Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

In the last decade, there has been considerable debate over the writing
of Native peoples’ history. There are those who argue that non-Natives
who write such histories are engaging in theft or cultural
appropriation; at the other extreme are those who dismiss this argument
out of hand. This book takes a position somewhere in between. Its
primary author, a non-Native ethnologist at the Canadian Museum of
Civilization, attempts to tell aboriginal stories “in terms that would
have made sense to [Native peoples]” rather than in the terms of
academic anthropology.

The Nlaka’pamux people of Spuzzum, British Columbia, might be better
known to readers as the Thompsons of the Fraser River. In spite of its
title, this book is not history in the traditional sense, but rather a
series of glimpses into the culture and life experiences of a community.
Fishing and other resource use, religious ideas, family structure, the
impact of the 1858 gold rush, missionaries, railway construction, and
changing patterns of land ownership are all part of the story. The book
concludes with an essay that deals with understanding the past in a
cross-cultural context.

The text is lucid and jargon-free, and the photographs interesting and
well placed. However, the use of a specialized orthography to render
names in the Nlaka’pamux language is often confusing. The author does
not explain why she has adopted this particular system or what the
Nlaka’pamux people themselves think of it. Those who want their
history to have a narrative structure will be frustrated by the book’s
episodic organization. Nevertheless, Spuzzum will certainly be of
interest to anthropologists, local historians, and specialists who have
been following the debate on the writing of Native history.