St'át'imc Erotic

Ask a St'át'imc person where they are from and the answer puts them on one of two very different pieces of ground. The upper communities sit in the Fraser Canyon around Lillooet, sagebrush and ponderosa pine on dry rock, some of the hottest country in Canada. The lower communities run down the Lillooet River through Mount Currie and Pemberton into cedar rainforest and the lake chain above Harrison. Eleven communities, one language, two climates, and the difference works its way into everything. English used to call all of them Lillooet, after the lower group, and the town kept the name after the people took theirs back. The canyon wind explains the best known St'át'imc food: salmon caught at the rocks below the Bridge River rapids and hung in moving air rather than smoked, which makes a firm, sweet dried fish that traveled far past the territory as a trade good. Winters were spent in s7ístken, round semi-subterranean houses entered by ladder through the roof. The pit village at Keatley Creek above Lillooet holds hundreds of those depressions, some of them unusually large, and records several thousand years of people staying put in one place.

St'át'imcets is Interior Salish, a near relative of Secwepemctsín and Nlaka'pamuxcín, and it splits into upper and lower dialects that speakers can tell apart in a word. It has had an odd second life in academic linguistics, where its determiners, which mark whether the speaker is committing to something existing rather than whether it is definite, became a standard reference point in work on meaning. Fluent first-language speakers now number in the dozens, almost all of them elders, with immersion and school programs carrying the rest. Catholicism arrived with the Oblate missions in the nineteenth century and is genuinely held in many families, sitting alongside sweat lodge, winter dance and land practice without much visible friction. The gold rush of 1858 pushed thousands of miners up the canyon and the wagon road followed; nothing about the territory was the same afterward. In 1911 the chiefs signed the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe, a blunt statement that the land was never surrendered, and it is still the spine of St'át'imc political argument. The century that followed brought the Bridge River hydro diversions, which took a river apart and were not settled with BC Hydro until 2011, and the Sutikalh camp, which has kept a proposed ski resort out of the Cayoosh valley by occupying it since 2000.