Raspberry magazine - Fall 2019 by Raspberry

FRASER VALLEY ARTS, CULTURE & COMMUNITY LIFE

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Fall 2019

Katie Stobbart EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Jess Wind ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Dessa Bayrock LITERARY ARTS CURATOR

Aymee Leake VISUAL ARTS CURATOR

LAYOUT & DESIGN

Katie Stobbart

CONTRIBUTORS

Dessa Bayrock Ania Kyte Heather Ramsay Katie Stobbart Jess Wind

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Editorial: We need to change

The hottest political trading card game

Featuring glasswork by Ania Kyte

A changing Chilliwack

The draining / reclamation of Sumas Lake

Review of Hoffmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Echolocation

We need to change The way we built our world is unsustainable Katie Stobbart & Jess Wind Following the Earth’s hottest global September since 1880, the leaves in the Valley have begun to flare red at the edges, crisp, and drift to the ground as they do each year. Beyond the mundane change of the seasons, greater shifts compel us to think of change on a larger scale. In many ways, rapid change seems to be a hallmark of our modern world. Technology flips as quickly as fashion; people born without the internet now wear libraries of information as a wristwatch. The empires of the past have faded into near irrelevance as we are linked inevitably into an impossibly vast global community. As we change faster and faster and faster, the cracks in the foundations of what we have built are showing. Many of us can now feel a false sense of stability begin to fracture, for those of us who had the privilege of ever feeling stable. Some of these changes we feel in our everyday routine; our daily infrastructure is overloaded with the weight of larger systemic changes. Getting from point A to B has a new level of risk and time commitment with an exploding population and a highway that sees multiple accidents a day. A stretch that should take no more than 40 minutes between Chilliwack and Langley can take four times that. In much of the Fraser Valley, housing is lacking or unaffordable. For every new business in Abbotsford, it seems two close their doors — some after a short lifespan, some after a lifetime. We look to the past, grasping for what used to be fruitful. We revitalize historic spaces, trying to give ourselves some sense of longevity in all the new we are building. We see the same kinds of changes now that we did in Historic Downtown Abbotsford in Chilliwack’s downtown development plan to revive the five corners area on Wellington and Old Yale. Even the same businesses, which have managed to take root in Abbotsford, are opening second locations there in Chilliwack. But success is only one side of any story. Our country is now having to reckon with the impossible price of our “success” as a nation: in part, the well-being, culture, humanity, and lives of many pre-existing nations of Indigenous people. Canada is quickly losing its ability to hide behind its big unassuming grins and Tim Horton’s coffee. It’s no longer

good enough to blissfully settle inside our ignorance and “universal” healthcare. It’s no longer good enough to pretend Canada doesn’t have a racism problem when the most privileged among us can idly mock non-European cultures, and when Indigenous communities continue to go without safe water. It’s no longer good enough to assume Canada is making strides toward a greener planet. It’s no longer good enough. The world we are grappling with should make us uncomfortable. It should make us angry. It made six million people across the globe uncomfortable and angry enough to strike for action that will slow the effects of climate change. Let’s hope there is still real power in public unrest, and continue to act. If we look to the past for lessons, let’s not just look for successes. Let’s look at the flipside of success, the cracks in the foundation, the hidden costs that enabled us to grow quickly and cheaply and aggressively. We need to make repairs and amends — to our people, to our planet — before we continue to run blindly forward. We need to understand and reconsider the cost of our comforts. We need to make real, radical change to the way we think and act and refuse to act.

We need to make repairs and amends — to our people, to our planet — before we continue to run blindly forward. Part of that, yes, comes from doing what we can within the system to enact muchneeded change: vote, advocate, speak up. And some of what we must do is resist our inclination to maintain the status quo. The status quo has and continues to cause deep, lasting, horrifying damage. It’s not enough to recycle, or sometimes remember to bring our cloth bags to the store. The Amazon, one of our planet’s greatest sources of biodiversity, is on fire. It’s not enough to say we’re sorry and continue to behave as we always have. Our country is in a state of genocide, with the continued disappearances and murders of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQIIA+ people. It’s not enough to keep building new shopping districts when it’s not feasible for so many people to live here and commute elsewhere. It’s not enough to bury ourselves in work and money and logistics and oil and ignore the toxicity of the systems we are participating in. We need to deeply and meaningfully alter our patterns, locally and nationally and globally. We need to change.

ELXN

With great responsibility comes super powers

All new this election season: your local MPs trading cards. Now with artwork featuring extraordinary powers for change and leadership. This exclusive release features politicians: normal, everyday people who make extraordinary promises. They come from our communities, may face similar struggles and bear witness to the changing world just as we do. Yet politicians have greater powers than the average person, either to effect change or maintain the status quo. It’s important to remember those are powers we give them, for better or for worse, when we vote at election time. Each trading card features the candidate’s basic stats and platform highlights all covered on fun backgrounds representing party colours. Collect a full set in one colour for bragging rights with your friends. Battle them in the all new “all candidates meeting” debate game. Level them up through research and careful critique — the cards are just a starting point.

Cast your vote on October 21 to decide the winner!

ch â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;em t a c a t ot

all

2019

Local Candidate

Parachute Candidate

Abbotsford • Liberal Party of Canada

Electio

Local Author Constituency Manager for Jati Sidhu

Party Platform Highlights More money for middle class families, action to address climate change crisis, and stronger gun control

At All Candidates Debate: “[Liberals have] been working to decrease poverty by strengthening the middle class.”

Madeleine Sauve

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abbotsford

Seamus Heffernan

Abbotsford • New Democratic Party Ex-Faculty at Emily Carr Fed. of Post-Sec Educators Representative Film and TV Worker Active IATSE Union Member Platform Highlights Health care access, education, investing in green economy, responsible governance in partnership with First Nations

Ed Fast

Abbotsford • Conservative Party of Canada

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International Trade Former Minister in Conservative Gov. Environment and Climate Change Shadow Minister in Current Gov. Party Platform Highlights Cut tax rate for low-income citizens, balance federal budget in 5 years, create green homes tax credit, harsher consequences re: illegal firearms

Stephen Fowler

Aeriol Alderking

Abbotsford • Christian Heritage Party Acting Treasurer Local Seniors Organization Advocacy For low-income residents At All Candidates Debate: “I was a single mother and my children benefitted from poverty … poverty is not a problem.”

James (Locke) Duncan

E Abbotsford • Green Party of Canada Teacher & Social Activist Teaches in School District 34 At All Candidates Debate: “To defeat poverty we have to tackle the root causes, like low income, a precarious job market, cuts to social programming, and bias or discrimination on the base of gender, ethnicity, and other factors, as well as the ongoing effects of colonialization.”

Abbotsford • People’s Party of Canada Automation - Industrial Controls BCIT Trades Program Graduate Platform Highlights Province equalization, growth of oil and gas industry, rejecting environment alarmism, nationalism over globalism, protections against censorship

Heather McQuillan

Dorothy-Jean O’Donnell

Chilliwack-Hope • New Democratic Party Film Industry

Lawyer

At All Candidates Debate: “We are going to invest in 500,000 new affordable homes over the next 10 years [and] we are going to ensure the minimum wage is raised to $15 an hour.”

Local Candidate

Chilliwack-Hope • Marxist-Leninist Party

Platform Highlights Renewal of political process, anti-war government, ending colonial injustice, prioritize social programming At All Candidates Debate: “We think that individual income tax should be abolished.”

Parachute Candidate

Arthur Green

Chilliwack-Hope • Green Party Financial Service Business The Green Shelters Corporation Party Platform Highlights Addressing the climate emergency, transitioning to a green economy, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and more...

Mark Strahl

Chilliwack-Hope • Conservative Party National Defence Former Member of Standing Committee Former Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Party Platform Highlights Cut tax rate for low-income citizens, balance federal budget in 5 years, create green homes tax credit

Chilliwack-Hope • People’s Party of Canada Secondary School Teacher Teaches in School District 33 Platform Highlights Province equalization, growth of oil and gas industry, rejecting environment alarmism, nationalism over globalism, protections against censorship

Election2019

Kelly Velonis

Chilliwack-Hope • Liberal Party Executive Director Chilliwack & District Seniors Resource Society

Election2019

Party Platform Highlights More money for middle class families, action to address climate change crisis, and stronger gun control

chilliwack - hope

Robert Bogunovic

Local Candidate

Parachute Candidate

Michael Nenn

Mission, Matsqui, Fraser • New Democratic Party Telecommunications Industry Platform Highlights Health care access, education, investing in green economy, responsible governance in partnership with First Nations

Nick Csaszar

Mission, Matsqui, Fraser • People’s Party

Jati Sidhu

Mission, Matsqui, Fraser • Liberal Party Foreign Affairs & International Development Standing Committee Member Party Platform Highlights More money for middle class families, action to address climate change crisis, and stronger gun control At All Candidates Meeting: “We’re proud of the work we have done, lifting 800,000 people out of poverty.”

Brad Vis

Mission, Matsqui, Fraser • Conservative Party

Studied at BCIT and UFV

Communications, public relations, and policy development

Platform Highlights Province equalization, growth of oil and gas industry, rejecting environment alarmism, nationalism over globalism, protections against censorship

At All Candidates Meeting: “We can’t forget that having children is a choice and when we made that choice we took on financial commitments. That said, the Conservative Party does support the Universal Childcare Benefit.”

Mission, Matsqui, Fraser • Green Party Economist & Policy Analyst One of BC’s Green Party Founders At All Candidates Meeting: “We must shut down the tar sands. There are millions of jobs in building back up our infrastructure.”

Election2019

mission - matsqui fraser canyon

John Kidder

Election2019

call for

submissions

Send your original unpublished writing to info@raspberrymag.ca for consideration in our next issue. photo: Taneane Twele Photography

Ania Kyte My name is Ania Kyte, and in addition to being a Mom to my two sons, Alexander and Anderson, I am also a glass lampwork bead artisan (which means that I use a torch flame to melt glass and make artglass beads). I discovered a passion for beadwork about 10 years ago, with the help of a good friend named Linda, who started me with a few basics and encouraged me in my progress. Since then, I have been involved in aspects of beadwork such as: beadweaving, loomwork, and wire-work.

On September 16, 2002, I took a class with a local lampwork artisan, and became passionate about the art of lampworking, which involves melting glass over a torch flame to create unique, hand-formed glass beads, one at a time. For the first five years, I used a very basic set up to create all my beads: a HotHead torch, propane gas, and Morretti/ Effetre glass from Italy. Now, I use a more complex set up: a Nortel Minor torch, along with propane and an oxygen-concentrator for the majority of my work. I still keep the Hot Head set up on a secondary

workstation for teaching classes and for working with Satake glass, a leadbased Japanese glass. All my beads are kiln-annealed overnight in my “Olympic Murano” kiln with a “Bartlett” digital controller for strength and durability. Since those early few months at the torch, I have been working towards developing good technique and a unique style - and now, even after several years at the torch, I’m still experimenting with the glass and enjoying the journey... And now, I create unique, custom jewellery using my own beads and high quality materials such as pearls, gemstones, Swarovski crystals, sterling silver and gold, so all the work you see has been 17 hand-crafted by me.

Lampworking involves melting glass over a torch flame to create unique, hand-formed glass beads, one at a time.

CHILLIWACK Echoes of the past DESSA BAYROCK It’s been four years since I moved across the country, and it’s not the first time I’ve returned to Chilliwack to visit. But it is the first time I decide to spend time wandering the downtown core, consciously facing all the ways it’s changed. I have the whole morning in front of me, and twenty-five years of memory lay across the city like smog. I decide to try to find the Paramount Theatre, or what’s left of it, and the answer

is nothing: as soon as I see the vacant lot, I remember: the saga of it being condemned, of citizens rallying to save it, of their failure. I had it in my head that the sign had been saved, maybe attached to a hipster condo building as local, vintage flair. But that was a story about a newspaper building in Chicago, I think. The unfamiliar transposed onto the once-familiar. I’ve never been to Chicago but it feels more familiar than

I have the whole morning in front of me, and twenty-five years of memory lay across the city like smog.

Chilliwack, somehow. Here, now, a community garden attempts to fill the empty lot, and it looks pitiful in the snow. It’s March, and it’s cold, and nothing has yet started to grow. The fruit trees — they must be fruit trees — bow their limbs under the snowfall. A sign on the fence reads ANOTHER QUALITY DEMOLITION BY CLEARVIEW DEMOLITION LTD. It takes me at least a minute to realize the fence has no gate. There’s a garden, yes, but there’s no way in. All of Chilliwack seems to be sending me secret messages in this way. Is there a pattern in the spidering of the broken storefront windows? In the holes left by demolished buildings, as conspicuously missing as lost teeth in a smile? In the

school children who push by me in the crosswalks, chasing one another like rabid, terrified animals? Perhaps it’s always made me feel this way — claustrophobic, anxious, uncanny, unmoored — and it’s just that now I’m no longer used to it. I’ve lost the tolerance for it, for whatever this is. I turn around and walk back towards Mary Street, passing Sticky’s Candy. The front door is boarded up, although I can see a cashier inside setting up for the day. Someone has scrawled a strange symbol on the plywood at head level, a curved U and two slashed dots. A pig’s nose? A two-nippled breast? A mouth which

has subsumed its face, its eyes? I walk into the Bookman, where I worked for a year before moving to Ottawa, and recognize no one except the bookstore cat. Nietzche has the feline boniness of the very old, and the corners of his eyes are clotted with the thick brown sap that ancient cats seem to produce, to collect. I crouch and look him in the eye. Do you remember me? I whisper. I read once that cats don’t experience time as linear, but I don’t know what that means, exactly. Does he feel as though I never left? Or has time has made me a complete stranger? He consents to let me pet him, but he lets everyone pet him, which is why he makes such a good bookstore cat. Book titles jump out of me and they, too, feel like they’re trying to tell

me something. The Way of All Flesh; Do the Mountains Call Your Name; Songs of Innocence and of Experience; How To Be Eaten By A Lion. I pull this last one out and read the title poem: Notice this and remember it, / this way in which you became beautiful / when you thought there was nothing more. Is Chilliwack the lion, or am I? Who is eating whom? When I lived here, in this town, on Norland Street next to the river, I used to drive home along Wellington, stopping at the intersection of Wellington and Main, looking idly at the window display of Creekside Home Decor. For the longest time, they kept panes of stained glass in the window, beautiful little squares leaded together by someone local. My favourite was always a composition of narrow blue rectangles, a design

stay awhile longer that seemed to edge navy sections up like waves and fall again into teals and baby blues. They’re closed for the morning, still, when I walk past, but two stained glass panes still live in the bottom of the window. The one I loved, of course, is long since gone. I wander into Decades, where I used to buy huge, sticky cinnamon buns after theatre rehearsal — where I attended a junior achievement program as a kid and designed a fake video rental store — where I wrote my first feature article for my university newspaper — where I studied for the geography final which was the last thing I needed to pass in order to graduate with my BA. A piece of art hanging on the wall reads STAY AWAY LONGER in flowing script, but of course this is my own brain playing tricks on me again. Turning to it a second time, it clearly reads STAY AWHILE LONGER. Just a few minutes longer, I promise this familiar space. Just a few moments more. But then I have to go.

stay away longer

if you drive through downtown chilliwack these days, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard to miss the construction fences and boarded up windows

the old and the new JESS WIND

If you drive through downtown Chilliwack these days itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard to miss the construction fences and boarded up windows at Five Corners. These fences, decorated with historical Chilliwack facts and promotional jokes about what the space will become, border a 3.75 acre revitalization project for the downtown area. 27

This is a significant development for the downtown area with many businesses already slated to move into the space including second locations for some of downtown Abbotsford’s hotspots and the new Bricklayer Brewing. “The new and innovative redevelopment proposed by Algra Bros. Developments aims to transform downtown into a healthy, sustainable and thriving community that promotes social and economic vitality,” according to the Chilliwack Downtown Plan. “The redevelopment will have a minimal impact on the natural environment while remembering the area’s historical significance.

The project also intends to retain some of the historical buildings and facades while re-using other materials in the construction to honour downtown Chilliwackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s historical period between the 1980s to the 1940s. Follow Downtown Chilliwack on Instagram to stay upto-date with the progress.

Once & forgotten

a lake drained & reclaimed by heather ramsay

Before the rows of blueberries were harvested and the dark factories churned out button mushrooms, the lake was essential to the local First Nations people’s life. Drained or reclaimed? I craned my neck to read a commemorative panel at a rest area on a flat patch of highway between Abbotsford and Chilliwack. The sign, festooned with a dogwood (British Columbia’s provincial flower) and a date (1967), rises high above the path to the cinderblock bathroom.

SUMAS LAKE RECLAMATION In 1924, by a system of stream diversions, dams, dykes, canals and pumps, 33,000 acres of fertile land were reclaimed from Sumas Lake. The wind wrestled my hair as I tried to understand words written in Canada’s centennial year. “Few areas in BC have such rich soil with transportation and markets in close proximity. . . Produce… mixed farming… important factor[s] in the economy of our mountainous province.” It sounded wonderful, but I had the feeling that something was wrong. I’d never heard of Sumas Lake before pulling up stakes and relocating to Chilliwack, BC, an hour drive east of Vancouver. In the years I’d lived in Vancouver and later in northern BC, I hadn’t thought much about the Fraser Valley, or its bounty of dairy cows, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli farms. I’d driven through the area on the way to somewhere else. Past 32 the manure stink that farmers say is the smell of money. Past the poultry

pens and the pumpkin patches. But now that I lived here I wanted to find out more about this once and forgotten lake. That’s how I discovered that this flat stretch of road hounded by hour upon hour of droning traffic was once an ever-changing waterway used by generations of Stó:lō. Before the rows of blueberries were harvested and the dark factories churned out button mushrooms, the lake was essential to the local First Nations people’s life. But, less than 100 years ago, as settlers trickled into the area, the wetland was drained and the lake became a garden of rich black soil and land available to those who were willing to pay. The rest area commemoration revealed a snippet-like story about the draining. But I wanted to know the other story about Sumas Lake: one that hadn’t been honoured with a 10-foot tall sign. After a bit of research I found someone who might remember the lake. I took an exit on the other side of the freeway and followed the winding North Road to Ray Silver Sr.’s sage-green split-level on the Sumas Indian Reserve. “Find the longhouse, and I’m the next one up,” he told me over the phone. As I pulled into the driveway, I could see him, framed by the picture window, leaning on a cane. “Come up. Come up,” he called from

the top of the stairs. “Don’t worry about your shoes.” When I talked to him, Silver, at 86, was one of the oldest members of the Sumas Band. The tiny reserve where he lived (Silver died in 2016), hugs the base of Sumas Mountain, on the eastern edge of Abbotsford. Now hemmed in by an onslaught of cars zipping past on the highway, his people’s lands were once considered the heart of Stó:lō territory. Before the crisscrossing roads and the factory chicken farms, more than 10,000 people lived in the area. Before the lake was drained, Stó:lō people came from villages up and down the Fraser to gather and feast at Sumas Lake.

The lake provided Silver was born in 1929 in his parent’s house located just up the slope and across what is now four lanes of traffic from the roadside stop that used to be the bottom of a lake. He hadn’t witnessed the draining. The last water was squeezed out of the marshy wetland in 1924, five years before his time. But he’d been told stories. “Millions of salmon spawning. Fish. Sturgeon. Everything. The lake provided for the natives. That was their SuperValu.” The lake was also their highway. They paddled on the wide glassy water body and down tributaries like the Marshall, the Sumas, and the Vedder rivers to the Fraser. Silver’s people visited their neighbours via the lake for countless generations, and they

followed the cycles of fish, game, and waterfowl. “ W h e n they wanted sturgeon, one guy would sit up the front end of a canoe with a spear. Another guy would paddle along on the lake and the [first] guy would keep moving the pole up and down,” said Silver. The lake was shallow. When the hunter touched a sturgeon he knew it and he would thrust the weapon in. The spearhead, attached to a rope, would come off the pole and the huge fish, a remnant of a 200 millionyear-old species straight out of the Triassic age, would run. A sturgeon can weigh up to 600 pounds. Getting one fish meant feeding the entire community.

The last water was squeezed out of the marshy wetland in 1924. “They’d get these sturgeon and then they’d cut them in large strips and smoke them. They smoked everything,” he said. Today, most members of the Sumas Band get their food at the supermarket. But while I sat on Silver’s aging brown velour couch, he continued to paint a different scene. “There were millions of ducks that used to come out here, they say. Ducks, geese, everything. The young men would go out in the waist-high 33 water carrying pouches and sneak

through the trails in the long grass to catch waterfowl diving in the weeds. When the ducks were startled, they’d get tangled in the grass, and the young men would grab them, wring their necks, and put them in the bag. When they got enough they’d bring them home. It was very easy. The lake provided.” But change was coming.

It was during these early days that government and settlers decided Sumas Lake was a nuisance. Then came the Hungry Ones The Stó:lō called the first Europeans who came to their territory, Xwelitem, or Hungry Ones. In the beginning there were only a few fur traders. Fort Langley was built in 1827, a day’s paddle from Sumas Territory, and for several decades the balance of power between the First Nations and the Hudson’s Bay Company employees remained relatively stable. The fur traders needed product and the First Nations supplied them.

and live on reserves.

But settlers who started arriving later in the 1800s became focused on acquiring and clearing fee simple land for farming.

It was during these early days, that government and settlers decided that changeable body of water known as Sumas Lake was a nuisance. Every spring, the snows thawed up the Fraser canyon and the freshet flooded 30,000 acres of rich soil and potential farmland in the low-lying lands between Abbotsford and Chilliwack, extending all the way to the US border.

Keith Carlson, a historian who has worked extensively with the Stó:lō over many years wrote in his book, You are Asked to Witness: The Stó:lō in Canada’s Pacific Coast History, that the Hungry Ones believed the Stó:lō way of life was incompatible with theirs. The new colonial governments decided assimilation was the only thing that would save the first peoples, and they made rules 34forced them to abandon their ways that

Not only that, but the shallow wetland nurtured masses of mosquitos. According to Carlson, the bugs got so bad in the summer that the Sumas and Chilliwack people adapted their lives to survive the onslaught. Mosquitos don’t fly across large bodies of water, so some people moved out to islands on the Fraser River in the worst times and others lived on platforms in a type of stilt village in the middle of the lake.

But some settlers, driven mad by whining buzz of the needle-nosed pest, made the case that the dyking and draining of the flood-water breeding areas was essential for human health. At the time, there was a debate among the newcomers. Some enjoyed the wetland for what it was, but in the end the arguments for drainage won. Silver describes how this impacted his people. “They came and told the native people they were going to drain the lake. Our people got worried about it right away. They were downhearted. The old people talked and one of the big chiefs said, ‘The white men are crazy. There is too much water out there. They’ll never drain it. Don’t worry, it’s too big.’” Much to everyone’s amazement, the huge task of redirecting rivers and building the Sumas and Vedder Canals started in 1920

and was completed by 1924. Carlson admits that when looked at through the settler’s lens, the engineering that went into the dyke system — the “reclaiming of Sumas Lake” — was a wonder of modern ingenuity. “In some ways, they have a right to a story that celebrates that history. It’s just that we don’t ever hear the other stories. And the other stories are just as important as those that have been commemorated over time.”

So here is the other story Once the lake was drained, everything changed for the Sumas people. New strategies for getting food had to be found. In the fall, this meant travelling several kilometres to the Fraser River to get salmon.

It was heartbreaking for the old people, Silver said, to see how difficult it had become. “But we had to do it or starve.” The biggest barrier was at Barrowtown or Pump Town, as Silver calls it. This facility controls the levels of water in the Sumas River. The dam and pump system helped stop the flooding Fraser River from flowing back onto the land. “That was a hard thing for us paddling canoes. My grandfather had a big heavy dugout ... We’d load everything, all of our clothes and bedding and some food and get down to Pump Town … We had to pull up the canoes and pack all our stuff over the dyke to the other side, over the pumps. Then we’d come back [from the Fraser River] and pull the canoes over to the other side and reload them. It was a lot of work.” Silver and his family would stay at their smokehouse for a month, preparing salmon for the winter. “We put them in little bales after they were smoked … They kept, eh, you didn’t have to freeze them or anything. They were smoked really hard.” The richness of the area still provided, but after the draining of Sumas Lake, people faced hungry days as well. “It was tough to be a native then. We weren’t recognized as humans really, by Europeans. We weren’t allowed to do very much of anything. We weren’t allowed to speak our language or practice our culture. That was still in effect when I was a little guy,” said Silver. His voice slowed as he remembered the days when elder ladies in his village hid behind blankets to whisper their language to one another. “They didn’t want me to learn because they were afraid I would go to jail. Or they’d go to jail for teaching me.” We paused to look around his modest 36home, the living room walls covered in

works by his artist son, Ray Silver Jr — items like carved dance masks, painted canoe paddles and cedar basket weavings, once forbidden or burned by the newcomers. “The elders lost their culture, they lost their lake, they lost everything,” he said. “They didn’t know whether there was a future for us.” The future turned out to be pretty bleak. The recently released Truth and Reconciliation Commission report made no bones about what happened when Silver was a boy:

Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual ractices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed ...

In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things.

A rich life lived Even when the lake was gone, the Sumas hung onto their ways. As young men, Silver and his brother-in-law became the hunters and fishers of the village travelling to Elk Mountain for game, to the back side of Sumas Mountain to trap beaver, otter, and mink on the Fraser River as his people had always done for salmon and sturgeon. But around every turn, the Hungry Ones found ways to thwart them. Regulation after regulation stopped them from hunting and fishing on their territory. Silver and others tried farming too. “There are farms out there bigger

We weren’t recognized as humans by Europeans. We weren’t allowed to speak our language or practice our culture. than our reservation and the pioneers got them for nothing,” said Silver. Nevertheless, there were four dairy farms in the village when he was a boy. At one time he had a herd of cattle and later he, Lester Ned and another man, farmed vegetables on a larger scale. They called their business Sumas River Growers and built a big produce stand with expensive refrigeration units out by the highway. Then in 1985, the BC government put an overpass a kilometre away at Whatcom Road and eliminated the exit leading to the Sumas reserve. “They put [us] out of business. The traffic was going down the freeway and they couldn’t come into our huge stand,” he said. After that, he had to shut the business down. “I lost quite a lot,” he said. But for all of his losses, Silver said he had a rich life. He married and raised 11 children. He worked in Abbotsford at the Clayburn brick factory and at the Sumas brick plant up the road from the time he was 15 until he was 75 yearsold. For thirty of those years, he was the production manager. He worked hard to show the white men that he was equal to them. “I was no different. I worked beside [white men] and they liked me and I liked them. We were just like brothers.

It is not them, it is the government. The law. Or what they call the law.” He hauled himself up off the couch and tapped his way with his cane to the hearth. “I want to show you this.” He felt along the trophies — past the silver boxer on a tall pedestal, past another small shiny fighter, arm outstretched until he found the gold boxer on a wide wooden base. Silver, who coached the Fraser Valley Boxing Club, organized a tournament in Chilliwack in 1980 that brought 127 young people from around the region together. Silver’s big regret was not pushing his children to pursue more education. “It’s getting better. The government is doing a lot [of ] pretty good things for us. Like education. I think that’s the most important thing for not only the native people but for all of us, all the nationalities, to get an education. Learn how to live on Mother Earth.” Silver’s thoughts turned back to the lake. “It is sad but it happened. I guess we are accepting it now,” he says.

I want to tell you about the lake After an hour, Silver’s daughter arrived to take him for breakfast. We waved goodbye and I promised to bring this story back to him. 37

As I pulled out of his driveway, I thought of the ravine up Sumas Mountain and how Silver explained that it is lined with different kinds of clay. Some of the clay is world-class, and was used to make the bricks that he built his life with. The lower-grade stuff is hauled away to mix in concrete. I drove up the road past a plastic factory and the boarded up band-run brickworks. “People don’t build fireplaces anymore,” Silver said. “So they shut it down.” I climbed higher and higher above the once and forgotten lake and thought about how I’d only scratched the surface of the story beyond the sign at the roadside stop. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission writes that “reconciliation is about establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in this country. In order for that to happen, there has to be awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour.” Now that I’m aware, every time I stop to buy walnuts from the man with a small grove of trees near the highway, I think of the lake. Pumpkins continue to ripen 38 in the fields and pale endives grow in the

mysterious building on the side of the road. I ask myself how to reconcile these two stories — of a lake drained and a lake reclaimed. Later, I went back to the rest area and let my dog out for a pee. A young First Nations woman glided by on a skateboard. A family waited as dad tinkered under the hood of their aging minivan. A greying RV couple emptied their tanks at the sani-station. A blonde man with two-day stubble leaned back in the front seat of his 1980s-era Camaro and smoked pot. Snowtopped Mount Baker loomed above the blue-forested hills on the border. I wanted to tell them all about the lake. I wanted them to know about the pump house that keeps the river from inundating the reclaimed land — that it is always the first spot in the eastern Fraser Valley to get power restored after a storm. I wanted them to know that the lake, although almost forgotten, could still return. I craned my neck up at the sign again and wondered if it was tall enough to withstand a true reclamation of Sumas Lake.

A shiver, a shudder, a shift dessa bayrock

diving into echolocation by karen hoffman The first thing about Echolocation is the cover: a cover which glimmers seductively, maybe even dangerously, the way the lure of a deep-sea predator beguiles its prey. It is a cover of shining, concentric circles, which shine and shine and entrance like a hypnotistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practiced, subduing hands, and yet calls out a warning: here are the ripples, and here is the epicentre, and what lingers beneath, to make such waves? It is the perfect cover for Karen Hoffmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collection of short stories: the glint of hidden motion, of unsettling depths, of far-reaching waves casting out, and out, and out.

A woman follows her new husband into the wilderness, where he burns her clothes and demands her allegiance â&#x20AC;&#x201D; solidifying, instead, her fierce loyalty only to herself. A group of university professors gather for a lakeside barbecue, where the grazing touch of a disembodied hand in the water could be a body, or a dead animal, or nothing at all. A miscarriage. A lost love. An estranged father who is not a father at all. Family history, dreams and nightmares passed down like traditions, the heft of sleep, of depth, of weightiness. Something just out of sight unsettles you, befriends

feel the second-hand strangeness ...

book and befriend them, be close to them,

You want to pull the characters out of this 40

you, promises you the thing you’ve always wanted. It’s too good to be true. It’s too true to be good. A shiver. A shudder. A shift. You want to pull the characters out of this book and befriend them, be close to them, feel the second-hand strangeness of their experiences and the soft viciousness of their thoughts. These characters feel real — perhaps too real — precisely because of this viciousness, a sharpness which lingers and threatens and coaxes, even as it feels blurred, obscured, drowned. Each character feels like a knife in a sheath — a promise of danger, utility, possibility, but cloaked, asleep, still hidden, still safe. This collection is urgent — a collection of urgencies — a cacophony, as an orchestra’s tuning turns imperceptibly from chaos into total bursting order. It is hungry, demanding, ravenous. Where do desire and certainty meet? What happens when one kills the other? How can we overturn the things we are sure of, or the things that are sure of us? The movement of these thoughts is like water: currents and stirrings and the urge to drift down, down, to be swallowed or subsumed. Each story is shaped by the seed of what if, a hard knot of desire or fear which drives characters into changes, rebellions, and possible mistakes. Even the most flawed urges carry with them an unutterable sense of relief: the answered question, the obeyed desire, the newness of life turned inside out or upside down and shaken beyond sense, beyond recognition. These stories present a series of furtive unearthings, necessary and urgent and still somehow gentle: the drift of consciousness into a dream or out of a marriage or under the water. How slowly things can shift, and how softly, Hoffman seems to whisper. And yet —

when we wake up miles from where we fell asleep, are we satisfied with how our lives have drifted?

dark?

And if we aren’t satisfied — what might we be capable of? What great change? What small rebellion? What betrayal, like a knife in the

Hoffman lays out answers like a surgeon’s tools, glinting against the soft mint of a sterile cloth: bodies are dragged out of the lake; last year’s gardening gloves are found,

It is hungry, demanding, ravenous. Where do desire and certainty meet? clenched and leathery, and must be buried. The result is a collection as seductive and dangerous as a lung full of water, a mouth full of smoke, and it holds its breath as it dives down, and down, until it reaches a depth where hunger turns to darkness and the edges of everything — no matter how solid and sure they seemed in the light — become imperceptible.

Our contributors Dessa Bayrock is a Fraser Valley ex-pat who lives in Ottawa with two cats and a variety of succulents, one of which is growing at a frankly alarming rate. She used to unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada and is currently a PhD student in English, studying literary awards and the production of cultural value. She really likes books and has a tattoo of Mount Cheam on her arm. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or on Twitter at @yodessa. Aymee Leake studied visual arts at UFV, and is a staunch arts advocate in Abbotsford. She has been an enthusiastic administrator and coordinator in a variety of organizations, including the Abbotsford Arts Council and a number of galleries. In 2016, she was nominated for the Christine Caldwell Outstanding Arts Advocate award. She’s quirky, passionate, and patently hilarious. These days, you can find Aymee painting eyes and firing up the kiln at the Clay Cottage. Ania Kyte lives in British Columbia, where she takes care of her husband, their two sons, two turtles, hamster, and two tropical aquariums. She also organizes a local monthly bead group, the Fraser Valley Beaders Group, is the President of the Pacific Pyros Glass Beadmakers, and vicepresident of the Mission Arts Council Board of DIrectors, as well as teaching beadmaking and jewellery-making classes.

Heather Ramsay is a writer and journalist completing her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at UBC. She lives in Chilliwack. Katie Stobbart is the founding editor of Raspberry and the heart and soul behind Red Press Society. She’s a queer feminist poet and nerd from Abbotsford, where she lives with two cats, eleven houseplants, and a thousand books. Katie has a B.A. in English, Creative Writing from UFV and is the executive assistant at a local non-profit organization. When she’s not working, you’ll find her writing, painting, or leading a bumbling party of heroes on a quest to save the forest. Jess Wind teaches communications at the University of the Fraser Valley and is an editor at Raspberry. She has an M.A. from Carleton University, a B.A. from UFV, and enough zombie research to survive the apocalypse. She’s a pop-culture nerd, a retro-loving geek, and a writer of many things. She also shares a birthday with Harry Potter.

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Raspberry is a magazine devoted to Fraser Valley culture and community life. Established in June 2016, Raspberry publishes reviews, event coverage, and other local content. f RaspberryZine

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THANKS TO OUR 2019 RAISEBERRY SPONSORS

Red Press Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising the profile and stimulating the growth of local arts, culture, and community life in the Fraser Valley. BOARD OF DIRECTORS Jess Wind PRESIDENT

Dessa Bayrock SECRETARY

Aymee Leake TREASURER

Lian McIntyre BOARD MEMBER

Shea Wind BOARD MEMBER Katie Stobbart EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR f RedPressSociety

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