HISTORY OF B.C. LAND TITLE PROVIDES COMPELLING TALE
Imagine strangers have invaded your home, infected you and your children with a lethal disease, abducted the kids and looted your possessions. This is not a hypothetical question for Indigenous First Nations across Canada. They were invaded by settlers, intentionally exposed to lethal diseases, and subjected to racist violence over the past centuries.
Lha Yudit'ih: We Always Find a Way, written by UBC professor emerita Lorraine Weir with Chief Roger William of the Xeni Gwet'in, one of the communities that make up the Tsilhqot'in Nation in B.C.'S Chilcotin region, is an account of how the Tsilhqot'in people met the attacks of disease, armed intervention, residential school with all its attendant abuses, and ongoing attempts by big business to exploit the resources of their land. It is a story of armed struggle, civil disobedience and courtroom battles, and a story in the end of victory.
The product of a decade of hard work, the book weaves together oral history and archival research to tell a long and complex story, giving the voices of the Indigenous people at the centre of this history a central and determinative role. The Tsilhqot'in victory at the Supreme Court in 2014, in which Chief William was the plaintiff, was a landmark in Canadian law, the first time that Aboriginal title to a territory was formally recognized by the court.
The challenges the nation faced included the smallpox epidemic that arrived with settler explorers, threats from road builders and a war of self-defence fought by the nation against the intruders. In one particularly shameful incident, chiefs of the nation met with settlers to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the war. Instead of the expected negotiations, the chiefs were seized, tried, and executed — an injustice belatedly acknowledged by official exoneration of all the executed leaders by B.C. in 2014 and federally in 2018.
Oral history is a difficult genre, and Weir has elegantly surmounted the difficulties to create a book that sings with the beauty of the spoken word as it conveys the life-and-death seriousness and courage of the Tsilhqot'in people. It provides valuable insight into the process of translation and into the difficult labour of creating honest history.
This splendid book belongs in every school library in Canada, and on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the truth and reconciliation process.