Signs of the Time: Nłeʔkepmx Resistance through Rock Art

Review By Kerrie Charnley

May 27, 2025

Salishan Peoples’ ancestral red ochre rock paintings speak across the coast and interior of British Columbia and Washington. The Interior Salishan Peoples – Syilx, Secwépmec, St’át’imc, and Nłeʔkepmx Peoples – have interrelated but diverse histories and stories with regard to the rock paintings in their respective territories. I am a Salishan academic, a Katzie (Coast Salish), and as such I am always cognizant of  the importance of foregrounding this diversity. It challenges a pan-Indian, homogenizing way of thinking about and relating to Indigenous Peoples that sometimes creeps into portrayals. Signs of the Time: Nłeʔkepmx Resistance through Rock Art (2024), written by Chris Arnett, focuses on Nłeʔkepmx Peoples’ rock paintings.

Arnett is a scholar of Maori and Norwegian descent, raised in Coast Salish territories. Through friend connections, he had the opportunity to be introduced to Salish rock signs in remote locations. Thus started a lifelong passion for study of Salish rock signification, particularly that of Nłeʔkepmx Peoples. Arnett’s diction aims, primarily, at an audience of archaeologists and ethnographers. The first five chapters background Arnett’s eventual example, in support of his revelatory claim (in the last two chapters) that the rock paintings operate in resistance to colonial drives. Certain rock paintings save the Stein Valley from logging. The rocks, and their places, continue to have agency in current times. Arnett’s inclusion of Nɬekepmxcin (language) concepts throughout, along with excerpts from Elders’ personal, historical and sptekʷł  narratives—such as those from Annie York from previously published texts—shows respect for Nɬekempex Peoples’ Knowledges embedded in Nłeʔkepmxcin and is a nod to Nɬekempex readers.

Nevertheless, there are concerns. According to Cree scholar Greg Younging (2018), anyone writing about Indigenous Knowledge, who is not of the particular culture or nation whose Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is being written about, should invite an editor from that nation/culture to review it prior to publication. I assigned several chapters of Signs of the Time to the students in my Interior Salish Literatures course at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. The students are all Interior Salish language revivalists in the final years of the four new Interior Salish language fluency degrees at UBCO. The students, experts in their languages, cultures and stories, are based in their ancestral communities and territories. Students appreciated Arnett’s inclusion of Elders’ voiced stories and the Nłeʔkepmxcin glossary and usage. However, students noted the lack of more recent contemporary Nłeʔkepmx expertise. The students and I felt that Nłeʔkepmx collaborators, ideally as co-writers, with their expertise and own approaches, would have strengthened the text considerably. Inclusion of a chapter with dialogue amongst collaborators would allow a diversity of authorial Nłeʔkepmx perspectives across Nłeʔkepmx territories to be included. While Arnett is clearly a seasoned scholar, students found two problematic occasions where Arnett forgets to cite his Nłeʔkepmx source. In these places it sounds as if he was the knowledge holder. These occasions would have been remedied had Nłeʔkepmx advisor collaborators been involved.

I hold my hands high to all of the Interior Salish Language Fluency degree students for their careful reading and insights and for their courage and passion in reviving their respective languages and their millennia-honed knowledges held within those languages of which rock paintings, and their physical and spiritual realities, are a part. I hold my hands high to Arnett whose Nłeʔkepmx knowledge-filled pages, filtered through his archeological lens, guide the reader along his travels through Nłeʔkepmx times and places. Readers are thus guided by the transforming rock paintings in order to understand, believe and take action to protect the xa xa Nłeʔkepmx tmixʷ.