Foreword

In early 2004 the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council (SNTC) chiefs committed themselves to the creation of an Aboriginal Rights and Title Department.The chiefs envisioned that the department staff would assist the nation with asserting Secwépemc title and rights through the collection, cataloguing, and researching of all materials supporting the legal test required by Canadian courts to prove the same.The materials included oral recordings, both historical and new photos, land use history, and archival materials, such as Hudson's Bay Company journals and other early explorer journals, as well as maps and countless other documents that served to support the Secwépemc people's use and occupancy of the traditional territory.The research work also focused on current land use and resource use by the Secwépemc and the documentation of the same for future reference.After several years of research and sharing information, including hosting numerous workshops and conferences on the topic, SNTC realized that the scattered sources of knowledge would best be shared by drawing key teachings into one source, easily accessible by the youth, elders, community members, and general public.Our council chiefs decided that the starting point for this work would be a book that outlined the shared wisdom of the elders and combined it with other more scientific aspects of learning, such as archaeology and ethnology.In 2007 Marianne Ignace was asked by SNTC to spearhead the writing of the book.The book project was never intended to be a comprehensive rights and title resource but is meant to serve as a tool that can be utilized by many to gain insights about and understandings of the values and cultural importance of the Secwépemc people's connection to the land and to their oral histories.In fact, it could be said that this book is a testament to the government's failure to achieve the aims of its assimilation policies, which stretch from the time when British Columbia became a colony in 1858 through to the province's entry into Confederation in 1871 and which continue to be supported by the laws of the twenty-first century.As shown by the Secwépemc elders whose voices are put forth in this book, our people have never lost our language, nor have we forgotten the memories that were handed down from our ancestors, nor have policies and laws been able to silence our experiences,

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