Old lands, old stories

One of the general differences between Indigenous and settler/colonial legal orders is that the former locate legal principles and teachings in (among other sources) the land itself. The latter, being quite literally deracinated (without roots), not only do not recognize the non-human world as a source or teacher of law, but characteristically seek to deny or obliterate the bases by which it might be so regarded.

In this sober mind, let’s look at the Lək̓ʷəŋən story of Camossung. The version below –one outline of a rich multi-voice narrative – was told by Songhees Elder Jimmy Fraser (Cheachlacth) around 1950:

After the Flood when Raven, Mink and the Transformer Hayls were travelling around teaching the people how things were to be done, they came to this place [the Gorge Narrows near Victoria], and found a young girl named Camossung and her grandfather, Snukaymelt (“diving”). The girl was sitting in the water, crying. 'Why are you crying?' asked Hayls. 'My father is angry with me, and won't give me anything to eat. 'What would you like?' he asked. 'Sturgeon?' 'No.' Haylas gave that fish a mighty heave and it landed in the Fraser River on the mainland. 'Cranberries?' 'No.' Haylas threw these to an area around Shawnigan Lake. Camossung refused a lot of things, and that is why they are not found along the Gorge. 'Duck? Herrings? Coho? Oysters?' These she accepted, and that is why they are plentiful here. 'You will control all of these things for your people,' said Hayls. Then he turned her into stone (some say it was because she was such a picky eater!).... Since she liked her grandfather to be with her, he was also turned to stone, as if jumping in carrying a rock to take him to the bottom.'  

Camossung and Snukaymelt, now stones in the Gorge Narrows, became many things over many years. As signifiers of this story, they helped pass its teachings across generations. As whirlpool-causing sentries, they were said to protect the resources that Haylas provided and the Lək̓ʷəŋən from external attack. Youngsters showed their bravery by diving into the rapids and touching the stones, gaining spiritual power and preparing for adulthood. Camossung and Snukaymelt were permanent, important features of an old and stable physical, cultural, legal landscape.

But change – sometimes sudden, often ignorant – is also permanent: Camossung and Snukaymelt were an impediment to settlers intent on a certain kind of settling. In 1934 Snukaymelt’s head was removed when a bridge across the Gorge was built. In 1960, the owner of a boathouse at the Gorge dynamited Camossung to improve boat access.

Two very different ways of hearing and telling stories on and with the land. Two very different ways of finding and following the law. And because it is my life’s work, I have to ask: can they reconcile?

Wrestling with this question causes me to look, ever desperately, for bridges (not the ones that blow up ancestors). One, I think, is right here. We all need old landscapes – forms that hold their stories over centuries – so that we can feel held, and be taught, by truths that endure beyond our lives.

I think that us newcomers to these territories may be (re)awakening to this need, even as we strip the earth of its blankets of wood and wetland, as we change the very shapes of rivers and mountains in our hunger for product and profit, as we make unreliable narrators of the seasons. But we cannot extract the need itself.

This summer I returned to a lake on central Vancouver Island. While my presence is a pittance (I’ve only come back twice), it’s been enough time for my children’s lives to leap ahead, for my most intimate relationship to arc and emerge through one of life’s unbidden challenges. It is enough time to feel the creep and slip of many changes, and to learn the ache for what is lasting. On the hill across from our usual campsite is a long familiar scar, the lasting mark of a landslide that would have boomed through the valley and smacked the water like a giant’s bellyflop. Someone, I am certain, has a story about this.  

This storied place, of course, is not mine to claim, much less command. But being able to come back to it, to the same lake, the same campsite, the same rocks from which one girl once jumped in the same golden evening wind in which another now twirls, feels like claiming a deeply human right. And it is a right that I, the individual, can only really hold as a creature of community and of time. My daughters, if they choose to return, will do so with a (slightly) deeper sense of home, a deeper appreciation for its vital, grounding stories.

I think we are, us settlers-of-several-generations, now beginning to recall how the need for old landscapes – old stories, old truths – still flows in us, how necessary they are to our belonging and well-being. It is a right that we all need, all deserve, but all must hold in humble balance. As the old ones know, there are no rights without responsibilities. And as us newer ones must realize, there is neither justice nor fulfillment in erasing old stories to tell our own.   

Though we need them, we do not easily respect old landscapes or uphold their teachings. Even if we have lived our whole lives here, our culture attunes us more to value change (we call it progress) than to learn from what lasts. But unless and until we learn how to do this, we cannot really be at home.  

In this, as in so many other contexts, reconciliation starts with listening. This is the foundation of respect, of understanding and, perhaps, eventually, of shared, sustainable belonging here in these old, enduring, law-giving lands. This means acknowledging the harm we've caused to Camossung, Snukaymelt and so many of the Indigenous teachers/teachings that we've damaged. It means honouring the resilience of what remains, the authority of what is being rebuilt. And, I think, it also means listening to ourselves. It means tuning back into our own deeply human need for old stories.

The Gorge Narrows