In a rural stretch of the Fraser Valley made up of dairy farms, trailer courts and the reserves of the Leq’a:mel and the Scowlitz First Nations, colonization and its ensuring narratives of conflict and cooperation are as personal as neighborhood beers around a bonfire.

The following appeared in Geist Magazine #63. The story is part of a larger tale of place that is ultimately about how we might learn to live together in a better way.

JEN SLEPT IN HER CAR outside the Deroche Hall for a few nights the spring she met Rope. She was seventeen and had just gotten a rose tattooed above her right breast and didn’t want her dad to find out. Her parents lived across the field from the Deroche Hall in a house they built when they got pregnant with Jen, next to a trailer court named in honour of Jen’s great-grandfather Joe Kelly, who had once been chief of the Lakahahmen Indian Band.

Rope was twenty-five and lived in his own trailer in Joe Kelly Estates. He was a white kid who grew up on welfare in Surrey. He moved out to Deroche when he got a job in a sawmill near Mission. When he learned Jen was sleeping in her car, he said she could stay with him for a while. They had met a few days earlier on a double date and had gone to a movie that none of them liked, and in the back seat on the drive home Rope fell asleep and spilled beer all over Jen. They became buddies but didn't want to date each other. He slept on the couch and gave her his bed.

IT TAKES AN HOUR and a half to drive from downtown Vancouver to the hall at Deroche. Head east along the north shore of the Fraser River. Once you pass Mission City, the highway is old and windy, one lane each way and you stop for the train when it comes through. The Coast Mountains, which begin up at Bella Coola and run in a strip along the western edge of British Columbia, reach their southernmost point here. The land between the slopes and the river is narrow, as if the mountain range is stretching out to touch the muddy Fraser.

Deroche sits hard up against these southerly Coast Mountains. The speed limit drops to 50 km/h past the trailer courts, the train tracks and the general store, which is also the post office and the place to buy a fishing licence, fried chicken and cold beer. Behind the store there are a few houses and then the blackberries and cedar trees take over and the forest rises steeply. The Fraser River is a kilometre away, and if you stand on the dike and look over at Deroche, the mountains look like a pile of sleeping bears in coats of thick green fur patched by a few old cutblocks.
The city of Chilliwack is five kilometres away as the crow flies, but a wild stretch of river frequented by eagles and black bears lies in between. The bridge is half an hour away, so as communities like Chilliwack and Abbotsford wrestle with some of the fastest growth rates in Canada, Deroche remains one of the quietest corners of the valley. Much of the area is zoned agricultural land reserve so there are lots of dairy farms and berry farms. It is the kind of place where folks will drop the tailgate at a barbecue to serve dinner on the ass-end of the pickup.

This is Sasquatch country. The name comes from Chehalis, one of half a dozen remote reserves deep in the mountains northeast of Deroche. The Sasquatch Pub is ten minutes down the highway; its once hard-bitten look has been softened with a ski-chalet exterior, but chainsaws still hang from the rafters and draft beer remains the most popular drink.

Chopping down the forest and bucking it into logs has been a seasonal job around here for generations. Jen’s dad is a logger. In twenty-nine years he figures he has clearcut the length of Deroche Mountain many times over. Jen’s great-grandfather Joe Kelly used to run a shingle mill beside Nicomen Slough, where the trailer court is now. Rope moved to the trailer court when he got the sawmill job. He started on the greenchain and worked his way up to the precision saw before he left what he says was “totally boring monotonous work” and went back to school to become a mechanic.

IN THE SUMMER OF 2006, Jen and Rope had been together for five years. They were living on one of the Leq'a:mel reserves halfway between Deroche and the Sasquatch Pub, and their house was always full of family and friends, a mixed crowd of Natives and non-Natives who liked to drink beer and eat steak. On the weekends, Rope presided over the barbecue on the back porch, turning his stash of split maple into the perfect bed of coals for grilling meat. Once the weather turned cold, Jen roasted a turkey as often as she could afford to, turning out mounds of steaming vegetables, fresh buns and even the occasional homemade pie. She said that feeding people was a tradition for the Leq'a:mel, that in the old days when people travelled up and down the river in canoes, this was an important gathering place.

There are twenty-four bands along the lower Fraser River who call themselves Sto:lo. The early government officials who laid out the reserves were haphazard about how they drew boundaries and what names they assigned to places, so for over a century, the Leq’a:mel were called the Nicomen or Lakahahmen and it wasn’t until a few years ago that the band changed its name back to the original Leq’a:mel, a Halq'emeylem word meaning “level meeting place,” which is an apt description of the banks of Nicomen Slough.

DAVID AND I ENDED UP in Leq’a:mel territory when we heard there was a house for rent on ten acres in the Fraser Valley. It was an old farm on a dead-end road that ran past a graveyard filled with ornate metal crosses and one small totem pole. The whitewashed house stood across from an unpainted barn and a cottage made of stone. After we moved in, we learned that the man who had built the place, whose name was Kostanty, had drowned with his wife while fishing in the Fraser. The forest that began out the back door grew on top of massive crumbling stumps left behind when the face of the mountain was logged a hundred years before. The few old giants still on the mountain wore charcoal scars on their trunks from a long ago fire. Jen’s great-grandfather Joe Kelly lay buried in the graveyard. His daughter Susie was still alive. She was Jen’s grandma and she lived just down the road.

Whenever Jen roasted a turkey, her grandma Susie drove over and joined the party. At eighty years old, Susie could still out-shop Jen on their weekly trips to Costco and the thrift stores of Abbotsford and Mission, and she could out-play her daughter Lorraine on the slots at the casino on the Nooksack Indian Reserve half an hour across the line in Washington State, where they like to go on Friday nights for the seafood buffet. When her first husband, a white soldier, turned out to be a poor provider, she went to work and became field boss on a big berry farm at a time when it was rare to find a woman running the show. In her thirties, she took up fishing and was out on the river before dawn, pulling up the nets heavy with the salmon. Some years she out-fished the men. She started the trailer court that became Joe Kelly Estates when she was part of what the Mission newspaper declared to be “the first all-woman chief and council in Canada.” Her sister Liz had been the chief. Susie was councillor and band manager, and helped start three more trailer courts before she retired from politics.

Over turkey dinner, Susie told us that she had met Kostanty, the man who built the place that we were living in, when he arrived in Canada as a refugee after the Second World War. They had both worked on the big berry farm where he was the handyman. He helped her build her first fishing boat. She remembered how he wouldn’t listen to her about not putting a lid on a batch of fibreglass he had mixed up, and it exploded and sacred him half to death.

She also remembered the spring twenty years ago when Kostanty and his wife disappeared. It was a Friday in May and the eulachon were running. The old man and his wife loved to pickle the little oily fish. The police reported that their old Ford truck was found near the dike on McDonald Road. Foul play was not suspected. The couple had been fishing from shore with a dip net. He was seventy-nine, she was sixty-nine.

Susie figures it happened on the rocks just past McDonald’s Landing. The tide can come up quickly and once the rocks get slippery, it wouldn’t be the first time someone was lost there. When Susie was a child you could row from McDonald’s Landing to the opposite shore in twenty minutes. Today this stretch of the Fraser is four times wider than it was then, and rowing across would be considered foolhardy. The landing that Susie pushed off from as a child is in the middle of the river now. Kostanty was never found. His wife’s body was recovered from the river a week later, 100 kilometres downstream. The local rumour was that the old man had buried gold somewhere on the property, but the little old lady who had been his neighbour for years told a different story. The money was in the bank, $350,000, and every cent was paid over to Kostanty’s nephew when he came from Poland to collect it.

WHEN JEN WAS GROWING UP, one of the nocturnal sports in Deroche was setting trucks on fire and throwing them in the river; that was before the regional district put locked gates on the dikes. Crack cocaine was the drug in those days. The crystal meth that is snaring kids and terrifying parents in the valley today hadn’t hit the scene yet. Early in their relationship, Jen and Rope did a lot of partying, and for a while they shared a crack addiction. It ended when they stole Jen’s mom’s bank card and drained her account. Jen’s parents were splitting up by then but they had no trouble agreeing on what to do. They sat Jen down and said she had a choice: either she stopped doing crack right then and there, or they would call the cops. When Jen promised to stop, they put her on lockdown. They told Rope that he could stay or he could go, but if he stayed, he was on lockdown too. He decided to stay. He says he and Jen didn’t start out being in love. They kind of grew into it.

Jen says that growing up she only remembers one time when a girl on the bus tried to pick on her for being Indian. She thought it was dumb of the girl, especially given that the trailer court where the girl lived was on Indian land. There was more discrimination when her mom Lorraine was young, but mostly Deroche has been a place where Sto:lo and settlers have been negotiating close relations for generations.

Jen’s great-grandfather Joe Kelly was the son of an Irishman named Patrick who came to the valley in the 1870s by way of Washington State through the Skagit Mountains, with a herd of cattle that didn’t belong to him. He got a piece of land between Mission and Deroche and settled down with a Sto:lo woman named Mary Jane. The cattle had birthed calves and Mary Jane was pregnant with Joe when the authorities came and took Patrick back to the United States, never to be heard from again.

The American authorities left Mary Jane with the calves that had been born in Canada. The British Columbia government, which was busy pushing the Sto:lo off their land, (and thereby shrinking Sto:lo reserves by 91 percent), bundled Mary Jane onto a sternwheeler with her calves and chickens, and deposited her ten kilometres upriver on the bank of Nicomen Slough, where her mother and stepfather lived.

WHEN SUSIE TURNED EIGHTY, she decided to let Jen, who was keen to have a business of her own, take over the smoke shop that sits on level ground along Nicomen Slough, where the government deposited Mary Jane so many years ago. Susie was proud of how Jen and Rope had pulled themselves together since their rowdy days. Rope had a good job. Jen was planning to expand the smoke shop into a gallery. She made a rare trip into Vancouver for a conference of young Aboriginal entrepreneurs and she gave a speech in front of the Governor General and won second prize in a marketing competition. She had been drawing up business plans for months when Susie turned the shop over to her.

It is a ten-minute walk from our farm to the smoke shop. A few days after Jen opened the door, my husband David walked down to visit. He was sitting by the counter with his camera around his neck when a young woman in a short skirt with an Aboriginal symbol tattooed on her thigh pushed through the door. She wanted cigarettes and she wanted to know if the jean jacket with the Native butterfly design on it was for sale. And was the artist really a Native, because just anybody can’t paint our symbols you know, she said; they’re sacred. Jen told her that the artist was Leq’a:mel, and that he was her uncle, and that he would have more jackets ready soon. The woman said that was good, she hated it when white people used Native designs and what was with them putting Native decals on their cars. It wasn’t right. Her voice had risen steadily. White people should go back to where they came from, she said.

Susie’s second husband was a boom boat operator who called himself Big E. He was shy about asking Susie out, but once he did they were together for almost forty years. They had one daughter, Lorraine, who grew up to be tall like her dad. The only time Lorraine lived anywhere other than Deroche was when she ran away to Vancouver with her boyfriend while they were both still teenagers. They were walking around downtown one night trying to stay warm and wondering what to do when a Corvette pulled up and a white guy rolled down the window and asked if they needed a place to sleep. He bought them clubhouse sandwiches and told them to keep the change, then took them back to his high rise apartment where they slept on the living room rug. He was gone when they got up. They thought that maybe the guy was repaying a debt, doing for them what some Native had once done for him. They went back to Deroche, where Big E, who was a logger, got Lorraine’s boyfriend a job. Lorraine got pregnant, and they built the house on the banks of the slough and began raising Jen.

Lorraine and Jen’s dad split up soon after Jen and Rope got together. Lorraine still lives in the house by the slough. She drives a pickup and likes nothing better than to gather family and friends together for a meal around a fire. When she was a kid, her parents had salmon barbecues by the river every weekend. Even when the weather is lousy, Lorraine is game to string a tarp and stand around in the chilly damp as long as there is enough wood for a roaring fire.

Just before Halloween she had a big bonfire on the bank of the slough near her house. Everyone was lighting off firecrackers, filling the night with loud bangs and trails of pink and green shooting stars. When Jen was a kid, some archaeologists digging around in the field here had turned up shillings and glass buttons as well as stone grinders and bowls. This level ground is the site of an ancient village. People have likely been making fires and grilling salmon here for more than three hundred generations. Lorraine is matter-of-fact about the spirits who share the bank of the slough. She figures they like fires, too.

LORRAINE WARNED JEN that she was going to get pregnant when they were at the music festival that their ex-biker friend and his wife throw each summer on the steep forested slopes of a private island in the middle of a skinny lake five minutes from Deroche. Jen was cooking and Lorraine told her to be careful, because when you act like the host at someone else’s house you stand a good chance of getting pregnant.

Six weeks later, Lorraine discovered that she had been right. Jen and Rope took a bit of time to think it out but soon Jen started to glow and Rope got a spring in his step, and they began to speculate about whether it was a boy or a girl. Susie started buying things for the baby when Jen took her on their weekly shopping trips. Lorraine arranged with the Department of Indian Affairs to have title for her house transferred to Jen and began making plans to move out so Rope and Jen could fix the place up before they moved in. At a discount store, Jen found a tiny T-shirt; on the front there was a kitten wearing a cowboy hat and the slogan: “Don’t mess with me. I’ve got the baddest grandma in town.”