Our oral histories are our iron posts: Secwepemc stories and historical consciousness

This dissertation is about the history of my people, the Secwépemc. I treat the concept of history here as more than a chronological ordering of events in the lives of our people; my purpose is to construe the sense of history, or historical consciousness, of my people as it emerged during the last 10,000 years. Relying on multiple sources that include converging lines of evidence between geological, archaeological and oral history sources for the early period, and increasingly, written - explorers and traders - sources, and most importantly, my own ancestors' recorded narratives, I trace my people's motivations and interests in the unfolding of events, along with the meanings, from the vantage point of our culture, that we ought to employ to read such sources. Among the important stories that my people tell are the narratives that deal with our perception the early newcomers, and of missionaries and the new religion they were imposing on us. In addition, it is worthwhile to listen to the ways that my people reflected on the relationship with the Crown as it emerged in the late 1800s, and early 1900s. As I argue, such stories, ultimately, need to be connected to our sense of land, livelihood, title and autonomy as an Aboriginal Nation. Our people's stories, as I will show, defy the colonizers' attempts to separate us out into small portions of our land and livelihood, and bring back our sense of nationhood as a people, Secwépemc, connected to Secwépemcul'ecw, our land.