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As I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder The Sliammon-language term for this label means “it is mine.” This book contains the teachings and history of the ɬaʔamɩn people as remembered and narrated by Elder Elsie Paul. The effort and care she takes in this work is important. She offers a counter-narrative to incorrect and inappropriate interpretations previously drawn by settlers. Please respect Elsie Paul’s right and responsibility to relate the history and teachings in her own words. She does so from her own perspective and does not attempt to speak for all ɬaʔamɩn people. Please attribute the stories shared in this book to Elsie Paul.

Some sections of this book are authored by other individuals and should be attributed to the appropriate person(s) as indicated. This label refers to a teaching that emerges throughout this book: “you learn from someone by example.” (The literal translation of tiʔiwš is “fast learner.”) The goal of this book is to share ɬaʔamɩn teachings and history widely with ɬaʔamɩn community members, students, and teachers at all levels, and with any other interested readers. This is Elsie’s goal in sharing ʔəms tɑʔɑw, and all of the authors hope the book serves an educational purpose. The authors ask readers to take care to use this information respectfully and in context. Material in this book may be culturally sensitive for a number of reasons. This label identifies such content by stating: “it is ours.”

ɬaʔamɩn teachings, laws, and practices that flow from them are subject to the ʔəms naʔ label because they are communally held and collectively stewarded by ɬaʔamɩn people for future generations. Much of this knowledge is captured in our legends, for example. The authors recognize that ɬaʔamɩn, Klahoose, and Homalco families have their own tellings of the legends.

Other parts of the book are labelled “ʔəms naʔ” because the ongoing nature of settler colonialism means that the histories discussed here are not part of a distant past. For close to a century, colonial laws and policies prevented community members from sharing teachings freely in their community without fear of punishment or retribution, imposing silences that remain even today. Thus this label also applies to chapters that discuss the genocidal practices that sought to interrupt the transmission of teachings and to sever ɬaʔamɩn sovereign rights to their territory.

Please treat information and photographs marked with this label with special care, especially if you plan to share them with others.

Mitlenatch Island With Sandy and Heather

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Seal Oil
“… people used, like, the seal oil or the bear grease to dip the fish in.”
And seal oil was used a lot. People would render down the seal fat and so the oil was used. Or bear grease. It was used for cooking. It was just used to enhance the food or add on to the food, to give it a different flavour. I know with the dried salmon, people today use different kinds of dips, to dip their fish or just put over the fish, however it’s prepared. But people used, like, the seal oil or the bear grease to dip the fish in. Or put a little bit in the fish stew. So that changed the flavour of it. Bear grease, it’s very bland. Actually, it’s really good. Not long ago a friend of mine gave me a small package of it – almost like a pound, I guess. And it makes the best pastry. Um-hmm. Really white. Really white lard, like, kind of a texture? And it just makes beautiful, flaky pastry. It doesn’t have any taste to it. No distinct taste to it. Like the seal oil, it took a lot of getting used to for me to be able to eat seal oil in the cooking. It’s got a very strong flavour and very strong odour to it. If you’re cooking it you pretty much had to cook it outside, because it really goes through the house and everything.
So my granny used to cook it on the beach, and they’d have a fire on the beach. But they would take the fat off it. It’s like, um, it’s like pig, you know, pork. There’s so much fat on the outer layer. Thick – about maybe an inch thick of the fat. And you’d trim all that off, and then you would cut it up and render it down. And that was the oil that was used for cooking. Yeah. It’s an acquired taste. But again, there was no lard or oil in those days. We didn’t have that. So my granny’d use that for cooking, like frying bread, or frying other kinds of foods. Like Mazola oil? Yeah, ’cause we didn’t have Mazola oil back then, so that’s what was used, like, for frying bread or frying meat or whatever.
I did acquire a taste for it when I was young then. I was probably about, I don’t know, thirteen, fourteen. But I remember we had to depend on that for cooking ’cause there was no lard and I guess that was during the war too. But prior to that, it was always used. Then the other commodities came in, like lard and oil, things like that that you could buy. But my grandparents still used the seal oil because they were accustomed to that. They were used to that. And I remember when the margarine first came out, it was in a plastic container. It was, like, in a pouch form. Thick plastic. And it was white. And you take it and you squeezed it and there’s a little ball in there of food colouring, I guess that’s what it was. It was orange in colour. So you squeezed it and you worked this pouch until you got the yellow margarine. Yeah. So that was quite the new thing, back then. Yeah, I remember that. And later on it came already yellow, right? Took the fun out of my life. [laughs]