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Written As I Remember It

Written As I Remember It

Teachings (Ɂəms TɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder

by Elsie Paul

With Paige Raibmon and Harmony Johnson

Published by: University of British Columbia Press

Series: Women and Indigenous Studies

Imprint: UBC Press

468 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 27 b&w photos, 2 maps

Paperback
9780774827119
Published: February 2015

£34.00

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Hardcover
9780774827102
Published: April 2014

£108.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Long before vacationers discovered BC's Sunshine Coast, the Sliammon, a Coast Salish people, called the region home. Elsie Paul is one of the last surviving mother-tongue speakers of the Sliammon language. In this remarkable book, she collaborates with a scholar, Paige Raibmon, and her granddaughter, Harmony Johnson, to tell her life story and the history of her people, in her own words and storytelling style.

Raised by her grandparents, who took her on their seasonal travels, Paul spent most of her childhood learning Sliammon ways, stories, and legends. Her adult life unfolded against a backdrop of colonialism and racism. As Paul worked to sustain a healthy marriage, raise a large family, cope with tremendous grief and loss, and develop a career and give back to community, she drew strength from Sliammon teachings, which live on in the pages of Written as I Remember It.

A Note on the Sliammon Language / Honoré Watanabe

Introduction: Listening to Ɂəms tɑɁɑw / Paige Raibmon

Where I Come From

1 The Territory and People

Legends: A Man Taken by the Seal Family Twins Are Gifted

Child

2 Life with My Grandparents

Sliammon Narrative: They Invited Them to a Feast

3 Teachings on Learning

Legends: Mink and Cloud Mink and Salal Mink and Eagle Mink and Pitch Mink and Grizzly

4 Residential School

Legend: t'əl (The Wild Man of the Woods)

Mother

5 Teachings for Moms

Legend: The Young Girl and Eleven Puppies

6 Married Life

Sliammon Narrative: qᵂʋl č'ɛ tɑwƟɛm kᵂut tɑmʌs (They [Spirits] Just Came and Told You Something)

7 Teachings on Grief

8 Community Work

Legends: Mink and Whale Mink and Wolf

Chi-chia

9 Naming My Family

10 Healing Work

Sliammon Narrative: č'ɛhčɛhʌ čxᵂ k'ᵂʌnɛtomoɬ (You Thank the One Who Looks after All of Us)

11 Teachings on Spirituality

Thoughts about Ma / Cliff Paul

Elsie Paul, a Sliammon elder, has spent her life and career in service to others. In recognition of a lifetime of effort dedicated to supporting First Nations well-being, she received an honorary doctorate degree from Vancouver Island University in 2010. Paige Raibmon is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Harmony Johnson is Elsie Paul's granddaughter. She holds a BA from Simon Fraser University and has served in a number of policy and executive roles in BC First Nations organizations.

Written As I Remember It is warm and honest, partly a memoir; part ethnography; part Farmer's Almanac. It draws on a Sliammon Elder's oral history of a skilled and prosperous people who lived and died here long before they built a company town and named it for an English surgeon…[it] captures a vanished world that survived for 10,000 years, and was just as worthy as mill towns with telephones.
- Holly Doan (Blacklock's Reporter)
Paul moves fluidly between these different affects in her narration, as any gifted storyteller and scholar might.
- Joseph Weiss, Wesleyan University (Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal) A strong, independently minded woman, the first to sit on the Sliammon First Nation's Council, Elsie Paul has had an inspirational presence in her family and in her community. This charming book should be warmly embraced by all those who seek to comprehend the teachings that guided this Sliammon woman's life in the twentieth century. - Dorothy Kennedy, Victoria (BC Studies)