Throughout the ages, Tla’amin place names would describe the area or features of a particular site or landmark. That becomes clear early in the new documentary əm kʷaθ nan Namesake, which will have its local premiere this weekend at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival. In the Tla’amin people’s Northern Coast Salish language, the main village site—t̓išosəm—translates into “milky waters from the herring spawn”. According to the film, other place names in the ʔayʔaǰuθəm (pronounced Ay-A-Ju-Thum) language translate to “little sandy beach”, “mouth at the rock”, “stillness”, or “end of the island”.
Co-director t̓agəm Eileen Francis devised the idea of anchoring this ambitious TELUS originals documentary around her people’s 13 moons. They carry teachings of time and responsibility for this nation on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast.
“That’s our calendar throughout the year,” Francis tells Pancouver over Zoom. “I wanted to show a passage of time.”
She and the other co-director, ƛɛsla Dr. Evan Adams, worked with Prism Prize-winning videographer Sterling Larose to create animated images of five moons. This reinforces the prevalence of descriptive place names in Coast Salish culture. That stands in contrast to settler culture, in which locations are often named after historical figures from the colonial era.
As an example, Adams points out that the Tla’amin people called the mightiest river in their territory tiskʷat (pronounced Tees-kwat). It means “big river”. This was an apt description until this waterway was dammed in the early 20th century to generate power for a massive newsprint mill.
Sunshine Coast city’s namesake creates divisions
Thirty years earlier, colonial administrators renamed this roaring river after Dr. Israel Wood Powell, the province’s first superintendent of Indian affairs. The city that emerged, Powell River, is also named after Powell, as is Powell Street in Vancouver.
“Many of our place names have other descriptors to them that I would hear—always—when I was growing up,” Adams says on the same Zoom call. “Then, we would hear the English name. And the English name was barely interesting and definitely not descriptive.”
əm kʷaθ nan Namesake documents how Powell played a pivotal role choosing the sites of notorious Indian residential schools in Kamloops and Cranbrook and on Kuper Island in collaboration with missionaries. In addition, Powell convinced the federal government to impose a ban on potlatches. The filmmakers maintain that this amounted to a ban on Coast Salish governance.
Now, the Tla’amin people want the name “Powell River” to be replaced with something more inclusive and less celebratory of a man who inflicted so much harm on their people. Academics, Elders, and lots of articulate, young Tla’amin people make a compelling case for this in the film. But this idea has encountered resistance within Powell River from vocal opponents of dropping Powell’s name, including some who spread venomous racism on social media.
“The name change already did happen from what our name used to be of it…it changed to Powell River,” Francis emphasizes.
Drones showcase magnificent territory
Francis hopes that the community can come together to create a name that embodies both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. That’s precisely what happened in 2018 when the B.C. government approved changing the name of the Powell River Regional District to the qathet Regional District. The name qathet means “working together, bringing together” in ʔayʔaǰuθəm.
“I feel like every town is dealing with reconciliation,” Adams says. “Organizations have had to deal with reconciliation, but now townsfolk are. I, personally, found a lot of beauty in the allies seeing and hearing us because before the movie, I thought there were way more terrible people in the world than there are. It was a nice surprise.”
Over the years, many documentaries about Indigenous history have focused on trauma. It’s understandable, given the genocidal history of violent colonization of Indigenous territory. And there’s no shortage of trauma in the history of the Tla’amin people. As highlighted in əm kʷaθ nan Namesake, their population of over 20,000 was reduced to 188 over a period of two years during the smallpox epidemic of the early 1860s.
Moreover, 60 to 95 percent were wiped out over a 21-day period. This catastrophe disproportionately felled the very old and very young. Adams’s great-grandfather survived but he lost his sight, which was a common symptom of the disease.
“I had heard stories when I was a kid about our great-grandfather, who was blind, and how his wife looked after him,” Adams says. “His daughters would bring him into the forest to cut firewood and they would sell the firewood for not very much money. But they were trying to make a bit of a living.”
əm kʷaθ na Namesake reinforces connection to the land
Yet as someone who sees himself as “phenomenally privileged”, Adams does not want to be reduced to being “portrayed as only my trauma”.
In fact, the filmmakers avoided injecting their documentary with gory and upsetting historical imagery. There’s a good reason for this. Francis notes that when the Tla’amin people have hosted a little Indigenous film festival in their community, her older cousins haven’t liked seeing trauma on-screen after having experienced that in their own lives.
“So sometimes, they have to take a moment and leave the theatre,” Francis says. “It’s something we all understand.”
She had always thought about her connection to the land. But Francis says that it became even more deeply rooted through the creation of the documentary, which includes sweeping drone shots of this gorgeous part of the world. Her enthusiasm for the land helped lure Adams into the project.
“One of the reasons I wanted to work with Eileen is because she is this young, fresh voice that’s very empowered,” Adams says. “You see lots of empowered young First Nations women in this film. I adore that.”
The DOXA Documentary Film Festival will present təm kʷaθ nan Namesake at 2:45 p.m. on Saturday (May 2) at the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema at SFU Woodward’s. There will be a second screening at 8:50 p.m. on Sunday (May 3) at the VIFF Centre, followed by a Q&A. For tickets and more information, visit the DOXA website.
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