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.