Steveston

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Steveston is the story of a town and a people in British Columbia in the
early 1970s, a time when the area was largely a Japanese-Canadian
fishing settlement on the Fraser River. Through poetic prose portraits
and sensitive photographs, Daphne Marlatt and Robert Minden evoke the
rich history of this community. In the early 1970s, the community was
slowly declining as the fish population dwindled.

Text and photos are grouped in two blocks, with the photos—22 images
taken during 1973-75—in the second block. All are of the local people
in the village setting. The faces reflect worry, joy, endurance,
determination, concentration, and humor: faces like those of Inez
Huovinen, a fisherwoman; an anonymous worker at the Marine Garage; and a
pair of facing photos, “Tsuneko and her children, Aaron and Gen”
partnered with “Tsuneko and her children, a few moments later.” The
first shows uncertainty, even worry; the second, security.

Both text and photographs evoke for Marlatt a town where “chance
flicks his tail and swims, thru”; a town with a complex past and an
enigmatic present, a wild place with more connections than the mind can
take in. One two-line description sums it up: “Steveston: hometown
still for some, a story: of belonging (or is it continuing?) lost, over
and over.”

This unusual book is best consumed slowly in small portions, with time
for reflection between nibbles.