If I were to call myself a disciple of anything, it would probably be a disciple of the mountains. It’s the kind of life, largely orbiting around skiing and rock-climbing, that raises eyebrows from the grinders as they’re diligently, exhaustedly going through their paces. Inspires a tangy cocktail of envy and disdain – after all, you’re just recreating. How frivolous. How fun.
The key is to pull apart that word, to recreate. To re-create yourself. The invigoration from a great day ripping on the hill, the sense of achievement from topping out on a climb, the paring away of the extraneous layers of life’s clutter, can take you to a place where you are just movement, the elements, flow. Recreating in the mountains, you catch a glimpse into the core of life’s riddles – that you can feel simultaneously powerful and powerless; that the less you have, the more abundance you feel; that the shadow of death sharpens your sense that you are alive.
People from all cultures, in all eras, have found the mountains to be a spiritual place. Mallory’s classic retort, "Because it’s there," is as good an answer as any as to what motivates us – if you have to ask, you obviously don’t get it. We set up base in mountain communities because, more often than not, we discover a nucleus of other people who do get it.
People who get that you don’t need to be under a roof, or in a church, to have a sense of the spiritual, of the Greater Than. For the Awesome to ripple over you and leave you goosebump-flecked.
My wonder was struck by the old ski school bell. A single object. A footnote to history, I stumbled upon a reference to it, half a page, in Anne McMahon’s The Whistler Story. Those few paragraphs intimated that here was an item that tied 150 years of stories together, offering some insight into the sacred, into what human beings have considered sacred over the past slim chunk of B.C.’s history, in our flawed and messy practice of life. From gold to God, the Transformers and the thunderbird, to hucking off the roof of the Roundhouse on your boards. The bell tells of it all.
At the base of Creekside by the old gondola, the Garibaldi Ski School had its meeting place. Bob Dufour, who started his Whistler career in 1972 as a ski instructor, recalls, "Mounted under a big sign for the ski school, on two big posts with a beam was this big bell that Jim McConkey got from the natives in 1968. We would ring it every day to summons people to lessons."
Having a bell to ring students to ski lessons was a European tradition. Jim McConkey, who ran the ski school from 1968 to 1980, acknowledged the influence: "I got my training under Luigi Fuller in St Anton, and that’s how they used to do it." McConkey, now 78 and still ripping, remains a legend in the ski world.
Otto Kamstra, the current General Manager of the Adults Ski School, recounts the larger than life stories. "He was the original New School guy, making films, skiing on the glacier, launching over 30-foot crevasses, making two turns and leaping again. There’s not a lot of today’s freeskiers who could match him. His hiring clinics were famous. He’d give you a ticket. Take you to the top of the Roundhouse. And ski you. Last man standing got a job."
McConkey sourced the bell for his ski school at Mount Currie. "This was in the summer of 1968," he recounted. "The chief at the time, Chief Ritchie, told me the story of it. Before the white people came to this country, the people from Mount Currie would, at certain times of the year, go down the Lillooet River, to Harrison Lake, around Port Coquitlam and up into the Fraser Valley. They would fish and hunt there."
A 1906 history of the Lillooet people by James Teit recounts that every August and September, large numbers of the Lower Lillooet would travel right to the Fraser River, where the Upper Lillooet were congregated for fishing salmon. Other Nations, including the Thompson and the Shuswap, were frequently there, and the late summer gathering accounted for the exchange of goods between the Interior and coastal people, as they traded amongst each other. The waterways were like a liquid Silk Road, spreading dentalia shells, basketry, furs, skins, foods…
In later days, the Hudson Bay Company traders were also on the Fraser River at the gatherings. These traders brought some European influences – including their god – to the First Nations, but it was the gold rush of 1860 that brought an onslaught of white miners and priests to the region.
As Jim McConkey recounts: "When white people came, the priests and clergy also came and had to save these people from this horrible life. Chief Ritchie said they Christianized them."
In 1858, Catholic missionaries, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, established their mission headquarters in Vancouver – B.C.’s first mission. Others soon followed, from all denominations, and within 50 years, some 25 churches had been built to serve native communities in the region.
Father Leon Fouquet arrived in New Westminster, near the mouth of the Fraser River, in 1860, and the Oblate cleared land to build two churches – one for European colonists, known as the White Church, and one for the Indians, known as the Indian Church. Chief Ritchie told McConkey that the Mount Currie people were responsible for contributing most of the work to a church built in the New Westminster area. It seems likely to have been this "Indian Church" for the Oblate fathers, which was one of two log huts.
The segregation was part of a policy of instructing the native people not just in religion, but in English. The Oblate fathers established the residential school at Mission in 1862. It operated until 1969. By 1906, when James Teit published his work on the Lillooet, the Pemberton band numbered 400, dressed in the same manner as the white settlers and all nominally Roman Catholics. Many of their cultural practices had been changed because of the church’s influence – Teit writes that the customary ghost and religious dances had fallen into disuse, and the shamans no longer practised overtly. A 1908 report filed by the Oblate Missionaries pronounced the Lower Lillooet people "industrious and law-abiding and making some progress."
The missionaries who built the church at New Westminster had brought a British-cast bell with them. When the church was torn down in the first decade of the 1900s, the bell was given to the people of Mount Currie, who, in an impressive logistical feat, loaded it onto a cart, dragged it up the side of Harrison Lake, up the Cariboo Trail, to Lillooet Lake.
"This thing weighed a ton," says McConkey. "They put it across two war canoes and paddled it up to the end of the lake; then they took it up along the Lillooet River that feeds from Lillooet Lake to Harrison Lake on the old (gold) trail; then again by a couple of war canoes to the village of Mount Currie." Clearly the expert canoemen Teit reported them to be.
A new church was built at Mount Currie, and the bell hung in the steeple there from 1905 or so, until 1948, when the church burnt down and the bell crashed to the ground.
McConkey recalls: "A friend of mine, Jack Bright, was the assistant manager under Franz Wilhelmsen. He found it. I went and saw the Chief and said, I want to buy it. They had a meeting and said they didn’t want to sell it, but they’d lend it to us, if we would give it back whenever they wanted it. So I went and got a backhoe. We picked it up and loaded it in a pickup. The front wheels were riding so low. We took it to an iron worker in Vancouver, who rigged it up so it had arms. They were pretty interested in it. And we set it up under a big sign and would call people to ski school. That’s where it was for a number of years until the Indians wanted it back around 1980."
The story is remembered slightly differently at Mount Currie: The bell was cracked when the church burned down, so it was sent to Whistler for repairs by train. And the people in Whistler kept it. After the road was put through, and someone in the village had a flat bed truck big enough, some 20 years later, it was retrieved.
The bell now hangs at the old village site in an open air steeple and rings to mourn the passing of members of the community.
"It rings differently, depending on whether it’s ringing for a woman or a man," says Johnny Jones, Archaelogical Field Technician for the Mount Currie Band, who lives within earshot of the bell. Jones’s work involves field recognizance, mapping cultural data for the band, work that is increasingly important in land use planning and negotiations.
The Lil’wat Nation explain the deeper significance of this mapping on their website. "Cultural knowledge in Líl’wat oral tradition is mapped on the landscape much as other Canadians might use a calendar. Events are anchored to place and people use locations in space to speak about events over time. Both sko-kwal (true stories) and shpi-tak-withl (legends) stories are told with reference to place names on the land where events occurred. Líl’wat people describe their history as ‘written upon the land’." It is a history Johnny Jones has been studying all his life.
As a kid, Jones would avoid church on Sundays, hiding from the nuns and playing in the bushes. He’d get into trouble on Monday, but he didn’t mind getting into trouble. He just didn’t want to go to church. He’d rather be outside, wandering around the mountains and the territory of the Lil’wat, where, one day, he met three Lil’wat elders, Charlie Mack, Baptiste Ritchie and Slim Jackson.
"What are you doing out here?" they wanted to know. "You’re just a little kid."
In Jones’s desire to be out exploring the land, Charlie Mack and Baptiste Ritchie recognized something increasingly rare, and started filling him full of local lore and traditional knowledge. "They said it was because I was interested, and there weren’t very many people left who were." Jones’s grandfather, Kupmen, whose English name was August Hunter, was the last really powerful medicine man from Skookumchuk, and lived until he was 125. He and Jones’s father also passed on their knowledge to Johnny, something that was lost to many of his people, because of the influence of the church and the residential schools.
Charlie Mack didn’t just share that traditional lore with Johnny Jones. From 1968 to 1973, when Mack was in his 70s, he shared his knowledge of Lillooet traditional life in a seminal aural history project which collated over 30 traditional stories in the Lillooet language. The stories were later translated into English. An important part of these stories is the way they explain sacred places throughout the Lil’wat territory, including places the mythological Transformers visited, transforming people into stones, and altering the shape of the land, with markings and footprints.
Several members of the Lil’wat Nation compiled additional information about their traditions and sacred sites for an on-line exhibit as part of Canada’s Digital Collection program. Sacred places can include traditional burial sites, spirit quest locations, pictographs and areas where traditional stories, prophecies and legends are depicted. Other important sites include remnants of the i7st’kens, the semi-underground pit houses that were the primary winter shelter for the Lil’wat, and culturally modified trees from which cedar bark has been stripped for basketry, roofing or clothing, leaving the tree healthy and intact. These are some of the sites that Johnny Jones has recorded.
What makes these places sacred to the Lil’wat is that they provide evidence that their people lived here for thousands of years. They are places where the Lil’wat people have lived in the past and still occupy. More broadly, the Lil’wat belief that the people ("tmicw") and the land ("ucwalmicw") are connected, so interconnected that one cannot exist without the other, heightens the sacredness of every-place. The Lil’wat don’t set up base here because they feel connected to a crew of like-minded people, because they’re drawn to the mountains, or because of the lifestyle. They are here because it is their land, the land of their ancestors, land they never ceded, land they assert has been theirs since time immemorial.
The bell that now rings out to mourn the passing of a member of the community holds all that history and all those conflicts and connections in its tone – the land and the people, the sacred and the profane.
A note on terminology
The Lil’wat Nation is one of eleven Aboriginal tribes that reside in the Stl’atl’imx Nation. The Lil’wat Nation is located 160 kilometres north of Vancouver, and a 30 minute drive north of Whistler, at the village of Mount Currie. The people of the Lil’wat Nation are of the Interior Salish group, as distinct from the Coast Salish which includes the Squamish. The Stl’atl’imx Nation is divided into two language groups, commonly known as the Upper Lillooet and the Lower Lillooet. In many of the historic texts, the people are referred to as the Lillooet Indians.
