ecologies is created and hosted by Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University. For their support and expertise, we also thank, at Princeton, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Humanities Council, and the Office of the Dean of Research, as well as Kouvenda Media. This project has also received invaluable research support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath, and Molly Taylor. Voiceover by Mario Soriano. Music by Hamilton Poe.
Two years after a devastating 2021 wildfire burned through much of their village center, community members gather in Lytton, British Columbia for a prayer walk. Big questions inspire and inflect the event: How can the community rebuild? And what will the new community look like? Lytton community members weigh in on preserving their multicultural histories and recovering community identity when the artifacts and cultural collections that represented them are gone.
Pauline and Ernie Michell, Pastoral Elders from Nlaka’pamux nation, at a multi-faith rebuilding blessing event on the second anniversary of the Lytton Fire (June 30, 2023). Photo by Molly Taylor.
A sign welcoming drivers to Lytton, Canada’s “hotspot” in the Fraser Canyon region of British Columbia. Photo by Molly Taylor.
Community members walk along Main Street through Lytton, British Columbia on June 30, 2023, two years to the day after a devastating wildfire burned down much of the town. Photo by Molly Taylor.
A “ginger jar” from Lorna’s collection that survived the fire in the Lytton Chinese History Museum. The fire has turned the jade-green glaze a rust red in patches. The jar is missing its cork lid, which burned during the fire. Photo by Jayme Collins.
A CN Rail train passing above the site of Lytton’s Chinese History Museum, still fenced off. Photo by Jamie Rodriguez
Episode 2: Salvage
Archival Ecologies Episode 2: “Salvage”
Full Trascript
Lorna
We came by her and there was a little, um, towel put out, and then there were like 10 little half broken ornaments on there that they were spraying. It was something to decontaminate them and that's what they were finding in her to remember her whole house by.
Heidi
Because it was three months later, the entire site was covered in sunflowers that had seeded from bird feeders, or we don't know where they came from but they were growing in almost every property possible. So there was this strange, beautiful thing happening amongst these ruins.
Jayme
Welcome back to Archival Ecologies, a story series about the intersections between archives and cultural collections and the environments where they reside. This season, we’re traveling to the historic town and reserves of Lytton, a small town in the Fraser Canyon region of British Columbia that burned down in a 2021 wildfire. Archival Ecologies is led and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University.
[instrumental interlude]
Archival Footage: News Broadcasters
“Lorna’s museum, along with the village office—nothing stood a chance.”
“The collection was second only to the Royal BC museum and it was one of the most important ones in North America.”
Jayme
In this episode, we’ll follow just one of the many stories of salvage and recovery that have defined the area’s archival ecologies since the fire—the story of the Lytton Chinese History Museum and its founding director, Lorna Fandrich.
Archival Footage: News Broadcasters
“Lorna Fandrich is trying to rebuild the Lytton Chinese History Museum and, like many other businesses, is hitting one roadblock after roadblock.”
“The process has been heartbreaking but also rewarding for Lorna, who's determined to rebuild.”
Jayme
We start this episode’s story in a small patch of grass next to a parking lot near the Stein Valley Nlakapamux School, the community based independent school on the Lytton First Nation reserve just 5 minutes north of the Lytton town center. A music festival called Two Rivers Remix is under way in a field behind the school on a plateau elevated above the river. The grass has been mowed. It’s green still, but dry and spiky to the touch from the threat of the desert’s heat, even now in early summer. It’s late June and the Fraser Canyon typically won’t reach its hottest for a few more weeks. And yet, music festival volunteers circulate with spray wands, dousing the grass in water to prevent the outbreak of fire. There are electrical wires criss-crossing the field to power the musical equipment.
There isn’t anything remarkable about this particular patch of grass, and yet with each step, grasshoppers erupt from the ground around me, otherwise invisible in the small shade available between the blades of grass. With each step a new wave crests away from me: this small patch of earth is brimming with grasshoppers.
[grasshopper sound]
Grasshoppers have always lived in this ecosystem, although they haven’t always been welcome. Embedded in the grasshoppers is a story about contamination and about the residues of history that, though unseen, live in the soil and continue to shape how humans, animals, and insects make life here.
[grasshopper sound]
In the 19th century, across the arid grassy regions of the interior of British Columbia that includes Lytton, settlers established ranches, grazing cattle across the Bunchgrass plateaus that border the region’s rivers. During this time, grasshopper irruptions rarely posed a problem. By the late 19th century however, overgrazing and other land management practices that attended colonization gave rise to grasshopper swarms that damaged grasslands and negatively impacted cattle grazing. As cattle herds grew, grass everywhere became smaller, younger, and more tender, providing good food for the grasshoppers who preferred the fresh sprouts. A feedback loop: Unregulated grazing transformed the grassland habitat into prime grasshopper habitat, which in turn threatened the cattle industry.
Focused on ranchers’ livelihoods, the provincial government chose not to regulate grazing activity and instead launched a pesticide campaign that applied chemical agents—arsenic in particular—to large swathes of land in an attempt to control the grasshopper population. While the results are sparsely recorded in the historical record, there is evidence that the poison did not only kill grasshoppers. Chickens and some cattle were also killed while the wider ecological effects on wildlife and on waterways remain unknown.
In this period, the government also lobbied First Nations residents to treat their land with the same chemicals, perhaps in a place like the patch of grass I stood in last summer. In one recorded instance from the 19th century, the poison killed cattle, chickens, and made several children ill on one reserve. That community then refused to place any more on their land. But that isn’t to say the arsenic wasn’t all around them, didn’t leach into the water, foods, wildlife, and soils.
The soil stores the residues of these chemicals, just as it stores other fragments of history. Surviving in this landscape is to survive contamination and to navigate the histories embedded in the soil. The story of surviving the fire is no different. After the fire, the soil beneath the village of Lytton was contaminated by incinerated building materials; at the same time, it became an archaeological site. Patches of earth that buildings had covered for a hundred years were revealed, making it possible to excavate for artifacts, especially from the First Nations village that was there before it was Lytton.
Patrick
The mayor sits down here and he does something different. He talks to the province, says, look, I'm a little concerned ‘cause many of these buildings here were built in the early 1900s, 1920s, the ones that weren't lost to various fires. So can we test the soil? The soil tests come back. It's 584 pages long.
There's immediate risk to health and safety in the water, in the air, and in the soil.
Jayme
This is Patrick Michel, retired chief of the Kanaka Bar Indian Band and lifelong Lytton resident who lost his house in the fire. In the summer of 2023, two years after the fire, the town center is still a mess of dry dirt, weeds, concrete, plastic, rebar, styrofoam, and other building material pockmarked by huge holes—evidence of the effort to ascertain and remove contaminants that the fire released into the soil. This landscape is a visceral reminder of the slow pace of recovery.
Richard
Um, what would be the right word? Discouraging, yeah.
They had to take off dirt. And then when they took the dirt off, they decided that, oh yes, but it's a historical site, so we have to do archaeological.
Jayme
Richard Forrest is showing us around the site of the Lytton Museum and Archives, which he founded and continues to steward. As Richard describes, central to the recovery process has been de-contamination, which has involved arduous processes of repeatedly testing and removing soil. In British Columbia, given provincial regulations about digging in sensitive cultural areas where there may be First Nations archaeological material, this work has needed to be done in collaboration with archaeologists. The ground here is more than biological matter—it’s also a historical archive of life, from pre-colonial settlement patterns through to the industrial and chemical infrastructures of contemporary life.
Patrick
The problem is the archeologists couldn't come until the contamination was done, but the contamination couldn't come in until the archeologist cleared the land.
30 yards from us they found human remains.
Richard
So between the two of them, it's been two years.
Jayme
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, concerns about contamination forestalled any opportunities for the recovery of cultural and community collections in the burn zone.
Kasey
We couldn't gain access to the site for a full three months afterwards.
Jayme
This is Kasey Lee, an object conservator and one of the founding members of the British Columbia Heritage Emergency Response Network. This province-wide organization trains conservators and community members in the protection and recovery of heritage materials during emergency situations and organizes response teams. Kasey was on the ground in Lytton during a salvage operation for cultural material that survived the fire.
Kasey
It was declared a contaminated site, um, they had, you know, the products of combustion and Lord knows what else, asbestos and... mold.
It was evident by October that there were some cultural sites that could possibly be salvaged. And the sooner the better. Winter was coming and things were exposed.
Jayme
For three months after the late June fire, artifacts and other significant materials sat out in the weather, exposed to the elements—including a cumulative 14 centimeters of rainfall—to contaminants, to nesting and burrowing animals, and to other curious interlopers. To survive both the fire and this period of exposure, any one object needed to be very durable—metals and ceramics, say, instead of paper or plant material—and was probably buried in protective layers of ash.
But by fall, time was of the essence.
Winter was coming fast and the site was still under quarantine: not even residents had been allowed back to see what remained of their homes. Then, one month after the team of conservators finally gained access to the site, atmospheric rivers drenched the province, causing mudslides in the burned areas that devastated the highway system in the province. Two years later, that too was still being rebuilt.
Across three weekend-long visits, the conservators worked across all the heritage sites in Lytton, but they were particularly successful in salvaging material at the Lytton Chinese History Museum, in part because of the nature of the collection: ceramics are designed to survive fire.
Lorna
I just knew that if it wasn't pottery, I'm not gonna find it. You know, I just knew it was, yeah, it was past that already.
I've had many people ask me why I'm still rebuilding. There may not be a community, there may not be tourists. Uh, two reasons. I still wanna tell the Chinese story. And because, um, I don't wanna be one of the businesses that bails on the town either. So whatever small contribution I can make, I would like to go ahead.
Jayme
Opened in 2017 on the site of a former Joss House or Chinese temple building in central Lytton, the Lytton Chinese History Museum aims to carry forward the histories and experiences of Chinese settlers and migrant workers in the area.
Lorna
And so 2015 it became a BC Chinese historical site and then it's also on a Canadian registry. And with that then I thought, okay, I have credibility with the Chinese community now.
And so then I just went ahead and decided to build it in 2016 and we opened in 2017. And then of course, as you know, it lasted from 2017 till 2021 when the fire occurred and we lost everything. There were 1600 pieces there
Jayme
In one sense, the museum has always been a project of recovery—recovery of a site whose significance to the town as a Joss House had been forgotten, recovery of an undertold history of objects and the people and lives for whom they were meaningful.
Lorna
So for the original museum in 2016, I only had 200 artifacts. Some from here, some from, actually, Kumsheen because there was a railway camp here in 1883. And so I had very little and then as I started putting up the building, a man, Al Dreyer from Lillooet, came and asked me if I would like to buy his collection. That was just over 800 pieces and he had collected them over the years from Lillooet, Lytton, and Ashcroft.
Jayme
Much of Lorna’s collection came from local sites, gathered by residents from the landscape: objects sometimes on old trash sites or just next to the river where people would walk. Objects lay out in the weather for decades, becoming embedded in the landscape to persist as history.
Lorna
He would go to the common sites. So for example, in Lytton, a lot of the pieces that he collected were just over the bank from what is the reserve end of the town. And that's because at that time, everybody just threw all of their garbage over the bank, towards the river. So that was the beginning.
So upstairs we just sort of began with talking about people coming for the gold rush. Artifacts there were partly from here, um, things like mule shoes or gold pan or things that we found on this site actually.
And then, um, about 12 miles up the Fraser, there was a Chinese mining camp there. It's on indigenous land. And so Bill Paul, um, lives on that land. And so he brought me a lot of, a lot of pieces more to do with mining or, or household things, you know, that had been out beside the river for years. Very rusted.
Jayme
Lorna also gathered objects from Chinese settlers who had since moved away from the Lytton area and who chose to donate their objects to the museum to tell the history of their family in this place.
Lorna
And the ones I feel the most sad about are the things I got from the Chung family that were here.
So I’ve got pieces of their mom's diary, I think it was their wedding skirt, and lots of documents about, they leased land from other people here to grow vegetables in the 1920s. And those are the things, uh, I'm really sorry I lost. I have photos of them luckily, but, uh, I did lose those. For the Chong family, that was tough, yeah.
Jayme
In the wake of the wildfire, Lorna has been determined to recover these histories for a second time by rebuilding the museum.
Lorna
It's a difficult decision when you're just told, okay, you're leaving now, and what do you take, you know, we have the bags packed for the insurance, your personal items, but deciding what to take. So if I'd gone in the museum, I know I wouldn't have thought of a thing, but it was too late anyway. It was way too late.
Just gone, you know? Oh, I mean, what can you say? It's gone
Jayme
Intermixed with Lorna’s commitment to rebuilding is this profound sense of loss. While much of the museum’s collection has a digital record, many of the pieces are irreplaceable. Rebuilding therefore raises a number of questions: how do you create a local history museum with only a few surviving objects, themselves significantly altered by the fire? What stories do these remaining objects tell? Can newly acquired objects—some of which may come from different areas—convey the same local histories?
For Lorna, the power of objects inheres in the stories people attach to them, and in the intergenerational memories and family histories that stir in people when they encounter a familiar item.
Lorna
Once two ladies came, they were from Edmonton. There’s a 60 year old and she had brought along her aunt and aunt’s friend and they were like 90 and they came in and they went into the room where I have all the medicine bottles and they started talking really excitedly.
And they just started laughing and talking to me and saying, oh yeah, this medicine here, I mean, they're 90, right? My mom used to force us to take this all the time and it tastes terrible. They couldn't believe there would still be a bottle around of this terrible stuff, you know? So those are the things that were fun for me when people came in and it just brought back this memory of their early time, which is yeah, pretty good.
I tried to convince one of those ladies to just stay, to tell stories all summer, but it didn't work.
History of Gold rush
Jayme
The history of Chinese settlers in central British Columbia is shaped by absence—of
documentation, of artifacts, and of first-hand accounts. According to the predominant narratives, that history begins when the gold rush reaches the province in spring 1858, at which point British Columbia is colloquially known as “Gold Mountain.”
March 22, 1858, Puget Sound Herald
Newspaper voiceover
“LATE AND IMPORTANT FROM VICTORIA, VANCOUVER ISLAND
GOLD DISCOVERY CONFIRMED!
Rich gold fields found on Fraser’s and Thompson’s rivers
By the arrival at this port yesterday of the schooner Wild Pigeon, Captain Jones, we have been put in possession of late and highly interesting intelligence from the goldfields of the Shuswap country. Captain Jones reports that the excitement relative to the gold fields lately discovered on Fraser’s and Thompson’s rivers is very great.”
Jayme
Piles of rubble from this period that stand taller than a person can still be seen along the rivers in the region, and even in the middle of towns like nearby Lillooet. They are reminders of how foundational gold rush history is to life here. And mining continues to shape the region’s ecology—to this day, people can still stake claims for so-called “placer mines,” which involve digging up gravel adjacent to streams (either by hand or with excavation equipment) to find the gold flakes within it. It is remarkably easy and cheap to stake these claims. There’s an online registration and a nominal fee of a couple of hundred dollars and these claims can be made within private property and on First Nations reserve land. These informal mining operations never undergo environmental assessment despite there being evidence that they have a negative effect on salmon stock and on the broader river ecology.
The Fraser Canyon gold rush would last less than 10 years, petering out by the mid 1860s, but it utterly transformed life in the area. The Fraser Canyon War broke out in June 1858 between predominantly white miners staking claims to land and Nlaka’pamux people defending their territory. The economic boom of the mining industry made the land very valuable to both British and American interests, leading to Britain claiming British Columbia as a colony in August 1858, mere months after the discovery of gold. It became a colony that would go on to join Canadian Confederation in 1871. It was British Columbia joining Confederation that led to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
During this time, many Chinese immigrants arrived in search of a fortune in gold or in search of steady—if dangerous—work on the railroad. After the railroad’s completion in 1885, Chinese workers were left stranded. A series of laws passed by the government between 1875 and 1923, including the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act, disenfranchised Chinese immigrants and their descendants (depriving them of the right to vote) and limited further immigration to the province. The lack of readily available employment in white society led to vibrant communities of small businesses in Chinese enclaves and Chinatowns.
There is one surviving first-hand account of Chinese life in central British Columbia from this period in the Diary of Dukesang Wong, a man who emigrated from China in search of prosperity
and worked in harsh conditions on the Canadian Pacific Railway in the late 1800s. After the railway’s completion, Wong would go on to become a tailor, raising 8 children in the province with his wife.
For many years, Wong’s diary wasn’t known to historians, nor was it collected in a museum. It survived in the family after his death and was translated into English in the 1960s by his granddaughter Wanda Joy Hoe as a school project. The original diary burned in a fire just a few years later, but the translation survived, tucked away in a desk for years until a writer named David McIlwraithe learned of its existence when he encountered a fragment in a small museum in the Fraser Canyon. He reached out to the granddaughter and facilitated publication.
While only pieces of Dukesang Wong’s diary survived the years, it is an invaluable first-hand account of the harsh labor conditions and day-to-day lives of Chinese railroad workers
in British Columbia. It is a crucial document of illness, starvation, dangerous work, and racism. Today, the English translation can be found in bookstores and libraries all over North America.
Reader for Dukesang Wang’s Diary
“My soul cries out. I wish I had never experienced such bad days as those in which we now live. Many of our people have been so very ill for such a long time, and there has been no medicine nor good food to give them…. The white doctor has told us the illnesses come from lack of fresh food, but we cannot grow any fresh food, as all of us, including the white people, are moving constantly with the work we have to do.” (p. 59)
Jayme
Many such firsthand histories like Wong’s diary live tossed over an embankment in a junk pile or tucked away in a drawer. Nor do all such histories need to be public. But Lorna’s museum was a place that brought disparate documents and objects together—a project of salvage and recovery that held space for the personal histories that have shaped life in this landscape.
Lorna
To me, having the physical objects there instead of a photo, for example, has more value in my mind. But at the same time, if you didn't have those, at least have a digital collection, you can still tell the story. That's what we're about, right. We're not about having, you know, 25 pots or 10 old cars we're about what, what happened with the old car?
Jayme
Lorna’s approach to recovery from the fire is shaped by a similar spirit of salvage and recovery.
[music]
Lorna
This is where the cement walls were still here, right?
Jayme
Standing at the site of her museum, Lorna remembers what she saw her first time back, 3 months after the fire.
Lorna
So everything had. Fallen down and had burned. And so there was about 14 inches of
ash with just a bit of metal which was like the stove, the fridge, uh, ducting. And, and a few of the display cases were still showing, but right here is where some of them were melted to the cement with the melted glass, and they were standing up in the air like this.
Because the glass had hardened before they actually fell.
Jayme
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, local stewards reached out to BC Heritage Emergency Response Network. I talked to two conservators—Kasey and Heidi—who were on the ground during the salvage mission in Lytton.
Heidi
I'm Heidi Swierenga, and we're here at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, where I am the Senior Conservator and Head of the Collections Care Management and Access Program. I'm on the steering group of the BC HERN, the British Columbia Heritage Emergency Response Network.
A few local conservators kind of stepped back from those incidences and said, well, surely, there must be some organized response to a heritage after an emergency. And so we started looking across Canada to see if there were other, any other processes out there, and we quickly found that no, there was nothing out there that already existed within the country for emergency response of collections after an emergency or a disaster. Heritage seemed to be this missing piece of the puzzle, both for response and recovery.
We were contacted at the outset by John Hogan and Laura Fandrich just by email saying, This has happened. We don't know what's going on. Hoping you can help in the future.
Jayme
It would be three months before anything happened.
Heidi
We were contacted by Team Rubicon Canada, who turned out was one of the first NGOs who was given the permitting to gain access to the site, which, which community members and family members still hadn't been able to get back.
Kasey
I don't know that much about Rubicon, but they enabled us to gain access to the site, and provided us with the advanced training in personal protective equipment that we needed, got insurance in place, made us these what they call spontaneous volunteers.
Heidi
We were at the Lytton Museum and Archives. And then we were working with John Hogan on a couple locations, uh, within the community. And most significantly, it was the Elgin, the historical Church.
That first trip, we were driven through the site to get to Lorna's museum. And, and the
only way to describe it was gutting. Uh, the, bottom of your stomach dropped out.
It was, it was shocking how different it was from site to site. And how different the recovery outcomes were, or the salvage outcomes I should say.
Jayme
Conservators like Heidi and Kasey are experts at dealing with contamination. I’m meeting Heidi in Vancouver at the Museum of Anthropology, which is closed for seismic upgrades. Because of the loud construction noise, we’re meeting in the museum’s cavernous basement in the textile storage room. To enter the room, I walk across a sticky mat designed to remove bugs, dirt, or bacteria from my shoes and protect the delicate collections from outside contaminants. But the objects in such collections can themselves also sometimes be contaminated from historic conservation practices (like dousing objects in toxic chemicals) or from the heavy metals used in old bookbinding practices.
Kasey
Anyone who had access at that point had to be with an escort. We had masks on our faces from the time that we turned off the highway.
Jayme
Even for conservators trained to work with contamination, the learning curve to work in the Lytton burn site was steep.
Kasey
This was over the top of anything that we had done before. And because of the level of contamination, the hazard involved, there were very specific protocols - they had to train us in the use of these really heavy duty yellow rubberized suits. It had the masks and the goggles and the hoods and, several layers of gloves and everything was taped up so that there was no chance for any nasties getting to our bodies. It requires two or sometimes three people to get each person into this equipment. And then out of it again.
Jayme
Conservators spent a day and a half at Lorna’s site, descending in the ash-filled outline of
the museum and its basement, sifting carefully through the site for any objects
that survived the fire.
Kasey
There was a lot of rubble, a lot of cement and stone and ash, as well as the remains of metal display cases and melted glass.
Jayme
It was initially a very slow process to find a way through the remains of the building safely and without risking further damage.
Heidi
When we got there, it was three months later. So, all of that sediment had been rained on and settled and compacted.
Kasey
There was this incredibly irregular surface with holes underneath. You didn't know where
your foot was going to go through, or where you were going to trip on, on something that you couldn't see because it was just out of your line of sight. So, uh, a lot of the first day was just spent clearing a pathway and making it safe to be down there. It wasn't really until the second day that we started finding things.
Jayme
Conservators worked closely with local stewards in the recovery process. Both Kasey and Heidi reflected on how integral Lorna was to the salvage operation at the Lytton Chinese History Museum.
Kasey
It was so important that Lorna Fandrich was there with us. She was our consultant. She was
Really the ring master for the whole operation.
Heidi
Lorna, for example, drew us a map. When we got there to say, all right, here's the staff room. Don't worry about that area. Here's the collection storage area. When you get down there, this corner is more important than that other corner. And then also critically, as we were able to recover items from the site and bring them up to the surface, Lorna was the one who would be reviewing everything and making decisions on the spot about what would be cleaned and retained versus what would be considered, uh, not keepable.
Jayme
As conservators brought objects out of the site, they were carefully washed, sorted, and packed away.
Kasey
We had to remove these from the heavily contaminated basement, and they were brought up to the people, um, on ground level, where we'd set up a succession of wash basins.
So decontamination was our, our main goal there. We weren't doing conservation treatments like we would normally do in a lab. We weren't mending things and we weren't even really cleaning them we were rinsing them off. We were helping Lorna to identify things that were
encrusted with dirt and ash. So that helped her decision making process. And we were also creating a discard pile. So, a lot of what we brought up, it was in such bad shape that Lorna said, No, I can't use that, you know, it's really not exhibitable.
Lorna
That's an oxen shoe, half of an oxen shoe. I think they're hard to come by. And, uh, I don't think I'll find another one. It's part of the, you know, wagon road gold rush story to have those. So I'll keep that one even though it's very damaged.
Jayme
Although many of the items that the team recovered were damaged beyond use, Lorna was able to salvage around 200 pieces in various states—including several so-called “railway teapots.”
Lorna
Those teapots were important to me. They're called railway teapots. And it's because at the top they have this little design, two parallel lines with lines like this. I don't think it has anything to do with the railway, but people call them that. But they were commonly imported during the railway period.
Jayme
Heidi describes her memory of bringing one of these tea-pots out of the site.
Heidi
We brought one out and it looked like a bit of an alien when we brought it out. It had this
mass over top of it. It turned out to be a melted glass display shelf. So the, the wonderful thing, the conservation thing is that the melting temperature of the glass was lower than the glaze itself.
Jayme
The railway pot was glazed in tin, which meant that unlike some other ceramics, the glass did not fuse to the surface and instead might have actually protected the teapot, but it did pose an unusual recovery challenge.
Heidi
Because of that different melting temperatures, we were able to get that glass sheet off very easily and there was absolutely no impact to the glaze itself.
We were looking at it thinking, Well, how the heck are we going to get this glass sheet off because it was molded around it? But we could see it wasn't fused. And Tara, the lovely paper conservator, who's not an object person, came up with a hammer and said, I can get that off.
And she tapped the glass sheet with the hammer in the perfect way and it just shattered and broke right off. And then I was left standing there with a perfect teapot. Only a paper conservator would have done that.
Jayme
Heidi and Kasey are conservators trained in and committed to the protection, restoration, and responsible management of cultural material. But as they described the process of removing objects from the Lytton burn site, they dwelled less on the challenge of returning objects to their original states, and more on the connection between the recovery of objects and the recovery of the community. They reflected, for example, on how as objects came out of the ruins of her museum, Lorna herself seemed to grow.
Kasey
We first got there, she was devastated more than anybody. And you could see that in her posture and the look on her face and just the way she was speaking. She was very withdrawn from the whole operation. There were several Eureka moments where there's something here, there's something here, and we'd get very excited and we'd call Lorna over to look down and as we started to bring things up, you could see her posture sort of straighten up, and her speaking and decision making start to strengthen, and with each item that we brought out of the basement, she was more of a participant, and then she was a leader.
You know, our initial aim was capacity building and trying to spread the expertise and bring it to local communities so that they had what they needed in the event of a disaster.
And I think more and more it's become something a little softer than that and it's more about connecting with communities and helping them to heal after a disaster. Because so much of that healing process is reconnecting with even shreds of their material culture that was salvaged. And dealing with that emotional tragedy and upheaval and helping that, just in a very small way, that rebuilding process so that they can get back to some kind of normalcy.
Jayme
Even the broken objects conservators uncovered at the site held promise for remaking the Lytton community.
Heidi
There was this little shard of a porcelain teacup with a white, with a blue painted flower on it. And it was a tiny cup, and it was, it was broken, there was only a section of the cup and I thought, well. I'm sure Lorna isn't going to want this, but I'm going to send it up anyway because the flower is so beautiful and I didn’t think about it again until I heard that Lorna, as part of the sorting process, when she found it, was delighted because it was an extremely rare pattern. And, uh, I'm not sure if it was this one or another one, but it had already lived through another cataclysmic event of some kind, and this was the second time she was seeing it. And it, it brought her much joy.
[music]
Lorna
It's just a matter of getting, getting to that step.
Jayme
Lorna plans to rebuild the museum and hopes to break ground this spring of 2024.
Lorna
I've been just stalling, waiting till they say, okay, you can actually put in a building permit because there was a huge change with the bylaws between the old council and the new council about what would be required.
Jayme
It’s been a painstaking and at times exasperating project. As with the decontamination process, there have been ongoing delays in all aspects of rebuilding, from permitting to bylaws to new environmental building requirements. In the meantime, Lorna has been gathering new objects for the new museum.
Lorna
Some of the other museums were very helpful to me, saying that they had, um, more pieces than they need and would I like them.
So I've been given some of those already. Some of them are waiting until I have a space. Um, several individuals have sent me items. There's a few more coming, like a family who's sending me their mom's wedding dress and a whole pile of her things. She's 95 and having to leave her home, so they're just waiting for me to say I have a good space to keep them.
Jayme
The new museum will be an amalgamation of objects that survived the fire, reproductions from digital images of lost artifacts and documents, and a significant number of new and often donated objects. While the rebuilt collection will be materially different from the destroyed museum, Lorna hopes to steward the same stories.
Lorna
So now I just have the photos without the scans. And so they're not the best, but they'll still tell the story. Right? I can still put them in in that regard.
So there's about 500 pieces I have now, and so they will not be from the Lytton area, but as you know, in every mining camp and every railway camp, the same items were used. So if they're looking the very same as items I had, I'm accepting them and I'm sure I'll be able to tell the story by just, um, perhaps buying a few significant pieces from a couple collectors I know.
I was able to get these little game buttons. So they would've played, um, gambling games with these, and they're made of glass, and they would have a set of black ones and white ones.
Jayme
One small section of the new museum will exhibit damaged items that help tell the story of the Lytton fire itself.
Lorna
We were able to pick out about 200 items. I would say about 40 of those would be, um, good to display other than I'll do one small cabinet that'll talk about the fire. I don't want the fire to be the focus of this museum either.
Jayme
As much as the fire has permanently altered the museum and its collection, Lorna emphasizes that she doesn’t want disaster to overshadow the purpose of the museum itself: telling the story of Chinese settlers and migrant workers in the area. Lorna stresses the imperative of telling that story as vital to how she approaches recovery. Unlike some of the other cultural stewards we’ll hear from in the coming episodes, for Lorna, objects can be replaced provided they can convey and carry forward the same story.
Through this lens: objects spark stories in off-hand encounters or in a joke between siblings; stories gather around objects in the fabric of communities, in family lore, or in entwining people together in their common experiences. For Lorna, it is these kinds of stories that provide the foundation for a community’s recovery from a devastating event like the 2021 fire.
<recorded question>
Jayme
How has the experience of the fire changed how you think about, um, cultural collections?
Lorna
Uh, I think it just pointed out the importance of them in any community because of what we've lost. So in any community, that is your history. That's our history for heaven’s sake. Yeah, even if local people didn't spend a lot of time in the museum, they did spend some time and that was their family's history because so many families here were longstanding
I think it's really important because yeah, we have, we have a past, you know, we're not just starting today.
Jayme
The Lytton Chinese History Museum lost most of its collection during the 2021 wildfire. The institution’s recovery has faced many setbacks. The museum’s rebuilding is more than the recovery of an under-told history—one gathered from among objects in trash heaps, objects littered in the landscape, or guarded in family collections of those dispersed from the Lytton area—the remaking of this museum also participates in a long history of surviving contamination in this landscape.
[music]
The traditions of that survivance have taken many forms; for Lorna and the Chinese history museum, stories are the basis for the survival of a community with a complex history and complex relationships. Telling stories and histories forms the basis for making community in an altered landscape, even as the threat of more fires lingers.
Jayme
In the coming episodes, we’ll dive into more of the archival ecologies of the Lytton area and its cultural collections. Stayed tuned for this ongoing exploration of how cultural histories, memories and practices are changing with the weather.
Archival Ecologies is created and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University. For their support and expertise, we also thank, at Princeton, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Humanities Council, and the Office of the Dean of Research, as well as Kouvenda Media. This project has also received invaluable research support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath, and Molly Taylor. Voiceover by Mario Soriano. Music by Hamilton Poe.
In the wake of the fire, concerns about contamination slow down efforts to salvage material from the burn site. The BC Heritage Emergency Response Network aids Lytton’s organizations—especially the Lytton Chinese History Museum, founded by Lorna Fandrich—to access and recover material from the sites. Most of Lorna’s collection burned, but she was able to recover about 200 objects that will provide the foundation for the new museum. With a combination of salvaged and newly acquired objects, Lorna plans to rebuild the Lytton Chinese History Museum to tell the same story: the history of Chinese life in the Fraser Canyon region.
Newly acquired buttons and game pieces from Lorna Fandrich’s collection for the new Lytton Chinese History Museum. Photo by Jayme Collins.
Concrete, rebar, and plastic litter the site of the former Lytton Chinese History Museum. Photo by Jamie Rodriguez.
Lorna Fandrich giving us a tour of the site of the Chinese History Museum, which used to sit in the large hole in front of her. The large hole is evidence of the contamination remediation process. She will rebuild at the same site. Photo by Jamie Rodriguez.
Episode 3: The Place of Objects
Archival Ecologies Episode 3: “The Place of Objects”
Full Transcript
Jayme
The wind in Lytton is constant.
It blows up the canyon, from the rich delta where the river meets the ocean in Vancouver, from within the territories of multiple Coast Salish peoples. This is where the salmon start their cyclical return up the river to spawn. Moving east, the wind blows through the fertile soils of the Fraser Valley, and then follows the river as it turns abruptly north, moving through the quickly transitioning climates and ecosystems of the northward river: from dense west coast Douglas fir, cedar, and maple rain forests to the arid pine and sagebrush desert ecosystem of Lytton. While it has been known as the Fraser River since the explorer and fur trader Simon Fraser navigated it 1808, the river, in fact, has many names along its length.
Lytton has always been a crossroads—rivers, railroads, and highways meet here. The wind, though, gathers a different topography, embodying connections between the river, oceans, mountains, and the fertile agricultural land as well as the diverse ecosystems that support life here through patterns of sustenance and trade.
Every fall, the salmon return to the river, and the Nlaka’pamux people hang its meat in the wind’s path to dry it and preserve it for winter.
John Haugen
When I was leaving my house the day of the fire, I remembered there were these two big baskets in my bedroom downstairs and I said, I don't own those baskets, and so I went running back downstairs and grabbed them, and then they were the only two baskets that survived the fire at my place.
Jayme
Welcome back to Archival Ecologies, a story series about cultural collections and their relationships to the environments around them. As climate change contributes to more frequent and more extreme weather conditions, archives and community collections are being damaged. This season, we’re traveling to the historic town and reserves of Lytton, a small town in the Fraser Canyon region of British Columbia that burned down in a 2021 wildfire. Archival Ecologies is led and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University.
John
My name is John Haugen and my community knows me because I'm a council member for our community. I do a lot of different things within the community. I’m sort of a knowledge keeper and de facto historian. So I do some things around ceremony, grizzly bear ceremonies, and sometimes name ceremonies. I work a lot with our language.
Jayme
In this episode, we’ll talk to John Haugen, an Nlaka’pamux knowledge keeper and a collector of baskets and other First Nations cultural artifacts. John told us about the cultural collections that were lost on the Lytton First Nation reserve during the 2021 wildfire, including several collections of Nlaka’pamux baskets. The Nlaka’pamux are known as skilled and prolific basketmakers, and basketry is central to the community’s cultural identity. At the time of the fire, the community’s collections of baskets lived in different households and buildings across the reserve. Two of the largest collections were one stewarded by the band, and a family collection stewarded by John himself.
John
The one huge collection was located at the Lytton First Nation. The collection outside of that that was quite large was my mother and my own personal collection. I added to my mother's collection by going to auctions, and she accompanied me a few times to those auctions. So those were the two huge collections in town, and then from the homes that got burnt down, there were probably about 20 homeowners that had varying collections within their own private homes.
Jayme
The losses of these basket collections are devastating. Traditional basket making knowledge had long been undermined by the social upheaval and violence wrought by colonialism and residential school, from whose lasting legacies the community is actively working to recover. For a community focused on preserving and teaching traditional knowledge, ancestral baskets constitute an important connection to tribal history and identity. In this episode we’ll consider the significance of baskets in this community, their importance within Nlaka’pamux food systems, and how John and the wider Lytton First Nation community are moving forward from the devastating loss of baskets that the 2021 fire caused.
John
Post-fire, some of them said this, well, I had this at home and I should have taken a photograph of it, or I should have brought it here, or I should have had it in a fireproof thing.
Jayme
In the wake of the fire, John has had a number of baskets repatriated to him from individuals and institutions who collected them from the community over the last 150 years or so.
John
This one is a berry basket, but it's more of a smaller one. Could be for like a child or a young person. A lady by the name of Diane Miller sent this to us from Surrey, B. C., and it's imbricated with three different colors. The two cherry bark, brown and black, and the canary grass in white, it's very unique and kind of cute. I'm grateful that people think of us and have these to contribute back to our community. This was for when they went fishing and they would put the trout in there. Fairly watertight, like if you looked at this one. And you put it up to the light, you can see no holes that are really coming through, even though it's stitched.
Jayme
Nlaka’pamux basketry is a form of artistic expression intricately tied to community foodways and food security, a relationship shaped by landscapes and economies of settler colonialism in the area in the wake of the Gold Rush. Lytton First Nation’s basket collections testify to the complexity of First Nations cultural survivance in Canada. The relationship between baskets and the ecological and economic systems that support life in the area is an integral part of this story. But so are the stories of how baskets were collected, where they are now, and who today has control over them, as well as the community’s commitments to local cultivation and circulation of basket making knowledge as a living art and as a source of intergenerational connection.
John introduces us to the collections of baskets that were lost to the fire by telling us the stories of their origins and stewardship histories—who collected them, how those people knew the community, and then how the baskets made their way back to Lytton. We can think of these stories as the “provenance” of the objects. John emphasizes that different kinds of provenance are integral to understanding what the baskets and the collections mean.
John
We were fortunate that a woman, her name was Gladys Hunter, she was married to a provincial court judge and in the 1950s and 60s she used to come to our community and she would bring a semi-truck trailer, and it was usually, uh, secondhand goods that people in the Lower Mainland no longer needed, and she was trying to donate them into the reserve community. And so she did that a lot. And then, um, every Christmas she would bring up a truckload of things and Gladys Hunter became really good friends with the lady I mentioned, Rosie Skuki.
And locally there was a ladies club, it was called the Indian Homemakers Association. And once those trucks came around, they would sort them out and decide, oh, this family could benefit from this item, and those kind of things. And uh, so in return, Mrs. Hunter, she was collecting baskets off Rosie while she was doing this kind of charitable work.
Jayme
Hunter, who was married to a provincial court judge, would travel from Vancouver to the Lytton community to donate second hand goods. While there, she would buy baskets from a local basketmaker, Rosie, with whom she had become friends over the years.
John
But when Mrs. Hunter knew her time was getting to the end she wrote out this document and she wanted to repatriate the baskets that she collected over her lifetime back to Lytton. So the band had her huge collection.
Jayme
The baskets and other objects that Hunter had collected from the Lytton First Nation would come back to the community years later, forming the foundation for the band’s community collection.
John also had a personal collection. He inherited a large collection of baskets from his mother and grandmother, who had made efforts to keep cultural material in the community at a time when much of it was being bought and sold to tourists and museums located elsewhere. He would later add to this collection by purchasing baskets and other cultural objects at auctions. John’s interest in preserving Nlaka’pamux cultural knowledge developed from his experiences with his mother and grandmother as a child.
John
I come from a family grouping of eight siblings and when I was five, my grandfather passed away and then my grandmother had the opportunity to move in and share a household with us. So that's where I really started to have a better ear for our language because herself and my mother spoke the language on a daily basis. And so I was able to pick up some of the sounds. And then other people started showing up at our house to record my grandmother through linguistics for her telling stories and connecting people, like she would help again with genealogies and similar things with names.
Jayme
He watched as his mother and grandmother collected baskets and other cultural artifacts.
John
My mother, she did a variety of jobs. Sometimes she had three jobs on the go and she worked when I was younger in a restaurant. And the restaurant owners of the Copper Kettle, one of their sons became a charter student at Simon Fraser University when it first opened. And he went to school to become an archeologist. And his parents in their restaurant used to collect artifacts from local people, like they would bring them in, and my mom was working there and then she started doing the same thing. She took them into a private collection and we also looked for arrowheads on weekends and stuff like that. So she garnered quite a good collection of arrowheads and cultural artifacts. And her sister was a basket maker, [name].
So we had the opportunity to have a lot of baskets from within our own family and then others that she had collected from local basket makers and things like that. And then some were handed down through our family line.
Jayme
As an adult, John has been committed to returning cultural material to the community, and has been an active collector, gaining baskets through donations and by buying them at auction.
John
What I was mainly doing was bidding against baskets that we recognized, or that we knew were, from our community. And we had accumulated quite a few. There was one basket that had Lytton written on there. And there was another one that had an elder's name Paul Nellie written on the basket.
So we knew those had significant connection to our community. And then sometimes people would bring my mother or I basket saying that their family no longer wanted these and they wanted us to have them and. I just knew from how the different women made their baskets and some of them had a signature way they made them in their shapes and things like that. That's just sort of my own learned ability from being around baskets a lot.
Jayme
John’s basket collection not only connected him to his mother and grandmother, but became an archive for intergenerational connection and learning. Having the baskets nearby was crucial.
John
The community would use them as sort of a visual reminder of their connection to their ancestors and for just the pleasing way they were put together.
Basketry is, um, sort of labor intensive from digging the root to cleaning the root and splitting the root, and then making sure you have all the things that are in the same basic shape to go for the wrapping and coiling. And then there's the part of collecting and then dyeing the cherry bark. There's a lot of work even before you start to make a basket to get yourself ready. Pulling a cedar root through is sort of hard, and some women would do that into their eighties and nineties prior, but you won't see that much in today's time. When you poke the cedar root to go to coil it around, you have to pull really hard.
Jayme
Made from materials like cedar roots and wild cherry bark that can be harvested from the local environment or procured in trade with nearby communities, Nlaka’pamux baskets are tied to the ecosystems and cultural networks that have defined and continue to define Nlaka’pamux territory. In this, the baskets might be thought of as maps, signaling places where certain resources were harvested or of familial, economic, and diplomatic networks that allow for the exchange of resources. As wildfires and climate change transform the landscape today, the materials and conditions needed to make baskets are imperiled.
John
It's a challenge on many levels. The climate and the fire would have an effect on basketry, because basketry is depending on the natural materials from cedar roots and the imbrication is dependent on the cherry bark from wild cherry trees. And so they have that connection. And if fire eliminates resources in one area, then where do you really go.
Jayme
John tells us how local resources like cedar root, cherry bark, and salmon have long been integral to the community’s ecological relationships and survival. Those relationships are especially visible when it comes to food security.
John
Having the two rivers here, the huge sockeye salmon runs go right by our doorsteps. So we had the opportunity to really sustain ourselves and know that the salmon were returning every year. So we did have that opportunity to use the resource to the best advantage of trading and getting things that we may not have had locally.
Jayme
Baskets were materially tied to this resource system. One of the first steps in basket making is to harvest materials from the local environment. Local decoration traditions and techniques are connected to the resources available in the surrounding area.
Judy Hanna
We look for, um, an area where there's lots of cedar, cedar trees.
Jayme
This is Judy Hanna, one of the community’s basket makers.
Judy
My mother always told me, she never did take me out.
Jayme
She learned basket making from her mother and teaches it to community members, including at the local school.
Judy
I was never with her when she went to dig for her roots. But you know how the tree goes, you know, the branches stick out. And, uh, she'd say, you look for the branch that is the furthest out. And she said, you point down there, and then from there, you start digging. I like the roots that are, say, about the size of a loonie, maybe a toonie. Anything bigger than that, it's hard for me to handle. They could be anywhere from two feet to five feet long, you know, depending on how far we dig.
Jayme
Not only were baskets made from local resources, they were also important to gathering and harvesting food from the landscape like huckleberries.
John
If you look at the shape of a basket and it's in the trapezoid kind of style, it's narrower on the bottom and it flares upwards. So that was ingenious science kind of thing cause if you put the huckleberries on the, the bottom and the way that shapes out, it sort of keeps them all from squishing, like those baskets were huge picking baskets. It was quite unique.
Jayme
Such innovations in basket design thus coevolved with food systems that relied on deeply attuned environmental knowledge tracking a complex calendar of seasonal change and resource availability. Between the mountains and the rivers, Nlaka’pamux people would harvest a range of different resources throughout the year and move between camps, where they would sometimes meet friends and family members from neighboring communities. Along the populated river’s edge, governed by customary use around inherited fishing access points, life revolved around the seasonal cycle of the salmon. Baskets were at once made from local flora and served as valuable items for trading to supplement local salmon, huckleberries and other foods.
John
In our history, our elders would say if a woman knew how to make a basket that her family wouldn't starve because she had something that she could trade or put into the economy and then she would get other things in return for that basket. So there's a lot of, um, reciprocity and economy that came out of baskets, and it was true. Usually basket makers were more, um, well to do and well off they didn't starve as their ancestors told them.
Jayme
If baskets were tied to Nlaka’pamux sustenance and economic security, colonial settlement and bureaucracy in the wake of the 1858 Fraser Canyon Gold Rush disrupted and transformed these relationships in manifold ways. With the gold rush came more development in the area, including roads, bridges, and farms, putting pressure on traditional foodways while promoting in their place systems of wage labor, from railway maintenance to work on hop farms in the nearby Fraser Valley. Well-established economic patterns built on seasonal cycles, on movement between the mountains and river, and on kinship ties and diplomatic trading relationships transformed in response. But in this new context, baskets remained an important item in the Nlaka’pamux economy, and in local sustenance, as basketmakers made a livelihood from selling baskets to tourists and other visitors to the area.
Judy
My mother was a basket maker and her mother, my grandmother, they all made baskets. And it wasn't um always just for their own use. They sold it because we didn't have any money when we were growing up. So, my mother was you know, she used to earn the money, eh? And when I turned 12, she told me, you know, she said, you gotta make your own money from now on. So, I had to learn how to make basket. And for a little 6 inch, um, teapot stand, we used to get 75 cents for that. And I know, you know, how hard my mother worked, it was a survival technique for her, for our whole family.
Jayme
In the decades after the gold rush, both colonial and environmental forces compromised the capacities of First Nation communities in the region to access local resources and maintain traditional economies. Canneries founded at the mouth of the Fraser in the 1870s severely limited the stock of salmon arriving in Nlaka’pamux territory, and laws like the 1878 Fisheries Regulations for the Province of British Columbia and the 1889 Federal Fisheries Act attempted to control and limit Indigenous fishing economies. Simultaneously, infrastructure development prevented fish from moving through their seasonal migration.
Other voice
International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission, Bulletin 1, 1945. William F Thompson, “Effect of the Obstruction at Hell’s Gate on the Sockeye Salmon of the Fraser River” 1913
“Accumulation of fish began in July. The water was unusually high and continued so until late in the season. Early in August the Provincial Authorities found large numbers of salmon in all stretches of the river below the points mentioned above, but particularly below Hell’s Gate. It is stated that the great schools of fish could be seen in the eddies below Hell’s Gate, extending downstream for over ten miles. The Indians above the obstructions were not securing their usual catches, the few on their racks had been taken before July 15. This accumulation continued throughout August as it became obvious that the expected numbers of a big year were not materializing on the spawning grounds.”
Jayme
In 1913, a large slide caused by the construction of the Canadian Northern Railway blocked the Fraser River; a year later another slide blocked the river at Hell’s Gate, a notoriously fast and difficult section of the river south of Lytton. Salmon did not arrive in Lytton that year, and communities upstream of the block faced having no access to the salmon they expected to harvest to sustain their communities through the winter.
Other voice
“The creeks and rivers from Hell’s Gate to Ruby Creek were full of sockeye, living and dead, during the remainder of the year. Late in September vast numbers of dead sockeye had died without spawning, and others were drifting helplessly downstream. They died all through October and November. Dead and living fish were found in the creeks into December.”
Jayme
The cascading effects of this slide were not resolved until the 1940s. Put differently, for 26 years communities upstream of the block had severely limited access to salmon. Even after the slide was cleared, First Nations access to fish as a food and economic resource was undermined by the settler government’s interest in making fish a key commercial industry. To this day, fish remains a site of contention between First Nations groups and settler governments in British Columbia and across Canada. Compounding this long standing social reality, climate change poses new threats to local food systems like those in and around Lytton.
John
We really have ourselves ready for other things that are gonna come our way climate wise, because we know there's things that are going to be ever changing. We just came through the hottest May ever in BC and there's always the potential for more prolonged and other droughts. There's going to be water shortages and with the change in the landscape, there's going to be more landslides and more floods. Like if you look at the disaster that happened to the fish at Big Bar where that landslide went into the river and they tried millions of dollars to remedy that, and they still haven't been able to really engineer something that's gonna be manageable for the fish to get by.
Jayme
John is referring to a huge slide along the Fraser River upstream of Lytton at Big Bar that happened in 2018. The slide caused a block that turned what was a placid stretch of river and a critical migration route of Early Sockeye and Chinook Salmon into rapids. Salmon were being killed trying to migrate through the area to spawn. Temporarily, the solution was a Whooshh Passage Portal, or a “salmon cannon,” installed by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but flooding that year made it ineffective. The permanent solution was a “fishway” with various rest stops for migrating fish passing through the rapids. But according to John, this solution still hasn’t made it manageable for the fish to make it past the mudslide.
As the Nlaka’pamux community have navigated the shifting terrains of settler colonialism in the Fraser Canyon, they have had to overcome physical blocks like this mudslide and yet more systemic transformations. These transformations took shape as material obstructions in the landscape—dams, roadways, railways—as well as in new governmental policies around land and resource use.
One of those policies was about fire: ignoring the strategic burning practice and expertise of the Nlaka’pamux people and other First Nations–which served to increase the size and availability of foodstuffs among other benefits–the settler government adopted a program of universal fire suppression. Previously, the Nlaka’pamux people would set fires mostly in the spring and fall, in times when they knew rain would put them out after a couple of days, and let the fire burn uphill to control its growth. In burned areas, after 2-3 years the root vegetables that returned were larger than before, and huckleberry plants that had stopped bearing fruit were growing again. This approach also eliminated material on the forest floor that provided fuel for more extreme wildfires. The settler government’s approach replaced this cyclical, seasonal approach with policies that disrupted local food systems and unwittingly made the region more wildfire prone.
Judy
Five years ago we all had to evacuate. My baskets were the first ones to go into my car. The second time we had to evacuate, I put my baskets in my cellar.
Jayme
As fires become more severe, homes and basket collections are more frequently threatened. The losses in 2021 were devastating.
But hope for the future comes from baskets that have been collected by people and institutions across a broad geography.
John
We got one from Vancouver Island and the individual there said her grandmother worked at St. George's Residential School in 1932 and she had traded some clothing for this basket. So she was willing to return that to our community, knowing the baskets we had lost within the administration building and the other private collections within the community. And then there were others, um, that came from California and they knew their ancestors were in the Okanagan Vernon area and that they had come over to the Fraser Canyon to go on a road trip and they had bought baskets and brought them back to Vernon.
Jayme
As John’s account brings to light in detailing some of the baskets sent back to the community after the fire, baskets have not only circulated as parts of a system of sustenance for Nlaka’pamux people. The displacement of baskets from the community also stems from official and non-official policies of “vanishing” that eroded tribal cultural knowledge while also uprooting objects from their communities and placing them in museums.
During the same period that baskets were sold to tourists and other groups as commercial goods, a wide range of cultural artifacts were taken without consent or purchase from First Nations communities. Between 1884 and 1951, the so-called Indian Act outlawed Indigenous cultural practices. The act aimed to force assimilation of First Nations people into white settler society. Residential schools, first opened in the late 1800s, were the cruel educational arm of this project. First Nations children were separated from their families, communities, and territories, and prohibited from learning and practicing cultural knowledge, from language, food, and clothing to basketry itself. In Lytton, St. George’s Residential School opened in 1901 and did not close until 1979.
While I as in Lytton, John invited me to a community event where I had the opportunity to speak to several community members. When I asked people about baskets, several spoke abouwt their experiences at St. George’s, and many spoke about their mothers, about the deep closeness they feel to their ancestors by holding a basket. It felt palpable how important baskets are to the process of recovering community and intergenerational connection and knowledge.
John
Harlan Smith, wrote a book called The Archeology of Lytton, I think he published it in 1897. When he was here there was a huge burial mound at the confluence of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers. Him and his coworkers, or the people he had with him, had gone to that burial site and would take things under the cover of darkness and canoe them acroserican Museum of Natural History and other places like that. They indicated that roughly they have maybe 300 of our ancestral remains that are housed within their institutis and then bring them to the CP Rail station and send them off to institutions like the Amon alone.
Jayme
Harlan Smith was an early ethnographer and archaeologist who visited the Lytton area as a member of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition between 1897 and 1899. This expedition was led by anthropologist Franz Boas and financed by Morris Jesup, the president of the American Museum of Natural History. In Smith’s writings about the region, he linked the wind to the dispersal of the artifacts he and his compatriots removed.
Other voice
Harlan Smith, Archaeology of Lytton, British Columbia, 1899
“No definite age can be assigned to any of the remains secured, as the wind, which sweeps strongly up the canyon of the Fraser River, is continually shifting the light, dry sand from place to place. It uncovers the graves, disarranges them, and sometimes re-covers the remains. Miners and Indians often camp at this site; and the objects left or lost by them are scattered on the surface, and often covered by the shifting sand. All these objects must be distinguished from the undisturbed burial of the prehistoric people. The surface is strewn with human bones which have been uncovered by the wind. There are also scattered about shell beads, wedges made of antler, scrapers and chipped points of stone such as are used for arrows and knives, grinding-stones, celts, and other material similar to that found in the graves. Southward from the sand hill, on the level of the terrace, were found traces of similar hearths, charcoal, and rolls of birch bark partly burned.”
Jayme
This scene of desolate gravesites, of life interrupted and abandoned, witnessed in the very process of becoming an “artifact” of history, paints a picture of an unpeopled landscape, of a community in decline, and sets the scene for white settlement. That narrative also involves another one—the taking of many objects from the landscape to be placed in collections and institutions far away. This practice of “salvage anthropology” saw itself as recording cultures on the verge of disappearing. Attendant notions of “vanishing Indians” were pervasive at the time, and served to legitimize settler colonial land claims. Notions of vanishing appear in Harlan Smith’s descriptions of abandoned remains uncovered in loose sand by the wind that whips through the canyon.
Today, Nlaka’pamux baskets are held by institutions ranging from the Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C. and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa to the small Burnaby Village Museum outside Vancouver.
John has spent a lot of time bringing objects, baskets especially, back into his community. This process is called repatriation.
John
There's just so much work around repatriation that you could have a team of 10 or 20 people and still not be able to keep up. I'm glad that for the tribal groups in BC that have been able to achieve this, that it means a lot to their community. And just being reconnected to some of your cultural artifacts and knowing that your ancestors are back where they were meant to be in the first place, or big key things that, I don't know, it's just hard to put into words where you want, um, things to be and done right. Because they use the word reconciliation a lot in this country, but when the time for action on some of those things, it's not always there and it's not always easy and there's just many different barriers to do that kind of work.
Jayme
Cultural repatriation has been gaining steam in First Nations and Indigenous communities over the last couple of decades–a movement that parallels and overlaps with Indigenous land repatriation work (or “land back”). In the U.S., the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, passed in 1990, requires federal agencies, institutions, and museums in possession of Native cultural material to return that material to culturally affiliated tribes and lineal descendants. While NAGPRA has aided in connecting Lytton First Nation with cultural material that ended up at institutions in the U.S., neither Canada at the federal level nor British Columbia at the provincial level have an equivalent policy, although many institutions in the country, like the Royal B.C. Museum, have internal procedures for returning cultural material to communities. These institutions also consult with communities around access guidelines for collections and to provide accurate metadata, provenance, and information tags for materials.
Repossessing objects is an important part of recovering cultural knowledge. As John narrates, while fraught, some of the histories written by ethnographers during the 19th century can also be helpful in recovering community knowledge.
John
James Teit, who was an early ethnographer, he got um connected to Franz Boas and started to work with a group called the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. So Boaz started to ask him to record information about the Nlaka’pamux: their stories, their language. So a lot of that has been helpful to some of the work we do today because as part of his work after he died, there was a book that was published by Haeberlin, Teit, and, uh, Roberts, Helen Roberts, and it detailed a lot about the basketry that was done within our territory. And they were just so proficient and prolific at making baskets within this area that was just phenomenal.
So James Teit really connected with a lot of basket makers to get their knowledge and what the designs represented, and what time of year they were gathering roots, and who was helping them, and those kind of things.
Jayme
First Nations artists and communities have also used museum collections in their cultural recovery work.
John
We've known a lot of, um, artists that have had to go back into museums to study and look at artwork and then sort of reconnect themselves to their ancestral teachings and things like that because for a while, especially with carving and totem poles and things like that, um, there was sort of that cutoff. The colonial governments and others were taking down totem poles, sending them off to far different institutions and things like that. And some people had burnt the totem poles if they were part of a religious group or those kind of things.
There was that time in our history where people didn't have that real connection to things that should have been in their territory where they have the daily observance of them and so many carvers and, and many basket workers and weavers have had to go into museums just to look at the artwork of their ancestors to say, this is how we can move this forward and reteach, relearn, and reconnect and refocus our traditional artwork in those different forms.
Jayme
But while museums may serve a role in this work, for John, baskets only come alive when they are in the community.
John
If there's a basket within our community, we know ourselves that baskets were meant to be touched and used and handled. And then for a basket to be in a museum, they sort of protect them and they don't want them to be handled and they want them to be on display and for their aesthetic value and put in a showcase and preserved, that's their ultimate goal is to preserve and conserve them and things like that. But knowing they have a lot of those there and they do get a lot of visitors that wouldn't have that opportunity to come here and look at baskets and things like that so there's kind of a balance you would have to look at. Museums do have a place and a purpose.
Jayme
While I was in Vancouver, just over a 3 hour drive from Lytton, I went to the Museum of Anthropology (or MOA) to view several Nlaka’pamux baskets they hold in their collection. MOA is an important provincial institution with an expansive collection of First Nations cultural materials, much of which was gathered during these histories of cultural repression, dispossession, and assimilation. It is also an institution at the forefront of repatriation and community-engaged museum practices. While at MOA, I met with Coll Thrush, a professor of history at the University of British Columbia who spends a lot of time thinking about those histories and especially about the place of museums and archives in settler colonial contexts.
Coll Thrush
I think about the Museum of Anthropology in terms of its location on a site that was a fortified site, that was a military site. There are gun turrets that are sort of built into the architecture of the museum. And that this was an important lookout site for the Musqueam First Nation.
Jayme
At MOA we are no longer in Nlaka’pamux territory, but in the unceded territory of the Musqueam First Nation, a tribal group located in the area of what is now called Vancouver.
Coll
When you walk into a room with 200 baskets in it, or you walk into a hall that has, you know, 60 foot totem poles in it, um, those are meant to impress and impress with volume, impress with quantity, and so on. And so there is a way in which a space like this really asks us to be impressed with these belongings, but we're also supposed to be impressed with the institution.
And then I think too about how many worlds are sort of brought together in this place. Sometimes people describe belongings like these as being caught between two worlds and in fact, there aren't two worlds. There's one world. There's one world with finite resources, and that's why settler colonialism did what it did, but there are also different worlds. There are the worlds that it's not appropriate for a museum to access or a historian like myself. There are Indigenous worlds that are still inviolate and are still preserved, that don't need to be available for view to everybody. So in that sense there are two worlds still, and those two worlds do kind of come together here at MOA as people negotiate access and interpretation and, and so on.
Jayme
As Coll narrates, I find myself reflecting on the conditions of access and care at large archival institutions, about what First Nations objects mean in a space that foregrounds certain kinds of knowledge and that imagines an archive as preserved, cataloged, and displayed within its walls.
Coll
What's being preserved is the physicality of the objects but it isn't necessarily the case that the more intangible heritage is preserved, because sometimes again we don't know who made these, which families they come from, which in some cases which communities they come from. That's not always obvious in the records. And so the relationships have potentially been broken there. And so sometimes what happens in museums, and I think MOA does this much better than most places, but in a lot of museums the objects are almost completely dissociated from their cultural context. And I guess that's the question we can always ask with museums is who is this for? Who's the audience? Who is this supposed to benefit? And that's always the question we should be asking because that's a question about power. I think in a way that many museums have a very hard time relinquishing that power, you know, allowing people to touch things and look at things close up and learn how they were made and learn to remake them and so on.
John
I'm really glad to say that there are people that are doing the necessary work to see that basketry goes forward.
One of the ladies, Jennifer Iredale, that I mentioned and her friend Bonnie Campbell and some others donated to a legacy grant that people can apply to, to try to do some basketry work. And then there's some women in the community and a few men that are doing basketry. The two men that I know are, uh, Vincent Brown and Peter Sam and Vincent comes from a line of basket makers. His mother's still alive and she was a basket maker and his grandmother. And so he carried on from going out to help dig roots. And that is what the mothers and grandmothers and aunts used to do, is to get their young nephews or their sons to really help them dig roots. And probably June or October were the better months to do that.
Jayme
John’s hopes for recovery hinge on the return of new baskets to the community and on the tracking down of photographs and other evidence of the baskets lost. But these hopes for the future don’t end at the collection; he also hopes for the construction of a community center for the sharing of knowledge about basketry, and the fostering of a basketmaking practice within a younger generation.
John
Well, people are really interested in that because, after the fire or post-fire, some of them said well, I had this at home and I should have taken a photograph of it, or I should have brought it here, or I should have had it in a fireproof thing. And other people are knowing that some of them are getting elderly and they've had this, and sometimes there's a generation gap where there's no one below them and so they don't have people to pass things on to in their line. They want things to go into a more public building where either their family gets acknowledged that this came from this group or those kind of things that people have that opportunity to visualize it and either learn from it or connect to it somehow.
Jayme
Having a place where community members can gather to see baskets is an important aspect to teaching basket making practices across generations throughout the community.
Judy
You know, the people who want to learn how to make baskets, I show them the different kinds of baskets and where I picked them up and the ones that I made and the ones I've, I've got my, my mother's um, basket. She made me a tray for my birthday one year and I've got a picture of her giving me the tray and I think it was for my 30th birthday or something like that.
Um, yeah. I have one tray of my grandmother's, and one from an aunt. When I'm going to have a class, I take a few samples and I show them, you know, this is what you could make, you know. To me, I collect just for the sake of, you know, having it back in the community. One day, maybe we'll have a museum, and all these baskets can go to the museum, you know, show off.
John
I think it's really important to have some of those things because with the shift of other people collecting and taking things away, then you have a lot of your things that are in different areas of the country and different parts of the world, but they're not really amongst you to really see. And then some things like that are changing because people are doing 3D images of things and we've learned that from the archeologists when they take an artifact and say, we're going to rebury it, they will make a 3D image of that. And they have these 3D printers now that they're making replicas for future educational purposes and those kind of things.
Well, the way forward in basketry, there's still the people that have the knowledge on how to dig cedar roots, when to dig them. And there's still that memory within our community of how to do baskets.
Jayme
On June 30 2021, the wind fanned the flame of the fire that would destroy much of Lytton and its cultural collections. But as community members pick up the pieces, they are rebuilding cultural and ecological connections through new approaches to old practices, building new infrastructures for fostering intergenerational knowledge for a future of adapting to new climate realities. Moving through the landscape to dig cedar and dye cherry bark, processing roots, and gathering to weave baskets are tangible practices of continuance and rebuild intergenerational and ecological connections that have been interrupted in myriad ways over the last two hundred years.
Jayme
In the next episode, Archival Ecologies will spend time with the process of Nlaka’pamux basket making through the narratives of two Lytton First Nation basketmakers we had the privilege to talk to—Judy Hanna and Peter Sam. Stay tuned for this ongoing exploration of how cultural histories, memories and practices are changing with the weather.
Archival Ecologies is created and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University. For their support and expertise, we also thank, at Princeton, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Humanities Council, and the Office of the Dean of Research, as well as Kouvenda Media. This project has also received invaluable research support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath, and Molly Taylor. Voiceover by Mario Soriano. Music by Hamilton Poe.
Nlaka’pamux knowledge keeper John Haugen describes baskets the Lytton First Nation Community lost during the 2021 wildfire and discusses the role of basketry in the community. The meaning and the making of baskets in the community draws together food systems, local ecological knowledge, colonial land and resource use disruptions, and the circulation of baskets and other First Nations cultural material during colonization, when baskets circulated as economic goods and as cultural artifacts destined for museums across the globe. For John, the recovery of baskets in the community hinges on the repatriation of baskets and on the creation of a local community center for showing baskets and teaching basket making knowledge, fostering a new generation of basket makers in the community.
Sound design by Sam Riddell and Jayme Collins. Mixing by Sam Riddell.
Kumsheen, where the Thompson and Fraser Rivers meet at Lytton before going southward through the Fraser Canyon and then west to the Fraser Valley and Pacific Ocean. Photo by Jayme Collins.
Coll Thrush, Professor of History at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver next to Nlaka’pamux baskets in the textile storage room in the basement of the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver. Photo by Jayme Collins.
Episode 4: Weaving Community Knowledge: Nlaka’pamux Basketmaking
Archival Ecologies Episode 4: “Weaving Community Knowledge: Nlaka’pamux Basketmaking”
Full Trascript
Peter
This, this basket here, it's traveled all over the country. Like, it's probably packed I don't know how many gallons of huckleberries, and how many times it went up the mountain. And how many basket full of apples she brought home from the orchard. So she'd bring all the, I guess you'd call them windfalls that are some that don't make the grade. So that's what we would have. So she'd bring them down and put them in the cellar and during the winter, that's what we survived on.
Judy
There's a lot going on in basketry now, you know, now that people are beginning to realize, you know, that all these, um, things are important, you know. I mean, for a long time, I had nothing to do with baskets, but then it got to the point where, yeah, I've got to sit down and do some basket work.
Jayme
Welcome back to Archival Ecologies, a story series about cultural collections and their relationships to the environments around them. As climate change contributes to more frequent and more extreme weather conditions, archives and community collections are being damaged. This season, we’re traveling to the historic town and reserves of Lytton, a small town in the Fraser Canyon region of British Columbia that burned down in a 2021 wildfire. Archival Ecologies is led and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University.
In the last episode, we recounted stories about the baskets that the Nlaka’pamux community in and around Lytton lost during the 2021 fire. As the community recovers from the loss of basket collections, they aim to revitalize the basket making knowledge that is central to Nlaka’pamux culture.
In this episode, two Nlaka’pamux basket makers based in Lytton–Judy Hanna and Peter Sam–take over the story. Judy and Peter walk us through their processes of basket making and how they are sharing their practice with others in the community. They relay their initial encounters with baskets and explain how they learned the craft, from digging and processing roots, to dying decorative material, to winding and wrapping a basket, to becoming teachers of basket making, helping to rebuild lost collections and the knowledge needed to sustain them.
Their words come from two separate interviews in the space of a day. I met both Peter and Judy at a community event that John Haugen, who was a key voice in Episode 3, invited us to attend. The community met at one of the gravesites on the west side of the river to replace gravestones that had been damaged in a wildfire in the Stein Valley the previous year, in 2022–just one year after the Lytton fire. This side of the river is only accessible by a 2-car ferry across the river from a small port down a steep hill just a few minutes north of the Lytton town center. Aside from a few farms and a provincial park called the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park, which is cooperatively managed by Lytton First Nation and British Columbia Parks, this side of the river is predominantly reserve land. It is difficult to access, owing to the small size of the ferry and the lines of cars that quickly grow as the ferry zig zags ceaselessly back and forth across the river, and it is palpably different in feeling from the land on the other side. This is Nlaka’pamux space.
After the graveside event, we joined the community for lunch in the community center. I met Judy in the parking lot as everyone was leaving.
Judy
So what exactly are you doing?
Jayme (tape)
Yah, so the project is an audio storytelling project about…
Jayme
She sat down to speak with us as people got back into their cars to head home.
I spoke with Peter back on the east side of the river in a reserve building. I was nearly an hour late to the meeting I had arranged. A newcomer to this space, I had misunderstood what traveling on this ferry involves and had to wait in a long line of cars to cross the river. Peter kindly waited for my team to show up. He had brought several baskets to show us.
Jayme (tape)
Tell us about this one.
Peter
This one, its a different style…
Jayme
Here are Judy’s and Peter’s stories. You won’t hear my voice again until the sign off.
Judy
I'm Judy Hanna. My mother was a basket maker and her mother, my grandmother, they all made baskets. And it wasn't, um, always just for their own use. They sold it because money was, you know, we didn't have any money when we were growing up. So, my mother was the... The earn, you know, she used to earn the money, eh? Yeah. So, and when I turned 12, she told me, you know, she said, you gotta make your own money from now on. So, I had to learn how to make basket.
Peter
My name is Daniel, Daniel Peter Sam. My mother used to do basket work. And I learned how, from my teachers, Judy Hanna and Giles Grineer [note: spelling possibly wrong]. They're the ones who taught me.
Judy
I wished I had learned right from how to start a basket, but when my mother was telling me to learn how to work on a basket, she used to do the start for me, and she'd have five or six of them, you know, in a box, and I'd just pick up one and continue working on it. So I'm still struggling with how to start one, but, we manage, eh?
My, um, second husband, he had cancer. So I had to drive him up to Kelowna and we stayed in Kelowna Monday to Friday. He was going for radiation treatment. And so I had, you know, what am I going to do sitting around in the motel room? So after my second trip up there, I took my basket making stuff, and I worked on baskets. So, and that also was my bread and butter for a while. I couldn't work when I had to be with, um, with my husband while he was taking treatment. So, from there, somebody had asked me to, you know, teach basketry. I said I could try.
Peter
When I first learned how to do basket making, we went out, went out to the bush and got some cedar roots. And we split ‘em.
Judy
We went to Blue Lake, which is about, um, I think it took us about 30 minutes to get there by, um, the kids went on the bus and we went on a truck, you know, four by four. And we look for, um, an area where there's, uh, lots of cedar, cedar trees. And my mother always told me, uh, she never did take me out. I, I was never with her when she went to dig for her roots. But you know how the tree goes, you know, the branches stick out. And, uh, she'd say, you look for the, the branch that is the, the furthest out. And she said, you point down there, and then from there, you start digging. Now, she never did tell me why, but um, I'm just assuming, you know, like, really close to the trees, probably pretty, old and hard to work with.
Yeah, so, um, yeah, we dug roots, and then we hauled it back to the school, and then, oh, as soon as we dig them, if we start, um, peeling the bark away from the root, that's the best time to do it, is right after you dig. It comes off so easy. Otherwise, if it dry, if the root dries out, you have to scrape all that, and that's a chore and a half. And then from there, we do the splitting, the splicing. And, um, I like the roots that are, say, about the size of a loonie, maybe a toonie. Anything bigger than that, it's hard for me to handle, my hands are not strong enough. Um, they could be anywhere from two feet to... Five feet long, you know, depending on how far we dig.
Peter
Well, I went and got my sticks. And we went and peeled them. Took all the bark off. Then we got them and we split them in half. We split them. And we quartered them. Then we sliced them across like the, uh, the grain, uh, like the age rings. We split it that way.
Judy
When we're working with basketry, we have to keep everything, um, wet. Um, it splits, you know, the roots will split and you don't really have a nice job when you have all these split up roots.
Peter
We'll soak it overnight and it gets nice and pliable, like, you stretch it out and wrap it around your fingers and make it nice and pliable.Then we get the knife and cut it down the middle and grab it with your finger and just split it right down the full length. Usually the, the outer part of the stick. It'd be usually like for, for making the wrappers. Then the inner part, like the center or the heart of the wood, we split that down really fine.
Judy
The finer roots, we use that to fill, and then we have the wrapper go around and round.
Peter
We'd get a bunch of fine stuff. Then we'd, uh, like to get some, find some, some, some of this. We'd cut it into fine strips, like usually the, the heart of the wood. Then we'd, we'd get about four strands and we'd tie a knot in it. You start the center. You start the center and then you, go through one, one loop, wrap it around, like this stuff here. Usually about four times, and then you'll get to the, get to the end, then you have to join, make a circle. That's the hard part. And we'd get, okay I'll call it, what I call it. Kumyaku. That’s what, that’s our Indian word for it. So, so we use an awl. Like, the awls I use, I made out of bone, uh, deer leg bone, like deer. Um, well the way I made it was I sawed it down with a hacksaw, but the old people used to smash it, smash it with the rocks and, and, and finally get a, get a sharp end in it or, or they'll get a rock and they'll sharpen it.
Judy
We use an awl, which is um, my mother had a deer, deer leg. Her awl was made from deer legs. Um, I'm a little bit, I don't have any of those except what she left. Uh, I just keep, keep it for show and tell. But I have one that's um, it's a deer, the deer antler with, um, a piece of, um, stainless steel rod in it, and it's sharpened. You know, it's really cheating but it works!
Peter
This is my, my graduation present. For completing my course. Judy's husband made it. But I can't get used to using it. I'm, I'm, I get, I'm so used to using the bone.
Judy
Yeah, we need an awl, and that's what we use. We poke a hole, and then put a wrapper around it, and go. And you can make it as big as you want. I have some trays that are about 14, 16 in diameter.
Peter
I would say...if a person worked on it every day, okay, like, with this one, I was, I was lucky enough in that day I would do one round. So, like this one here, I did a round in a day. And that's just small.
Judy
And the designs on the baskets. I really don't know my designs except what my mother used. She used the butter, she had a butterfly design. I haven't mastered that yet. For making the designs we use wild cherry bark. And, um, we... I know there's some wild cherry behind, you know, up in the mountain there behind my place. So I go up there and I cut one or two sticks down and, and then we have to score it and then unravel it all the way off the, off the stick. It's one, one long piece. And then that's got to be scraped. My mother used to use a, a piece of a real thick glass. I don't know where she got it from, but she had it in her box, and that's what she used to scrape all the dirt off the cherry bark. And the cherry bark comes out nice and shiny.
Peter
How do I add the color? That's uh, that's cherry bark. Like I'd cut a piece off and I'd, I'd stick it in one side, and I'd, and I'd tighten it up and I'd fold it over into my next wrap. I'd fold it over and that's what holds it in there. Like you put the cherry work around one, around one side of it.
Judy
Uh, going out to look for cherry bark is a whole unit on its own, too. Yeah. So that'll be a day trip. And then to score all that, and, and then unravel it off the stick. Yeah. It's from one stick onto another stick. After, my mother used to get it all off this, off the cherry bark stick, or the cherry stick. And then she'd clean it, and then she'd wrap it around, um, a piece of, um, either a stick or cardboard or something. She would wrap it all up. She’d have nice little bundles.
Peter
My teacher Judy, she knows a recipe how to make it, the red cherry bark turn into black. Like there's a process of it, like you use, uh, like cherry bark, inner, inner bark, and plus how you put it in a, in a can or something, in a glass jar, you fill it up with water. You put that in there and then you throw a nail in it. And you let it sit for, or you go bury it in the garden or something. And eventually, it'll turn black. I think from the nail. So that's, that's, that's one of the recipes.
Judy
And with the cherry bark, I experimented one year, I, I tried to dye some, because when we get it fresh off the branches, you know, it's a, it's a dark, well, different shades of, um, red. But, um, somebody gave me a recipe how to dye, how to make black. So I did that. I had sticks and rocks and leaves and whatever was on my list. I put it all in, into a little bucket and I boiled it up. And um, I buried it in my garden. I don't know why I buried it. Somebody just said, Oh yeah, my mother used to bury it. Okay, I buried it. But after, after about a month, I took a look at it. And it was dark, and I thought, okay, I'm going to just leave it. So, before winter anyhow, I dug it up and I had nice black cherry bark. So, that recipe works. But now's the time to be gathering what I need to make the dye. You know, like, there's some flowers that go into it. Wildflowers.
Peter
This is, this is my second one I, I made. I went down to Tacoma and I learned how, well I, I knew how to do the weaving already, so then, but then I went down there to learn how to do this finishing, like a finishing braid on a, on a top.
Judy
I have some big baskets, um, probably, probably about, maybe about 2 feet long and about a foot wide. And about, what would that be about? Eighteen inches, twenty inches deep. I have two, two old baskets like that. I have a collection which I take out and I show, tell my students, you know, this is what we could make, you know.
Peter
I'm still, I'm still learning. Well, hopefully there's more people learn how. Like it's a dying, it's a dying art. It's a dying…
I was teaching at the Stein Valley School, the students. And we didn't have any classes, so I, I said, oh, I'm going to start working on this other one, on this one. So I did two rounds, like one, one round in a day.
Some of the students are interested in, some of them are just, like, one student, I asked him, well, how's it going, he says to me, I don't know what to do, so okay, I'll show you what to do, and so I showed him what to do, and he was working on it, and the next time I'd come back to seeing him, and I said, What are you doing? He was putting the same wrapper through the same hole in that one spot. I told him you're supposed to put it beside it. So I took it all apart and straightened it out for him. But some kids, they caught on, like, mind you I had more or less sort of started, started for them, started the circle. Otherwise some, some students would, like they start with the center. Like with the center you, you go through the, through the center there about, when I do it is, like four times through the, through the center. And some students figure you got to go through the center all the way around on the second round. So they would end up with a, I call it a donut anyways. So then you’d, then I’d, take it all apart and sort of straighten them up. But as long as they're willing to learn, like it's a, it's a dying art, like, like there's hardly anybody really actually making baskets.
To keep on the, the craft, like the, like they'd be able to teach their children.
Judy
It's just something that, that we do, you know. Like my family making baskets, you know, my aunts and I remember, um how the old ladies, we used to call them old ladies, I guess I'm one of them now. They'd all sit around, you know, and they'd be talking, telling stories, and they'd be busy making baskets. There was my mom, um, my neighbor, the Adams family, their mother used to be there. And a couple of aunts, one, one from 25 Mile, and the other one was from Siska. They would get together and work on baskets. Yeah, it was fun watching them and listening to them. And, they'd be laughing and we didn't have a clue what they were saying. Because um, I was probably around five when my parents started, quit talking to me in our language. They wanted me to learn English because I was going to be, going to school. So, I, I, I, I understand quite a few words, but I can't speak it. But yeah, I thought, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we could do this, I tell my, I tell Peter. Like when we go to the lake, we've been up there a few times and working on baskets. I said, this is what the old people used to do. I told Peter, now we're the old people.
[end]
Archival Ecologies is created and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University. Thanks to John Haugen for inviting me to connect with the community and with Judy and Peter in particular, and for providing space to meet. For their support and expertise, we also thank, at Princeton, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Humanities Council, and the Office of the Dean of Research, as well as Kouvenda Media. This project has also received invaluable research support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath, and Molly Taylor. Music by Hamilton Poe.
Nlaka’pamux basket makers Judy Hanna and Peter Sam recount their processes of basket making, how they learned the craft, and share their hopes for the continuation of basketry traditions in their community.
Sound design and mixing by Sam Riddell.
Peter Sam, Nlaka’pamux basketmaker, with his collection of baskets made by himself and his mother. Photo by Jayme Collins.
The Lytton Reaction Ferry unloading on the Stein side of the river. Photo by Jamie Rodriguez/Molly Taylor.
Episode 5: Enchanted Objects
Archival Ecologies Episode 5: “Sacred Objects”
Full Transcript
Richard
We didn't have that digital background, but we had the stuff in the museum. Of course when the paper burns, it's gone. To me it was devastating.
Jayme
Welcome back to Archival Ecologies, a story series about cultural collections and their increasingly fragile relationships to their environments. As climate change contributes to more frequent and more extreme weather conditions, archives and community collections are being lost or degraded. This season, we’re traveling to the historic town and First Nation reserves of Lytton, a small town in the Fraser Canyon region of British Columbia that burned down in a 2021 wildfire. Archival Ecologies is led and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University.
When I visit archives and museums, I often find it strange to imagine everyday objects from my own life—a bag, maybe, or a calendar—one day archived in an institution. Why would someone be interested in crumpled receipts? Or the fact that I met a friend for lunch on a particular Tuesday in May? Or a selfie with my dog, Millie? But, as a scholar of archives, I know that such objects and artifacts can be windows into not just individual lives but also larger cultures and communities. One of the receipts, for example, might place me at a particular time and place and capture an activity like shopping for food at a supermarket that is indicative of everyday habits and economic systems that define the cultures of which I’m member. The receipt is printed on mass-produced paper with a slowly-fading ink, which, contra their 19th century predecessors, embody industrialization. The receipt also points to a cultural value in documenting consumer transactions for tax purposes, even for very low-stakes purchases. In a sense, such objects are filled with meaning that surpasses their importance to the people who own or otherwise possess them. They are enchanted with histories of people, places, technologies. Certain meanings might come into focus only after time has passed and someone in the future no longer immersed in the time and place where an object originated can look back upon it in fresh ways.
If such an object as my imagined receipt carries knowledge about my own culture that I can’t fully apprehend, what happens to that knowledge when that object—or, say, all kindred objects from a time and place—are destroyed?
Richard
My name is Richard Forrest, and we moved to Lytton back in 1991, I've had several different roles in Lytton including um being the chair of the museum for an extensive period of time.
Jayme
Richard is a local historian who was integral to the founding and stewarding of the Lytton Museum and Archives. He is a strong advocate for local history, and has been active in recording and encouraging Lytton’s local history for decades. In this episode, we’ll hear Richard’s account of the Lytton fire and its impact on the Lytton Museum and Archives. As he wades through the challenges to recovery, Richard reflects on the importance of local cultural collections and on the future of the town and its history after the fire.
In the months after the fire, Richard’s access to the site was facilitated by Rubicon, the humanitarian organization that was on the ground after the disaster.
Richard
Rubicon came in, and then months later, we went through the basement of the museum and got some stuff, but, you know, between the fire, the rains in November, which washed out the highway and everything else, and then the snow, and then the spring, and then the da da da da. There was very little of value left here. We did get some stuff, but not very much.
Jayme
The collection of the Lytton Museum and Archives was particularly hard-hit by the 2021 Lytton Fire and the months that followed. Nearly everything was lost from this collection that had been carefully assembled over decades to capture and steward what can often feel hard to access about the past: not the major events and violent wars, not the grand narratives and national mythologies but the ephemera of local life—the ordinary encounters, the intimate relationships, the mundane but meaningful habits that shape the daily lives of communities and yet are frequently unrecorded.
That was the kind of knowledge archived in the Lytton Museum.
I meet Richard in July, nearly two years after the fire. He shows our team around the site of the old museum, which was housed in an old railway worker’s house in the middle of town. A hot dry wind blows through the canyon and the air is hazy with smoke. It smells like a campfire. Richard unlatches the fence and walks us around the dirt pit where the museum used to be.
Richard
The site before was a really nice little, railway workers house. Built late 30s, early 40s. It was about 25 feet square, roughly, maybe 30 feet square, main floor and a basement on half of it. And the entranceway was right here.
Jayme
Richard has a gift for detail—a skill of the local historian. In his hands, the dry rocky soil of the post-fire site becomes an archive that he assembles and enlivens for us. What looks like an empty pit of sand, sagebrush, and bits of plastic becomes a cultural landscape, a living map of the town before it burned to the ground.
Richard
That hole is where the half basement was, and over there there was the crawl space there. And that line along there where the telephone pole is throwing a shadow is the property line between the museum and the swimming pool, which is that very big hole over there.
We’re right beside the museum right now. This was the backyard, which was all flat. We had a small building here, which was an old railway tool shed.
Jayme
Richard pauses while we walk, pointing to rusted shards of metal and melted pieces of plastic buried in the earth. He knows what each of these objects was before the fire.
Richard
This is an old drill that they used to use to drill the holes in track. And these down here are hay tongs. All this paved out stuff here was called Caboose Park because we had a beautiful 1940s wooden caboose here.
Jayme
The museum held an incredible range of objects that documented the natural and social histories of the area. Its collections included fossils and photographs, ledgers and accounts books, a copper kettle from a local restaurant, a radio, doctor’s bag, and old railway and mining equipment. All that is left after the fire are charred remnants of the metal and stone artifacts contained in the collection.
Richard
We put together a bunch of things that were in the Lytton area. But had been sort of just stored because there's no place to put them. So different houses had things that were supposed to be in a museum, but there was no museum. So we gathered that together. And then on the July the 1st, I think it was 1993, could have been 1994, we opened the museum on Canada Day.
Other voice/bleeding together with sound effects to create a soundscape
Lytton Sports Days, 1910.
Lytton Sports Days, 1913.
Old Firehall.
Richard
A lot of photos. I think there was close to two and a half thousand photos.
Other voices/soundscape
The Cast of “A Rustic Romeo,” 1914, produced to raise money for the Red Cross war efforts.
Freight Wagon on Lytton-Lillooet Road.
The Globe Hotel Beer Parlor.
Football Game against Ashcroft, 1927.
Richard
There was the old Lytton water company. Which, of course, water is always important. We had all of its records from its inception right through to the end of it. And it was ledger books like that. And that was in the archive. There was all sorts of maps.
Jayme
Our conversation weaves big stories about history into the objects that made up the collections—stories about the gold rush, for example. But for Richard, it is the painstaking work of trying to collect and represent the textures of local life that most defines recovery.
Richard
That's a gold scale. It was mounted on an oak box. In the box was all the records of all the gold that they weighed. There's no records of the gold anymore. Every one of those things was written down: who the gold was bought from and how much gold there was. Back then they used to go down to the river, pan for gold, bring the gold up, go to the guy, he would turn around and pay them for the gold. And then they could go do their shopping and stuff. From the river to the groceries. That's the whole story, right? And it's not there anymore.
Jayme
As he recalls lost objects, Richard tells stories of people from Lytton’s history as they made their livelihoods, put food on the table, built homes and relationships, or endeavored to make day-to-day life more comfortable.
Richard
They told a story of the community, they told a story of people gold panning for their dinner, people running a restaurant and being successful, all sorts of things like that.
One of the prize things that I really wish I could have got out of there was the Globe Hotel, which was one of the long term hotels in Lytton. When you go through it and see the guest register, and you see that people that lived three miles out of town would come in and spend the night at the hotel so they could get a hot bath. And the names they were using and the places they were living that now, of course, it's like two minutes out of town by car, right? And yet they had to use a horse and wagon or walk or whatever. That was such a delightful thing to see and hold.
Jayme
For Richard, objects like those from the hotel gain meaning from their provenance, gathered through their use, through interactions with people, and through movement through the landscape.
Richard
There was a radio in there. Nice little radio. Dates from 1920s. You can buy one on eBay for about 150 dollars. But the one we had, former mayor, quite a while ago, it was his dad's. And he had used it as a kid, and he had used it during the 50s and 60s here, and he donated it to the museum. So what's the point of buying another one from eBay? It doesn't have any provenance. Doesn't matter what it is, you know the value of it. It's the traceable history behind it. So when we find a teacup, we know who donated that teacup and whatever you find. But you only know if you got a record.
Jayme
Held in a museum, objects help to form community, in Richard’s account. And the fire redoubled his ardent belief in local history museums and their collections.
Richard
The Royal BC Museum is a huge museum, when you go in there, you can see beautiful exhibits, but they're all in Victoria. They don't connect. If you saw that same collection of totem poles on Haida Gwaii, you would connect with it, and you connected to the area. But being in Royal Museum, what the heck? I mean, why are they there? All these things connect, you know, connections is what's important and that's what a museum does, is it shows you what the connections are.
Jayme
History lives in objects like those the Lytton museum lost. The histories these objects hold are re-activated by places and communities. If such objects are enchanted with history, then, with their loss—and the loss of records that describe them— where does all that history go? Does it ever come back, or is it simply gone?
Richard
All of the records were very well kept, but in paper.
And guess where all the computers were? And guess where all the paper records were?
Jayme
When the Lytton Museum and Archives burned, also lost were the records of the objects and documents the museum had. Records like these have been integral to Lorna’s recovery of the Lytton Chinese History Museum that we explored in episode 2, and their loss is devastating. Lorna had digital records and photographs of much of her collection backed up in several locations. In the case of the Lytton Museum and Archives, all that remains as a record of what was lost are the memories of Richard, other community members, and visitors to the museum . That record is inevitably spotty and incomplete.
The Lytton Museum’s losses—and their specific vulnerability to fire—also reminds us that so much of history is recorded on plants and organic matter.
Made from plant fiber, paper has existed for centuries alongside other writing surfaces like thinly stretched animal skins and papyrus. But it became more widely used in the 19th century when industrial processes made it possible to produce it on a larger scale cheaply. With these transformations, wood pulp came to replace the old linen and rags that had previously been used to make paper.
Other Voice:
A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture of Paper in All its Branches, Carl Hofmann, 1873. Substitutes for Rags, Section 6, Wood. The Works of the American Wood-Paper Company.
The wood, mostly poplar, is brought to the works as cord-wood of 5 feet lengths. The bark having been stripped off by hand, it is cut into slices of about ½ inch thickness by a cutter, or rather chopper —a machine looking like a feed-cutter on a large scale. Four steel knives, from 8 to 10 inches wide and from 12 to 15 inches long, are fastened in a slightly inclined position, to a solid cast-iron disk of about 5 to 7 feet diameter, which revolves with a high speed, chopping the wood, which is fed to them through a trough, into thin slices, across the grain. This trough must be large enough for the reception of the logs, usually from 10 to 12 inches wide, and it is set in such a position that the logs slide down towards the disk. This slanting position only assists the movement of the logs, while a piston, which is propelled by a rack, pushes them steadily forward, until they are entirely cut up.
Jayme
As paper became more widely available, more could be recorded beyond official accounts and documents. Everyday records like receipts, notes, personal diaries, letters, and postcards all became possible because of the affordability of paper. This is one of the things that makes paper documents interesting: alongside official government documents in archives you can find things that document personal moments in peoples’ lives.
But paper, especially cheaply made paper, is a fragile material. It is susceptible to not just fire but also to mold, mildew, moisture, critters, and to brittleness and yellowing owing to acidic chemicals used in manufacturing particularly during the 19th century. That means that the histories of daily life that paper documents hold, even if they make it to an archive and aren’t simply thrown in a trash heap, are particularly vulnerable to decay and disaster.
For Richard, in the face of increasing threats on these kinds of documents and the histories they preserve, digitization offers one means to ensure the continuity of collections in an uncertain future.
Richard
Original photographs? No. Those were never digitized. Those are the easiest things to keep, because all you need is the page. You don't need to have the physical page, you just need to have the PDF file or whatever of that page, and you have that connection. But they're all gone now. So, like I say, from that point of view, you look at it and you say, well, we lost everything.
Jayme
Richard’s regrets that the museum never digitized the collection point to a much larger problem that attends many local history collections: they are often under-resourced in terms of both labour and technology, relying on volunteers and materials at hand to curate, document, and preserve objects in their collections. It is precisely these local institutions that are at the frontlines of climate change and bear the brunt of environmental vulnerability.
Kasey Lee, a conservator and one of the founding members of BCHERN that we heard from in Episode 2, notes that rural institutions are more likely to be significantly affected by environmental impacts and disasters.
Kasey
I do think that a lot more emphasis can be put on resourcing these community museums, indigenous communities. They're by far, more vulnerable. They are bearing the brunt of climate change disasters.
They don't have conservators in these places. Conservators are expensive. Most rural museums and libraries and archives are staffed by just a handful of dedicated individuals who do everything.
So, all of that knowledge and expertise and a lot of the funding was concentrated in the large urban centers. And a lot of the climate change related problems, those impacted most were in the smaller communities. Those of us working in the large institutions have efficient and high tech air handling systems. We can screen out the smoke and we can keep our temperatures reasonable and we have fire suppression systems in all of our buildings, but those in the local communities don't have those, they're more vulnerable and the impact is greater.
Jayme
Heidi Swierenga, also a conservator and founding member of BCHERN reiterates the importance of these local institutions.
Heidi
It's about, uh, marking out a community's identity, a community's sense of self. Whenever you travel around, the first place I go to is the local museum. If I'm somewhere, I want to learn about where that is. And the things tie us to the stories. And it's the story that is much, as much as important as that physical thing.
And once you lose the thing, you've, you've lost the connection to that knowledge. And I think that's why we are tied to our things. It's the thing that sparks the memory. And how can you learn about a place or a culture without those memories?
Jayme
Both Heidi and Kasey echo Richard’s case for the importance of digitization, but they also note its shortcomings and drawbacks. Heidi points out that while digitization proved valuable to the Lytton Chinese History Museum when Lorna was taking stock of what was lost, digital records and reproductions can never replace lost objects.
Heidi
Digitization is an interesting thing. What we saw with Lorna in her collection is through digitization, she was able to make quick connections back to what was recovered to the information about those, those specific objects because she had that database, she had a way to connect.
But it's still impossible to hold something that's digitized. You can't hold the digital file. And I've witnessed so many times the difference is between looking at a photograph of something and physically holding that thing. And it's with physically holding that thing that your fingers discover it, and it sparks that connection with your brain and the stories that come from that thing. So it's amazing to digitize, but it, it can't ever be understood as a replacement.
So many people need touch. Not just to understand something, how something is woven, how something is created, what does it sound like when you tap on it. It’s he key to unlock the memory if you are a knowledge holder about that thing, if it's from your family. A picture will get you started, but the physical holding is what brings a smile to the face.
Jayme
Richard notes these shortcomings, too, but expresses enthusiasm for an expanded approach to preservation through digitization that involves 3D scanning and printing.
Richard
I think I told you I wrote this little thing about making a 3D object from photographs. And yeah, you can do that. And then once you have that 3D object as a 3D thing, you can print it on a 3D printer, and you can have a representation. Again, you don't have the original object, same as a digital photo, but you have a representation of it. And that makes things much less needed to be in a collection.
Jayme
But digital collections are not impervious to change or loss. Digital documents are not immaterial—they need to be housed on harddrives and networks. And documents stored on the cloud rely on an ever-expanding system of data centers that have transformed the landscape where they are built and powered. While this migrates the storage of data away from the local environment of a museum or collection, digital media are also vulnerable to floods, fires, and other kinds of disruption. In the Lytton fire, the town’s digital backup of the municipal bylaws and records was lost when the server holding the backup burned in the basement of the Lytton Museum and Archives.
Richard
The one thing we have to worry about with digital is, as things change, the way you have your data stored, may have to change. You know, when people had vinyl, then they had CDs, and now they have MP3s. You know, you gotta be careful because you might not have a record player anymore. And, you still have the records, but you may have gotten rid of the record player.
Jayme
For Richard, the value and relative durability of digital records hinges on their portability, and on how they make cultural collections reproducible.
Richard
They're not more stable, but they are more portable. I normally carry a keychain with me that has Lorna's complete digital collection and the Lytton Museum's complete digital collection. And so if something were to happen, I can just turn around and take that and take a computer and turn around and boot it all up again.
Let the software chug along, and out comes the 3D object. It won't replace the original, but it's the same as having a digital representation of a photograph. You now have something that is reproducible. I can take that and take it to my 3D printer downstairs and print it. So I can print out a vase.
Jayme
Digital life is not timeless, and objects and artifacts produced through digital reproduction bear the marks of both the time they were originally made and the time in which they were digitized. Richard imagines the futures of collections in concert with the affordances of these digital iterations. While the original object doesn’t lose its value in the midst of its endless adaptation, digital technologies and media provide opportunities to improvise, adapt, and preserve the life of culture in the midst of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns.
Richard invests his energy in fostering the future of digitization for local history collections. But in our conversations, I also hear in his stories a different—and longstanding—form of cultural preservation: oral history.
In our conversation, he offered his own oral history. Richard is a fount of knowledge about local history and about the textures of local life in the present. He lives just out of town along Botanie Valley.
Richard
We’re going to go through that and you’ll see all the trees and everything, that’s how all of this used to look. Botanie is well known. People call it Botany Valley. Well known for its wildflowers. It's beautiful.
Jayme
We’re traveling with Richard from the town center to his home where he is storing artifacts that survived the fire. The gravel road we are traveling on threads through Botanie Valley along Botanie Creek, eventually arriving at a couple of lakes. Deep in the valley, the ecosystem transforms into a coastal forest microclimate, unique in the midst of the dry Lytton desert. The area is an important food source for the Nlaka’pamux people.
Richard
It was officially given to LFN…
Jayme
Richard stops us enroute to tell us about the landscape we’re passing through and how they have been affected not just by the most recent fire but by past fires.
Richard
This was all burned in 2007, but not as bad as it is now. The brown trees you're seeing all the way over here and the really scorched thing there that's all this 2021 fire. We were out for three weeks, then we got to come back and it was another three weeks we were watching the fire come over the mountain every day. In the evening it cooled down and then the next day it got hot again and shh shh shh back down again.
Jayme
I’m struck by how much he notices in the environment, and what he asks us to notice in turn.
Richard
two weeks ago. This was all yellow massive yellow sunflowers and things and balsam root things like that. I think I've got 200 different species that I've, that I've photographed so far.
Jayme
Both in town and in the valley outside the town center, Richard evokes historical landscapes—ones we can’t see, but that underlie and shape the one we stand in. A steward of Lytton’s histories, Richard opens a kind of portal to these other landscapes, and facilitates our connection to it as outsiders.
The Lytton fire is a recent and dramatic disruption of these historical landscapes and, in turn, of the fabric of the community. But in talking to Richard, I can’t help but think of other disasters that precede and shadow the Lytton fire, and of other objects lost and forgotten and the histories that went with them. Lytton has burned multiple times. What was lost in previous fires? How do the histories endure after the objects that embodied them are gone?
Richard
St. Anne's Church, a Catholic church. I think this was the fourth time it burned down. Well it was built and then a year later or two years later it burned and then it was rebuilt and then you know. And then across here was the Lytton Hotel. Not the first time Lytton Hotel burned either.
Jayme
Richard’s catalog makes me think of lost histories beyond Lytton—across western Canada, histories of destroyed towns, abandoned settlements, decaying cabins and old forts, villages, and gravesites. Places shaped by shifts in economic and livelihood cycles, like the booms and busts of extraction and logging industries, founded and then abandoned. The remains the only thing left to refer to a lost history of everyday life. Of neighbours gathering or meeting at a local restaurant, of people stopping at the local grocer for food on the way home, of visitors passing through town.
As the Lytton fire slowly recedes into the past, the Lytton Museum and Archive’s website sits unchanged as a digital space. There is little to indicate the museum itself has burned. At the top of the webpage is a sepia-toned photograph of Lytton that recalls its gold rush days as a frontier community. The website’s colour scheme is of a worn paper scroll. On the home page, a banner moves across the screen, around and around, advertising the next museum event: “Our next Regular Meeting is on Tuesday, February 25, 2020. Everyone is welcome.” There is contact information listed that no longer works.
Richard
Every place should have a local museum.
Jayme
With the internet holding the place where the museum used to be, the museum’s digital life points to its role in the community: as a gathering place for locals interested in the history of the place around them, and as a stop for tourists visiting or passing through the area. Testimonials on TripAdvisor attest to people’s everyday experiences of the museum.
Other voice(s)
“A little gem: This is a tiny museum with a big heart, it is all the better for having the personal stories of those who donated the items. The volunteers are so friendly and informative.”
“Take a moment to stop by: located next to the Visitor Center, this quaint museum holds an interesting assortment of artifacts that help tell the story of the surrounding area.”
“You could spend a few minutes here. It’s got lots of things to look at. You get a real taste of First Nations and settler life in Lytton over the last few hundred years.”
Jayme
Richard held so much of Lytton’s local history within himself. He passed away 6 months after our conversation. His loss marks a devastating loss to the community of a good friend and also a living archive. I am so appreciative for the stories he entrusted to me, and for the books and documents he curated to share his knowledge of Lytton with future generations.
Richard
We get massive amounts of hummingbirds. And I don't know why, but from April through to now, about a week or ten days ago, just huge hummingbirds. We got three feeders out there. And all of a sudden there's no hummingbirds, and then in about two or three weeks there'll be hummingbirds like stink again, and then they'll all go away.
Jayme
Paper, websites, photographs: in a way these are all memory devices, things that extend memory. Objects can do this in our life too, I have one of my grandfather’s old shirts that I wear in the garden; when I wear it I remember how his body moved, the care and gentleness of his presence, the quietude. As the shirt wears out, or if I were to misplace it in a move, I wonder what other memory devices I would turn to to remember this knowledge of my grandfather. Would I write a story? A poem? Draw a picture? Tell stories of my grandfather to my friends?
[music]
In the coming episode, we’ll dive into more of the archival ecologies of the Lytton area and its cultural collections. Stayed tuned for this ongoing exploration of how cultural histories, memories and practices are changing with the weather.
Archival Ecologies is created and hosted by me, Jayme Collins, and is a production of Blue Lab at Princeton University. For their support and expertise, we also thank, at Princeton, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Humanities Council, and the Office of the Dean of Research, as well as Kouvenda Media. This project has also received invaluable research support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath, and Molly Taylor. Voiceover by Mario Soriano, Kavya Kamath, and Nate Otjen. Music by Hamilton Poe.
Richard Forrest, steward of the Lytton Museum and Archives, reflects on the devastating losses sustained by the municipal repository. With a collection predominantly composed of paper photographs, ledgers, and other documents, very little survived the fire at the Lytton Museum and Archives. For Richard, the importance of these materials lay in their ability to tell stories about daily life in the area across centuries. In the wake of the losses, Richard contemplates the futures of collections in digitized records and photographs, and 3-D printed copies of objects.
Production support by Hannah Riggins.