Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw / We Come From This Land: A Walk Through the History of the Squamish People

Review By Nicholas May

October 10, 2024

Squamish elder Paítsmuk (David Jacobs) relates it was an innocent question his granddaughter posed one day after coming home from high school that led to the creation of Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw / We Come From This Land: A Walk Through the History of the Squamish People.  She had been studying history and social sciences, and wondered, “Where’s our history?”  Despite this glaring absence, we learn the decision was not made without hesitation.  A book can be a tough fit for ten thousand years of history, a wealth of stories more easily related in a longhouse.  Yet an urgency propelled the decision forward, namely, the need to educate younger generations.  Fortunately a much wider audience, as intended, will now benefit from this solid “introduction” to Squamish history.

We Come From This Land is written in the plural, second-person voice of the “Squamish Nation,” with Squamish journalist Stephanie Wood as primary writer.  Giving the book authority, however, are the multitude of Squamish voices that span its pages.  Early ethnographic material is skilfully woven with more recent studies undertaken by the Squamish, as well as accounts from contemporary elders and leaders, lending an oral quality to this book.  Squamish names and terms are used throughout, with a glossary at the end to help the reader navigate them.  The result is a Squamish voice on their history which, despite its potential to be read as an “official” history of the Nation, keeps faith with an oral culture’s understanding of the limits of what any one history can achieve.  More than most histories, this book is richly illustrated, including archival photos, pictures of cultural artifacts, and stunning contemporary images of the land.

This history is told in six parts, starting with the deep history of Squamish beginnings and relations with neighbours.  The two middle parts relate the difficult history following the arrival of Europeans and onset of colonization.  The final two sections bring this history up to the present and reveal the resiliency of a Nation that today confidently reasserts its place on its traditional lands.  Part 5 offers a summary of cases pursued by the Squamish after the federal government’s ban on Indigenous Peoples hiring lawyers was lifted and they began to pursue legal means to protect their lands.  As it shows, the results of this imperfect tool have been mixed.  The final section, Part 6, connects the Squamish Nation’s past with its present and future by looking at some contemporary endeavours they are pursuing as they regain ownership and stewardship over their lands.  These make for an impressive list, whose highlights include: their 2005 decision to abandon their pursuit of a modern treaty, finding it more profitable to instead pursue particular agreements; the establishment of their own environmental assessment processes, grounded in Squamish values, which they first tested in response to the Woodfibre LNG project; and the current development at Senákw, the site of an ancient village of this name that will change Vancouver’s skyline with its eleven towers reaching up to fifty-seven storeys.

It is probably safe to say that a beautifully crafted, well-researched, and accessibly written book like We Come From This Land will succeed in its stated goal of providing the Squamish Nation with another way of passing on the knowledge of who they are and where they have been.  Indeed, this gamble is yet another of the many adaptations to changed circumstances we learn they have made in their long history.  An accessible Squamish history written with a Squamish voice will also be useful for settlers living on Squamish lands, particularly those interested in the work of decolonization and reconciliation.  Such readers will see their home differently, not just in the Lions that are in fact Ch’ich’iyúy, the Two Sisters, but also the web of relationships that have enabled the Squamish to thrive here for millennia.