Book review: Skeena voices and Roy Henry Vickers' illustrations create stunningly beautiful volume
Credit to Author: Tracey Tufnail| Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 19:00:02 +0000
An Illustrated Oral History
By Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd (Harbour Publishing, 2019)
$29.95 | 112pp
Settlers called it the Skeena, but this mighty river, B.C.’s second longest, has been known for millennia as the Xsien, “the juice of the clouds,” by the Tsimshian and Gitxsan peoples.
It flows 570 km from the sacred headwaters of the Spatszi plateau south and west to Spokechute/Port Essington, where it joins the sea.
Although navigating its whirlpools, riffles and canyons has never been easy, the river has been a pathway for human travel and trade since time immemorial.
Roy Henry Vickers.
Voices from the Skeena combines CBC oral history interviews with the river’s elders recorded in the early 1960s with stunningly beautiful illustrations by world renowned Indigenous artist Roy Henry Vickers.
Robert Budd.
The elements work together to create a powerful and profound tribute to the river and the cultures it has sustained. (Vickers and Budd have collaborated before on a series of award winning children’s books.)
When radio documentary pioneer Imbert Orchard set out in the 1960s to tape the voices of elders who remembered the early days of settlement on the Skeena, and the traditions of thousands of years of Indigenous life along its banks, he created a treasure trove of oral history, preserving the voices of First Nations figures like Chief Jeffrey H. Johnson and Captain Joseph Alphonsus Gardner, as well as early settlers like Sarah Glassey, the first woman to pre-empt land in B.C.
One of the many virtues of this project is that it refers readers to a website (memoriestomemoirs.ca), where the original interviews can be heard.
The book tells stories about navigating the Skeena by canoe and by steamboat, and, together with Vickers’ exquisite illustrations, gives the reader a vivid sense of a river and a region in transition.
The excitement of a steamboat’s arrival at an upriver settlement is vividly presented, and many colourful characters of the era come alive in the interviews.
One particularly memorable character was “Old Cataline,” (Jean Caux) a legendary organizer of the mule trains that moved freight off the paddle wheelers beyond the river.
If you care about B.C. history or life on the Skeena, this is a book for you.
This is regional history as it should be, grounded in the authentic voices of those who lived it and presented in a context of compelling visual beauty.
• Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net
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