Written as I Remember It
Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder
Through a unique blend of life stories and legends, a Coast Salish woman recounts the importance of Sliammon teachings for future generations.
Description
Long before vacationers discovered BC’s Sunshine Coast, the Sliammon, a Coast Salish people, called the region home. In this remarkable book, Sliammon elder Elsie Paul collaborates with a scholar, Paige Raibmon, and her granddaughter, Harmony Johnson, to tell her life story and the history of her people, in her own words and storytelling style. Raised by her grandparents who took her on their seasonal travels, Paul spent most of her childhood learning Sliammon ways, teachings, and stories and is one of the last surviving mother-tongue speakers of the Sliammon language. She shares this traditional knowledge with future generations in Written as I Remember It.
Awards
- Winner, Armitage-Jameson Book Prize, Coalition for Western Women’s History 2015
- Winner, Aboriginal History Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2015
- Commended, BCHF Historical Writing Awards, British Columbia Historical Federation 2015
Reviews
Paul moves fluidly between these different affects in her narration, as any gifted storyteller and scholar might.
- Joseph Weiss, Wesleyan University
Written As I Remember It is warm and honest, partly a memoir; part ethnography; part Farmer’s Almanac. It draws on a Sliammon Elder’s oral history of a skilled and prosperous people who lived and died here long before they built a company town and named it for an English surgeon…[it] captures a vanished world that survived for 10,000 years, and was just as worthy as mill towns with telephones.
- Holly Doan
A strong, independently minded woman, the first to sit on the Sliammon First Nation’s Council, Elsie Paul has had an inspirational presence in her family and in her community. This charming book should be warmly embraced by all those who seek to comprehend the teachings that guided this Sliammon woman’s life in the twentieth century.
- Dorothy Kennedy, Victoria