Lytton: Climate Change, Colonialism, and life Before the Fire

Review By Chris Arnett

March 19, 2025

In Lytton: Climate Change, Colonialism, and Life Before the Fire authors Peter Edwards and Kevin Loring, “attempt to explore and understand Lytton” (5) by reference to their own childhood/adolescent experiences and to historical events culled from a variety of sources.  Readers can expect a popular account of this historic British Columbia town with some exceptional moments, and others less so.

Forty-one chapters chart a rough chronology culminating in the fire of June 2021. I say “rough” because while some topics are explored relevant to the subject matter of the subtitle, others are introduced without much comment. There’s lots of interesting subject matter for those who know, or don’t know, the town of Lytton and surrounding area, and these are interesting in and of themselves, but there is little cohesion between these subjects within a broader discussion of climate change, colonialism and life before the fire. The chapters on smallpox, the chronically dysfunctional institution of the St George’s residential school, and the 2021 fire, on the other hand, stand out as powerful essays.

Unless the chapter titles  “Promise of the Railway”  and “Boomtown” are meant to be ironic,  the arrival  of the two railways (CPR and the CN)  and the catastrophic impact on Lytton and the greater Nlaka’pamux world is pretty much ignored in favour of the Chinese labour force, anecdotes about Main street, BMX biking, and falling asleep at night to the comforting sound of the trains (perhaps also ironic given Chapter 40’s discreet take on the railway that fateful day). Past fires which also reduced much of the town to ashes are mentioned but shrugged off “as part of the price to pay for living at the Centre of the Universe” (177).

Some chapters seem gratuitous, as if the authors are scrambling to find Lytton-related material. There is a chapter on the famous anthropologist of Nlaka’pamux, James Teit, who lived on a ranch outside of Spences Bridge and really didn’t have much to do with Lytton at all (except to record several origin stories of the place which the authors overlook). Loring certainly acknowledges his debt to Teit in his work as a playwright, but this book would have greatly benefitted by more attention to Teit’s actual ethnographic work on Lytton (1900, 337) and less innuendo regarding Teit’s adolescent sex life. Anthropology doesn’t need to be spiced up. Where is Michael M’Gonigle and Wendy Wickwire’s landmark publication, Stein: The Way of the River (1988) which would have given the authors a wealth of source material on the place and its history? I was one of the outsiders in the Battle for the Stein in the late ‘80s and spent a bit of time in Lytton working with the Lytton and Mount Currie Indian Bands and the Western Canada Wilderness committee, sleeping on the floor of a store on Main street that served as the local activist headquarters or at the Haugen’s, wonderful folks familiar to both the authors!  Our relationship with the Indigenous leadership was respectful, fun and productive contrary to the authors’ take.  In any case, the footnotes for the Battle for The Stein chapter are missing.

The authors are obviously passionate and nostalgic about the place. Their love for Lytton literally oozes out of every page. However, they are not historians or anthropologists, and expertise in these subjects is not what the book is about.  Many readers interested in Lytton will enjoy it, which I did, as a general, though uneven, local history, percolated with the stories of the multi-ethnic locals and celebrity transients found in every small town in British Columbia.