A longtime rancher and member of the Lower Similkameen Indian band, Harry Robinson was born in Oyama near Kelowna on October 8, 1900. He devoted much of the later part of his life to telling and retelling Okanagan stories that he first heard from his partially blind grandmother, Louise Newhmkin on her Chopaka ranch.

Other mentors included Mary Narcisse, reputed to be 116 when she died in 1944, John Ashnola, who died during the 1918 flu epidemic at age 98, as well as Alex Skeuce, old Pierre and old Christine.

"When I become to be six years old," he said, "They begin to tell me and they keep on telling me every once in a while, seems to be right along until 1918. I got enough people to tell me. That's why I know. The older I get, [it] seems to come back on me.... Maybe God thought I should get back and remember so I could tell. Could be. I don't know. I like to tell anyone, white people or Indian."

With the help of Margaret Holding, Harry Robinson learned to read and write English in his early twenties. Weary of itinerant ranching and farming jobs, Robinson bought his first suit from a second-hand store in Oroville and married Matilda, a widow about ten years older than him, on December 9, 1924. By the 1950s they had acquired four large ranches near Chopaka and Ashnola where Matilda had grown up as the daughter of John Shiweelkin.

Childless and burdened by a hip injury in 1956, Harry Robinson sold his ranches in 1973, two years after Matilda died on March 26, 1971. On August 24, 1977, Robinson was living in retirement in a rented bungalow in Hedley when he met a non-Aboriginal graduate student from Nova Scotia, Wendy Wickwire, who was introduced by mutual friends.

On the evening before they all went to the Omak rodeo in Washington State, Harry launched into a story after dinner and continued until almost midnight. That experience drew Wickwire back to the Similkameen Valley for the next ten years, with her Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, transcribing and editing Robinson's stories, narrated by him in English.

For part of the 1970s, Wickwire lived in Merritt and Lytton, immersing herself in Aboriginal culture for a Ph.D. dissertation on Indian song. "I went to Lytton, to Spences Bridge, to Spuzzum, and all over to get a bigger cross-section of songs. Then I got to spend the whole year in the Nicola Valley, near Merritt, living in a cabin and tripping out to find people to record. During this time Harry kept telling me his stories."

Now a member of the Department of History and the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, Wickwire first broached the idea of putting Harry Robinson's stories into book form in 1984 and he approved. "I'm going to disappear," Robinson said, "and there'll be no more telling stories."

For years Harry Robinson would wait for Wickwire at the bus stop outside his home near Hedley, waiting for her to climb into his old green Ford pickup truck so he could tell more stories. "We'd go out to dinner and he'd tell stories all night. The next day we'd drop around to all of the various places in town, buying groceries at the general store, or sightseeing or something, and I'd make him dinner, and then we'd spend another night telling stories. I'd come back and go to a rodeo with him, or go on a car trip, or something, and we'd always have a great time. Hanging out, we kind of became like a father and daughter."

Interviewed in 1993, Wickwire said, "Harry was such a tremendous artist and a tremendous man, I just knew deep in my heart that this was really, really, really important stuff. I sent Harry's manuscript out--the first one--to almost everybody and it was turned down flatly by almost all of them. Then all of a sudden, one person, Karl Siegler of Talonbooks, picks it up. I knew Harry's work was important for British Columbia, for Canada, for the Oral Traditions-so I kept flogging it. Now Harry's on the map."

The Wickwire/Robinson collaboration has produced three volumes of stories, Write It On Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989), a finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize when Robinson was 89; Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (1992), winner of the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize in 1993; and the newly released Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory (Talonbooks, $24.95), containing Coyote stories and material about the new quasi-monsters, SHAmas (whites), who dispossess "Indians" of their lands and rights.

"The third volume contains many of the stories I put aside earlier because they were just too weird for words," says Wickwire. "For instance, Harry tells a story about a meeting between Coyote and the King of England. I did not find anything like this in the published collections. But after a detailed study, I have decided that Aboriginal folks a century ago were likely telling such far out stories--but the collectors weren't recording them very often. They weren't interested in them because they saw them as "tarnished" stories. Franz Boas and his colleagues were looking for the authentic "traditional" stories. And of course they were busy defining authentic and traditional in their terms, for their own purposes."

In his stories Robinson differentiated between stories that are chap-TEEK-whl and stories that are shmee-MA-ee. The former explain creation from a period when the Okanagan people were animal-people. The latter are stories from the world of human people, not animal people. He was always willing to incorporate modern influences, including the Judeo-Christian God, within his evolving world view.

"A good example of Harry's ability to incorporate current events in a meaningful way in his stories," writes Wickwire, "is his interpretation of the landing on the moon of the American astronaut Neil Armstrong. When the news of this event reached Harry, it was not surprising to him at all because he knew that Coyote's son had gone there years ago. The white people were naive, he concluded.

"Armstrong was not the first to land on the moon. He had simply followed the path that Coyote's son had learned about long ago, which is recorded in the old story "Coyote Plays a Dirty Trick." In this story, Harry sees the earth orbit and the moon orbit of the Apollo mission as the two 'stopping points' so critical to Coyote's son's return to earth."

Eventually Harry Robinson needed full-time medical attention for a worsening leg ulcer. He went to live at Pine Acres senior citizens home near Kelowna, in Westbank. "It was very sterile," Wickwire recalls. "He was used to driving his old pickup truck into town and getting his mail, and having lots of visitors come to his house." Robinson moved to a senior citizens home in Keremeos. Later his condition deteriorated when his artificial hip dislodged and caused serious infection. He had 24-hour care at Mountain View Manor in Keremeos until he died on January 25, 1990.

Wickwire is married to Michael M'Gonigle, her co-author for Stein: The Way of the River which won the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award at the B.C. Book Prizes in 1989. [See M'Gonigle entry] Wickwire later completed a biography of James Teit, the ethnographer who lived and worked among the southern and northern interior peoples from 1884 until 1922. Her academic qualifications are: B.Music Hons. (Music) University of Western Ontario 1972; M.A. (Interdisc. Studies - Music, Anthropology, Folklore) York University 1978; Ph.D. (Ethnomusicology, Anthropology) Wesleyan University 1983.

[See Harry Robinson entry]

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At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging
by Wendy Wickwire (UBC Press $34.95)

James Teit was the first significant, highly literate, ongoing activist for Aboriginal rights in British Columbia, serving as a translator, scribe and lobbyist. The chiefs of British Columbia referred to him as their "hand."

He helped to co-found the Allied Indian Tribes of British Columbia in 1916, having previously helped form the Interior Tribes of British Columbia (ITBC) and the British Columbia Indian Rights Association in 1909.

When Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier visited Kamloops in 1910, it was James Teit who prepared the official response on behalf of the Secwepemc, Okanagan and Nlaka'pamux nations, delivered by Chief Louis of Kamloops, to assert rights to their traditional lands.
Teit also accompanied the delegation of 96 chiefs from 60 B.C. bands who met with Premier Richard McBride and his cabinet in Victoria in 1911. In 1912, he went to Ottawa with nine chiefs to meet with newly elected Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden, during which time Teit translated the four speeches made by John Chilahitsa (Okanagan), Basil David (Secwepemc), John Tedlenitsa (Nlaka'pamux) and James Raitasket (Sta'atl'imx).

Teit delivered a statement to Borden: "We find ourselves practically landless, and that in our own country, through no fault of ours, we have reached a critical point, and, unless justice comes to the rescue, we must go back and sink out of sight as a race."

He returned to Ottawa with eight chiefs in 1916. When the 1912-1916 Royal Commission issued its report on Aboriginal grievances, the Allied Tribes opposed it, and again it was James Teit who replied on their behalf: "The Indians see nothing of value to them in the work of the Royal Commission. Their crying needs have not been met."

In 1917, Teit and Reverend Peter Kelly sent a telegram to Borden to oppose conscription for Aboriginal men, likening it to enslavement, because the land question remained unresolved and Aboriginals were being denied their basic rights as citizens. At Teit's urging, an order-in-council was passed on January 17, 1918, to exempt Aboriginals from conscription.

Born on the Shetland Islands, Scotland, in 1864, James Teit immigrated to Spences Bridge in the Fraser Canyon in 1884 to help manage a store on the estate owned by his uncle, John Murray.

When the anthropologist Franz Boas met James Teit in the summer of 1894, Boas hired him immediately. "The young man, James Teit, is a treasure!" he wrote.

A self-taught botanist, Teit worked as an entomologist, a photographer and an anthropologist, publishing 2200 pages of ethnological material in forty-three sources and he produced almost 5,000 pages of unpublished manuscript material according to UVic historian Wendy Wickwire in The Canadian Historical Review (June, 1998). Owner of a wax cylinder recording machine, Teit also recorded local singers and identified them with catalogued photographs.

Much to the displeasure of his family, Teit married a member of the Nlaka'pamux (pronounced "In-kla-KAP-muh") nation, Susanna Lucy Antko, with whom he lived happily for twelve years until her death in 1899. After Teit remarried in 1904, his six children received Scandinavian names. It is seldom noted that Teit became a member of the Socialist Party of Canada, reading socialist books by American and German authors as early as 1902.

In 1920, Teit circulated a document in Ottawa to members of parliament entitled A Half-Century of Injustice toward the Indians of British Columbia. He died in 1922.

Now Wendy Wickwire has produced a major biography, At the Bridge: James Teit and An Anthropology of Belonging (UBC Press $34.95).

"He spent the last fifteen years of his life at the centre of an Indigenous rights campaign aimed at resolving B.C.’s contentious land-title issue," Wickwire writes, and "like most 'friends of the Indians' at the time, [he was] quickly blacklisted and dismissed as a 'white agitator'" --Alan Twigg

Daniel Patrick Marshall, author of Claiming the Land: British Columbia and the Making of a New Eldorado (Ronsdale, 2018), and winner of the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on B.C. has written a personal response to At The Bridge for The Ormsby Review. Here are edited excerpts.

In my travels as an historian over the years through the communities of the southern B.C. Interior, I have heard two names repeatedly in conversations with regard to the history and cultures of Indigenous peoples. The first is the subject of this extraordinary book -- James Teit (1864-1922) -- the second is, in fact, the author of At the Bridge: James Teit and the Anthropology of Belonging. Separated by about a century of time, Wickwire's name has become synonymous with that of Teit's. The two share an "anthropology of belonging" with Indigenous communities as "participant observers."

James Teit did not flit through Indigenous communities as a detached observer (as did his colleague Franz Boas, the "Father of American Anthropology"). Instead, he fully immersed himself in the land and its people… I know from my own work with Coast Salish peoples that one cannot expect to make an instantaneous relationship with native elders and secure their confidence by merely breezing in for a short, scheduled appointment. "You white guys have the watches -- but we have the time," one chief used to say to me. And this is a point that Teit well understood -- as, indeed, does Wickwire.

Teit apparently offered some advice to the German-born American [Boas] who was prone to make quick in-and-out forays into native communities: put simply, "you want to take your time." The success of Teit’s ethnographic work, according to Wickwire -- the sheer detail and extent of Indigenous lifeways collected -- is largely attributable to his anthropology of belonging, of being fully present and living amongst those he wrote about.

"Teit's exclusion from anthropology's pantheon of heroes," Wickwire writes, is nevertheless "offset by his hallowed place in local Indigenous communities."

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Teit was one of three great non-Native allies who worked closely with and advocated for B.C.’s Indigenous communities. The others were Reverend Charles Tate, who worked primarily with south Coast Salish peoples such as the Cowichan and Squamish; and the Reverend Arthur O’Meara, who was particularly associated with the Nisgha'a peoples.

Teit came by his activism honestly. He was born in the Shetland Islands, a region of Scotland that had also experienced the harsh impact of colonization. The plight of B.C.'s Indigenous people resonated personally. Wickwire notes the parallels between the situation of Shetland Islanders and Nlaka'pamux people.

It seemed more than coincidental that, on the other side of the Atlantic, Teit's Shetland friends and colleagues were deploying ancient Norse land rights as a way to detach themselves from Britain and reclaim their rights to their island land base. Surely this is one of Wickwire's deepest and greatest insights-- to frame Teit's work within the "collective struggle of disenfranchised local peoples against imperial elites."

Wickwire has done B.C. scholars and Indigenous peoples an essential service in deftly peeling back the layers of personality, family, and life circumstances of one of Canada's unsung heroes.

9780774861526

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1) Won the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences "Canada Prize" ($10,000) in June, 2020, for the best scholarly book in the social sciences and humanities published in Canada in 2019. https://www.ideas-idees.ca/issues/aspp-and-canada-prizes#winner;

2) Won the Canadian Historical Association's Clio prize in June 2020, (for best book in BC history). https://cha-shc.ca/news/2020-cha-prize-winners-2020-06-03.htm

3) Won the BC Historical Federation's 2nd prize ($1500) in April 2020, for an outstanding work of BC history. https://www.bchistory.ca/interview-with-wendy-wickwire/.

4)Won the Canadian Anthropology Society's  2020 Labrecque-Lee best book award in Sept., 2020 for the best book on an anthropological/archaeological topic published by an anthropologist in Canada in 2019 : https://www.cas-sca.ca/about/prizes-and-awards/labrecque-lee-book-prize;

5  Won the Canadian Studies Network’s "best book in Canadian Studies" prize in Nov. 2020: https://csn-rec.ca/news/40125-congratulations-wendy-wickwire-awarded-the-csn-rec-book-prize

Shortlisted for the 2020 George Ryga book prize.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Roderick Haig-Brown book prize.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Basil Stuart Stubbs book prize.
Honorable mention for the prestigious Wilson Institute book prize (for best book on Canadian history).

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Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Stein: The Way of the River

BOOKS:

Wickwire, Wendy & Michael M'Gonigle. Stein: The Way of the River (Talonbooks, 1988).

Robinson, Harry. Write It On Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (Theytus/Talon, 1989; 2004). Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire.

Robinson, Harry. Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992; Talonbooks, 2004). Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire.

Wickwire, Wendy & Michael M'Gonigle & Marion Kelsey. Victory Harvest: Diary of a Canadian in the British Women's land army, 1940-1944 (McGill-Queens University Press, 1997).

Wickwire, Wendy (editor). Ethnographic Eyes: Essays in Memory Douglas Cole (Spring/Summer double issue, BC Studies, 2000).

Robinson, Harry & Wendy Wickwire. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory (Talonbooks, 2005). With CD.

At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (UBC 2019) $34.95 9778-0-7748-6152-6

[BCBW 2020] "First Nations"