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Chris Arnett, a fourth-generation British Columbian and a member of the Ngai Tahu, a New Zealand Maori tribe, has had a life-long interest in the history of B.C. and New Zealand. Arnett has researched the archeology of the Stein River Valley for the 'Nlaka'pamux Nation Development Corporation and worked for the Sooke Region Museum and Archives on a historical survey of logging on Vancouver Island's Southwest Coast. He has also taught First Nations studies at Malaspina College. He wrote The Terror of the Coast, a reconstruction of events surrounding the 1863 attack on Kuper Island Indian village by the British naval gunboat Forward. The book chronicles how the battle influenced Colonial government policies and later eroded Native jurisdiction.
Arnett has also edited the stories collected by Mildred Cryer for Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'qumi'num' Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island (Talonbooks 2007). Raised in the Shawnigan area of Vancouver Island, near Chemainus, by her very English parents Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Beauchamp Halhed, Beryl Mildred Cryer was born Beryl Mildred Halhed in Auckland, New Zealand in 1889. She married local businessman William Claude Cryer and they had one child. During the Depression, at the request of the managing editor of the Daily Colonist newspaper in Victoria, she collected Coast Salish stories from Hul'q'umi'num elders such as Mary Rice and Joe and Jennie Wyse for a series of 60 articles that appeared in the Sunday Magazine supplement. Although she was not trained as a journalist or anthropologist, Cryer was careful to keep track of the sources of the narratives, enabling ethnographers who came afterwards to trace their origins and better understand their meanings. In the 1930s she also co-wrote an article with Jennie Wyse (Tstass-Aya) for the Daily Colonist about a battle between the Snunéymuxw of Gabriola Island and the Lekwiltok from a century before. In addition, she recorded memories of the Douglas Treaty from Joe Wyse (Quen-Es-Then), as interpreted by his wife Jennie Wyse, and published his account in the Victoria Colonist. Her associations with the Coast Salish led to the publication of her book slanted towards children called The Flying Canoe: Legends of the Cowichans (Victoria: J. Parker Buckle Printing, 1949). She died in Welland, Ontario, in 1980.
Toward the end of the last century, They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever (Talon $24.95) became part of the cultural weaponry used to defend the integrity of the Stein Valley from massive resource-extraction. The valley is much cherished by the Lil'wat and Nlaka'apmux First Nations and by all who enjoy the outdoors. Some five years ago, at a conference of young native culture workers from around B.C., convened by the Nlaka'apmux First Nation at Lytton, people expressed continued interest in this volume. The original edition was created by the late Nlaka'apmux elder Annie York, anthropologist Richard Daly and Chris Arnett. Talonboooks released an updated version in paperback and eBook versions. The new edition preserves the vibrant life knowledge and worldview of Annie York and also presents new, up-to-date research on Stein Valley rock art, and more generally on rock art in B.C.
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Signs of the Times: Nłeʔkepmx Resistance through Rock Art
by Chris Arnett (UBC Press $39.95)
Review by Odette Auger (BCBW 2025)
A granite cliff with over 160 images announces the nature power of the Stagyn (hidden place) Valley. The 50-foot-long section of rock art is only one of many sites in nɬeʔkepmxcin/ Nlaka’pamux (pronounced Ingla-kap-ma) territory.
“The roar of the river is constant—reverberating off steep valley walls as it rushes through the lower canyon,” Chris Arnett (Ngāi Tahu, Maori through his father) writes in Signs of the Times. The valley was—and is—a place for the nɬeʔkepmxcin to quest for, or tap into nature power, Arnett explains.
Incisions, marks on rock, red ochre paintings—Signs of the Times details a wide range of purposes behind the rock art. Footprints in stone from when sptékʷɬ (origin stories/persons in those stories) walked the earth, gifting tools, directions and knowledge of the past, present and future.
“Against the backdrop of colonization, pictographs are signs of strategic resistance and resilience,” writes Arnett. The valley was literally saved by the descendants of those who painted their dreams on the rocks, when over 100,000 hectares with more than 50 rock art sites were protected in 1995.
I’ve been taught it’s our responsibility to question what we think we know and that art is a great place to begin. Arnett helps us with that responsibility as he explains each painting in the context of beliefs, values, symbolic language and ceremonies of the people who produced it. While many academic researchers treat the art work as a passive iconography to interpret symbolically, Arnett explains the art works are products “of active ritual and ceremony.”
Arnett quotes Elders with intergenerational knowledge who refer to the land as “a living entity full of information and the caprice of human beings. Here people talk to the river, to the creeks that feed it, to the animals, plants and mountains.”
“It is important to do so,” Arnett adds. Signs of the Times is not a light read but rather a thorough examination of archival, historic, ethnographic and archaeological reports and studies. Arnett takes his readers by the hand for the deep dive by Indigenizing the work through Knowledge Keepers who carefully share contextual information. By offering only partial explanations at times, the art is protected. The reader learns how snéʔm means songs, but also power. The same word is used to describe rock art makers as holders of “mysterious songs” and the “ghostly” or mysterious characteristics of some of the locations.
While some of the paintings relate to coming-of-age ceremonies, territory, laws and sʔíkʷlxʷ (dreams), others speak about existence, reality and the nature of being.
Nlaka’pamux Elder and storyteller Annie York (1904–1991) is quoted describing the relationship between vision states, connecting with spiritual beings and realms and the creation of rock art: “Most of them stories are being dreamed by other people and they dream it and write it,” she said.
Certain rock formations are painted intentionally, strategically, “because these places and their stories harboured power,” says Arnett. He emphasizes the xaʔxaʔ (nature power) of place comes before the art that recognizes the significance. Arnett poses the question early in the book, “Are paintings merely projected onto rock surfaces by the mind, or are they made in concert with other beings?” We learn of Elders in 1919 explaining to an early magistrate of Lytton that sneʔíʔ (ghosts) were “putting fresh paint on the images every spring. They still do.”
There are moments the reader feels a momentous change, as the settlers’ context slips away, with an opening sensation of awareness of the expanded time frame.
Long before the first Europeans arrived, Nlaka’pamux “prophets or dreamers visited the Chief of the Dead and returned to spread the word to meet the challenges of a changing world. Dancing, songs and media were some of the proactive measures employed by these specialists to address the emergency.” In this way, Arnett explains how rock art was “a form of peri-
meter defense…in an effort to keep European-introduced diseases at bay.”
Spirituality passes through academic passages in the book, highlighting deeper significance while Elders’ voices both brighten and ground the narrative. For example, in a discussion of the Prayer Rock, Rosie Fandrich shared a translation of a family prayer. Every member of her family offers up this prayer as they pass the Prayer Rock, which is marked with paintings.
“Oh my Grandfather, Grizzly Bear and my Grandmother, Black Bear. Take yourselves away from the paths that I will walk. I may startle you and you hurt me. I am looking for food like you are. Your grandchildren are hungry. So I am in your country seeking food to sustain us. I beg you to remember the promise that we made to the Great Spirit that we would respect each other. And I am in your country. Let me hear only your passing, as you will hear mine.” 9780774867962
Odette Auger, award-winning journalist and storyteller, is Sagamok Anishnawbek through her mother and lives as a guest in toq qaymɩxʷ (Klahoose), ɬəʔamɛn qaymɩxʷ (Tla’amin), ʔop qaymɩxʷ (Homalco) territories.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'q'umi'num Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island
BOOKS:
They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever: Rock Writings of the Stein River Valley of British Columbia (Talonbooks, 1993/2019) [Co-authored with Richard Daly and the late Annie York]. New paperback edition (Talonbooks, 2019) $24.95 978-1-77201-220-0
The Terror of the Coast: The 1863 Colonial War on the East Coast of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands (Talonbooks, 1999)
Beryl Mildred Cryer. Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'qumi'num' Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island (Talonbooks, 2007). Edited by Chris Arnett. 978-0-88922-555-8 $24.95
[BCBW 2020] "First Nations" "Anthropology"
Arnett has also edited the stories collected by Mildred Cryer for Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'qumi'num' Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island (Talonbooks 2007). Raised in the Shawnigan area of Vancouver Island, near Chemainus, by her very English parents Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Beauchamp Halhed, Beryl Mildred Cryer was born Beryl Mildred Halhed in Auckland, New Zealand in 1889. She married local businessman William Claude Cryer and they had one child. During the Depression, at the request of the managing editor of the Daily Colonist newspaper in Victoria, she collected Coast Salish stories from Hul'q'umi'num elders such as Mary Rice and Joe and Jennie Wyse for a series of 60 articles that appeared in the Sunday Magazine supplement. Although she was not trained as a journalist or anthropologist, Cryer was careful to keep track of the sources of the narratives, enabling ethnographers who came afterwards to trace their origins and better understand their meanings. In the 1930s she also co-wrote an article with Jennie Wyse (Tstass-Aya) for the Daily Colonist about a battle between the Snunéymuxw of Gabriola Island and the Lekwiltok from a century before. In addition, she recorded memories of the Douglas Treaty from Joe Wyse (Quen-Es-Then), as interpreted by his wife Jennie Wyse, and published his account in the Victoria Colonist. Her associations with the Coast Salish led to the publication of her book slanted towards children called The Flying Canoe: Legends of the Cowichans (Victoria: J. Parker Buckle Printing, 1949). She died in Welland, Ontario, in 1980.
Toward the end of the last century, They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever (Talon $24.95) became part of the cultural weaponry used to defend the integrity of the Stein Valley from massive resource-extraction. The valley is much cherished by the Lil'wat and Nlaka'apmux First Nations and by all who enjoy the outdoors. Some five years ago, at a conference of young native culture workers from around B.C., convened by the Nlaka'apmux First Nation at Lytton, people expressed continued interest in this volume. The original edition was created by the late Nlaka'apmux elder Annie York, anthropologist Richard Daly and Chris Arnett. Talonboooks released an updated version in paperback and eBook versions. The new edition preserves the vibrant life knowledge and worldview of Annie York and also presents new, up-to-date research on Stein Valley rock art, and more generally on rock art in B.C.
+++
Signs of the Times: Nłeʔkepmx Resistance through Rock Art
by Chris Arnett (UBC Press $39.95)
Review by Odette Auger (BCBW 2025)
A granite cliff with over 160 images announces the nature power of the Stagyn (hidden place) Valley. The 50-foot-long section of rock art is only one of many sites in nɬeʔkepmxcin/ Nlaka’pamux (pronounced Ingla-kap-ma) territory.
“The roar of the river is constant—reverberating off steep valley walls as it rushes through the lower canyon,” Chris Arnett (Ngāi Tahu, Maori through his father) writes in Signs of the Times. The valley was—and is—a place for the nɬeʔkepmxcin to quest for, or tap into nature power, Arnett explains.
Incisions, marks on rock, red ochre paintings—Signs of the Times details a wide range of purposes behind the rock art. Footprints in stone from when sptékʷɬ (origin stories/persons in those stories) walked the earth, gifting tools, directions and knowledge of the past, present and future.
“Against the backdrop of colonization, pictographs are signs of strategic resistance and resilience,” writes Arnett. The valley was literally saved by the descendants of those who painted their dreams on the rocks, when over 100,000 hectares with more than 50 rock art sites were protected in 1995.
I’ve been taught it’s our responsibility to question what we think we know and that art is a great place to begin. Arnett helps us with that responsibility as he explains each painting in the context of beliefs, values, symbolic language and ceremonies of the people who produced it. While many academic researchers treat the art work as a passive iconography to interpret symbolically, Arnett explains the art works are products “of active ritual and ceremony.”
Arnett quotes Elders with intergenerational knowledge who refer to the land as “a living entity full of information and the caprice of human beings. Here people talk to the river, to the creeks that feed it, to the animals, plants and mountains.”
“It is important to do so,” Arnett adds. Signs of the Times is not a light read but rather a thorough examination of archival, historic, ethnographic and archaeological reports and studies. Arnett takes his readers by the hand for the deep dive by Indigenizing the work through Knowledge Keepers who carefully share contextual information. By offering only partial explanations at times, the art is protected. The reader learns how snéʔm means songs, but also power. The same word is used to describe rock art makers as holders of “mysterious songs” and the “ghostly” or mysterious characteristics of some of the locations.
While some of the paintings relate to coming-of-age ceremonies, territory, laws and sʔíkʷlxʷ (dreams), others speak about existence, reality and the nature of being.
Nlaka’pamux Elder and storyteller Annie York (1904–1991) is quoted describing the relationship between vision states, connecting with spiritual beings and realms and the creation of rock art: “Most of them stories are being dreamed by other people and they dream it and write it,” she said.
Certain rock formations are painted intentionally, strategically, “because these places and their stories harboured power,” says Arnett. He emphasizes the xaʔxaʔ (nature power) of place comes before the art that recognizes the significance. Arnett poses the question early in the book, “Are paintings merely projected onto rock surfaces by the mind, or are they made in concert with other beings?” We learn of Elders in 1919 explaining to an early magistrate of Lytton that sneʔíʔ (ghosts) were “putting fresh paint on the images every spring. They still do.”
There are moments the reader feels a momentous change, as the settlers’ context slips away, with an opening sensation of awareness of the expanded time frame.
Long before the first Europeans arrived, Nlaka’pamux “prophets or dreamers visited the Chief of the Dead and returned to spread the word to meet the challenges of a changing world. Dancing, songs and media were some of the proactive measures employed by these specialists to address the emergency.” In this way, Arnett explains how rock art was “a form of peri-
meter defense…in an effort to keep European-introduced diseases at bay.”
Spirituality passes through academic passages in the book, highlighting deeper significance while Elders’ voices both brighten and ground the narrative. For example, in a discussion of the Prayer Rock, Rosie Fandrich shared a translation of a family prayer. Every member of her family offers up this prayer as they pass the Prayer Rock, which is marked with paintings.
“Oh my Grandfather, Grizzly Bear and my Grandmother, Black Bear. Take yourselves away from the paths that I will walk. I may startle you and you hurt me. I am looking for food like you are. Your grandchildren are hungry. So I am in your country seeking food to sustain us. I beg you to remember the promise that we made to the Great Spirit that we would respect each other. And I am in your country. Let me hear only your passing, as you will hear mine.” 9780774867962
Odette Auger, award-winning journalist and storyteller, is Sagamok Anishnawbek through her mother and lives as a guest in toq qaymɩxʷ (Klahoose), ɬəʔamɛn qaymɩxʷ (Tla’amin), ʔop qaymɩxʷ (Homalco) territories.
+++
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'q'umi'num Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island
BOOKS:
They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever: Rock Writings of the Stein River Valley of British Columbia (Talonbooks, 1993/2019) [Co-authored with Richard Daly and the late Annie York]. New paperback edition (Talonbooks, 2019) $24.95 978-1-77201-220-0
The Terror of the Coast: The 1863 Colonial War on the East Coast of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands (Talonbooks, 1999)
Beryl Mildred Cryer. Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'qumi'num' Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island (Talonbooks, 2007). Edited by Chris Arnett. 978-0-88922-555-8 $24.95
[BCBW 2020] "First Nations" "Anthropology"
Articles: 2 Articles for this author
The Terror of the Coast: Land Alienation and Colonial War on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands 1849-1863 (Talon $24.95)
Article
On April 20, 1863, the British naval gunboat Forward used its powerful cannons to blast a Native village on Kuper Island in Georgia Strait.
The openly unfriendly village, according to the British, was harbouring Native suspects in two allegedly murderous assaults against European transients in the Gulf Islands. During a fierce battle, with casualties, a handful of Lamalcha warriors managed to repulse the British.
This unsuccessful British attack marked a new low point in the relations between Native and non-Native residents of the B.C. coast and is the subject for Chris Arnett's second book, The Terror of the Coast: Land Alienation and Colonial War on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands 1849-1863 (Talon $24.95).
Arnett is a fourth-generation British Columbian on his mother's side and a member of a New Zealand Maori tribe, the Ngai Tahu, on his father's side. In 1993 he co-authored They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever: Rock Writings of the Stein Valley of British Columbia (Talonbooks).
In The Terror of the Coast he argues that the war between the Hwulmuhw or 'People of the Land' and the colonial government of Vancouver Island is of utmost significance in the context of unsettled First Nations' land claims.
After the British suffered their humiliating defeat at the hands of the Natives, British vengeance in the form of the "Colonial War"; was swift and savage. It included burning, looting, interrogations under the lash, show trials (without defence counsel or adequate interpreters) and the hangings of innocent people.
According to incidents outlined in The Terror of the Coast, the so-called 'Colonial War' launched in reprisal from Victorian England was in reality nothing more than brutal suppression of B.C. coastal Natives. It has therefore been an uncomfortable and largely ignored subject for Natives or non-Natives alike.
Arnett is not loathe to describe a much less 'civilized' time-it was an era when inter-tribal raids and warfare were still prevalent; when some Native peoples were still practising a form of slavery (which gave slave-holders the power of life and death); and when, to further their own ends, some Natives helped white people subjugate with deceit, destruction, division, torture, intimidation and judicial murder.
While degradations and brutality on both sides are recalled in fascinating detail, he also emphasizes that Native jurisdiction was rapidly eroded after the war of 1863 and aboriginal land was extensively 'alienated'.
In the Colony of Vancouver Island, land acquisition agreements were often deliberately made with small groups of Native peoples while the rest of their tribe was away for seasonal food harvesting. Promises of compensation made to Natives were frequently broken by Governor James Douglas.
At the time Vancouver Island was still its own colony, with its own Governor, and white settlement was spreading up the coast in patches as far north as Comox. The colonial authorities had to reassure white settlers that the coast was 'safe' to take.
In the wake of what happened, and given the historical setting of the incident, it is hardly surprising that the naval "bloody nose"; received by the British, and the nasty series of events surrounding it, are not taught in our schools or widely discussed in media.
In B.C., as in much of the rest of the world, the history of the European conquest and colonization of aboriginal peoples has been written almost exclusively by observers of mostly European origin, with their own in-built cultural biases. Most Native peoples who were colonized did not maintain written records.
While consulting a wide range of sources-such as newspaper editorials, letters, articles, government and police correspondence, naval ships' logs and 'Letters of Proceedings'-Arnett also sought out and interviewed some descendants of the Native people involved in the events. As well, some contemporary writings were critical of the British government and have been overlooked by other writers. Arnett brings these back into circulation to provide a valuable alternate perspective.
The Terror of the Coast is a lengthy and well-referenced book that adds an important chapter to B.C. history. It's not an easy read--an index would have enhanced its value as a reference book and made it easier to follow--but it does convincingly show the 'Colonial War' of 1863 was one more disgraceful event in the still-evolving colonization of what was later to become British Columbia.
Colonization where we live wasn't as benign and bloodless as many historians have led us to believe. 0-88922-318-1
[Quentin Dodd / BCBW 2000]
Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul’q’umi’num’ Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island
Article
Raised in the Shawnigan area of Vancouver Island, at Chemainus, by her very English parents Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Beauchamp Halhed, Beryl Mildred Cryer was born Beryl Mildred Halhed in Auckland, New Zealand in 1889.
Having arrived at Shawnigan Lake in 1892, she later maintained the area received its name from a hybrid word commemorating two early Anglo settlers, Shaw and Finnegan. She married local businessman William Claude Cryer and they had one child.
During the Depression, at the request of the managing editor of the Daily Colonist newspaper in Victoria, she collected Coast Salish stories from Hul'q'umi'num' elders, mainly her next door neighbour Mary Rice from Kuper Island, as well as Joe and Jennie Wyse, for a series of 60 articles that appeared in the Sunday Magazine supplement.
For instance, also co-wrote an article with Jennie Wyse (Tstass-Aya) for the Daily Colonist about a battle between the Snunéymuxw of Gabriola Island and the Lekwiltok from a century before.
Although she was not trained as a journalist or anthropologist, Cryer was careful to keep track of the sources of the narratives, enabling ethnographers who came afterwards to trace their origins and better understand their meanings.
Her associations with the Coast Salish led to the publication of her book slanted towards children called The Flying Canoe: Legends of the Cowichans (Victoria: J. Parker Buckle Printing, 1949). She died in Welland, Ontario, in 1980.
Cryer's contributions to coastal ethnology were subsequently edited by Chris Arnett for Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'q'umi'num' Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island (Talonbooks $24.95).
978-0-88922-555-8
[BCBW 2008]
