The People Are in the Land and the Land is in the People: The Importance of
Storyscapes in Cultural Heritage. by Christine Elsey, Professor Emeritus, Social,
Cultural and Media Studies, University of the Fraser Valley.
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My writing has largely addressed the clashing perspectives of meaning and being
with respect to colonial government institutions and First Nations, with the hope of
strengthening discussions on Indigenization for branches of government such as the Parks,
the courts and land claims cases, environment and wildlife, forests lands and natural
resources etc., but also to broaden settler understanding within industry and those
interested in land use and development within Indigenous territories. Through the concept
of storyscape, I seek to problematize the colonial process of erasing Indigenous presences
on the land through settler re-coding, re-mapping, and re-storying of Indigenous
traditional territories. Through the course of my research, and in studying the oral
traditions of various First Nations in what is now British Columbia, I note a poetics of
existence that emerges from the fusion of body and world that took place over the
millennia Indigenous peoples have spent on the land, thus the land can be seen as an entire
way of life and identity. It therefore is important in the above circumstances, to
decontextualize First Nation’s landscapes (their traditional territories) as cultural heritage
and a part of the people themselves. (Elsey, 2013) Social anthropologists have long
entertained a notion that culture seizes nature and that nature has been rendered
understandable from culture to culture, on the basis of the human stories that gets
embroidered upon the land. The anthropological notion that culture seizes nature
conceptualizes the relationship between culture and nature by explaining how nature
becomes nested within a culturally speci ic human story that provides a perspective on the
natural world thus telling us how the world comes into being, how it works and what it all
means. A wide range of anthropological ield studies (Ingold, 1996, Basso, 1996, Feld,
1996, Brody, 1980, Kahn, 1996 et al.), demonstrate how differences in cultural meanings
and folkloric traditions from region to region or society to society, lead invariably to
contrasting worldviews and interpretations with respect to the natural world and to the
attitudes and behaviours of humans toward their environments. In sum, my work
highlights clashing perspectives of meaning and ways of being between colonial/settler
government institutions and First Nations.
In contrast to Enlightenment explanations of nature characteristic of Europeanbased societies, Indigenous worldviews and methodologies tend to accord a great deal of
import to the relationship between land and story, and thus the primacy of oral tradition
with respect to First Nations peoples. Such oral and folkloric traditions ultimately inform
long standing inhabitants about their relationships with nature, the supernatural, and how
the people arrived at that place. Thus we can see how explanations and meanings about
the natural world, are actually a cultural matter inseparably linked to the interpretations of
humans and nested within the human story or what I have termed “storyscapes” (Grieder
and Garkovich, 1994). The array of origin stories worldwide with their explanations of
land, water and the elements give rich testimony to the human inclination of creating
meaning on the basis of a wide range of symbols and symbolic interpretations integral to
the process of culture. Within the Western line of thinking, through a rationalist
perspective, the cultural, spiritual, oral and experiential values of one’s environmental
surroundings are awarded a very low priority and thus are rendered more or less
insigni icant within the enterprise of human knowing and of valuing the world. However,

The People Are in the Land and the Land is in the People: The Importance of
Storyscapes in Cultural Heritage. by Christine Elsey, Professor Emeritus, Social,
Cultural and Media Studies, University of the Fraser Valley.
2
Anishinaabe kwe researcher and scholar Kathleen Absolon (2011) explains that an
Indigenous process of knowledge collection is generally experiential and holistic and,
that oral tradition is a methodology in and of itself and is the primary means of gaining
insight into Indigenous process, and to this I’ll add into the Indigenous meaning of land.
Thus, the land is supremely important to Indigenous peoples as they face the courts with
respect to the formalization of their constitutional/Aboriginal rights as is occurring in
Canada. According to Frideres and Gadacz, “Aboriginal peoples have a clear vision of their
heritage and culture as distinguished from that of the mainstream society.” (2005:16) Thus
Indigenous identity is being decolonized and re-situated in a renewal of ways of knowing,
oral tradition and experience and according to Okanagan scholar Jeanette Armstrong, “in a
relocation of the Indigenous self in between self and other and between the Indigenous self
and the wider external and surrounding world”, thus it is ultimately situated on the land
and within the territory. Thus assimilative and Western mainstream forms of knowing are
being problematized and are deeply thrown into question.
To demonstrate how Indigenous identity becomes coded in land and story, much of
the surrounding landscape in the Stein Valley (of what is now British Columbia) a valley
sacred to the Nlaka’pamux and St’at’imc people has a poetic, sacred and ceremonial
signi icance and also a “narrative meaning”. In this sense, the Stein Valley can be described
as a storyscape as found in the legends and trails of meaning and being of the St’at’imc and
the Nlaka’pamux people. The stories and traditions found in the Stein River Valley are
vested in an historic path moving along the side of the Stein River rich in symbolic sites,
sacred rock landmarks (landforms), rock paintings (pictographs), and Nlka’pamux named
places that speak to the ageless human presence on the land. (M’Gonigle and Wickwire,
1988: 19).
“The trail beside the river becomes the container for all that has happened there
within the centuries-old vortex of human and non-human activity. Worn with the
weight of generations of foot traf ic, the access trail has been the pathway of
aspirants and spiritual quests, of women going into the middle Stein to pick oyster
mushrooms (Kumash-ekwa, at Shklimeen or “wade across place”) and harvest cedar
roots for baskets (at Kiskw or Kemkamatshoots) and of families migrating t a place
near “canoe landing”, or shtlidheel shtlahkows, to engage in night ishing, which is
done with a pitch lamp shone into the dark waters to see the ish.” (Elsey, 2013,
100/101 1997, M’Gonigle and Wickwire, 1988)

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As shown in the anthropological studies of the cultural heritage of the Stein Valley
by Wickwire, Arnett, York, Daly, Elsey et al, the cultural memory as vested within the Stein
is a part of the local Nlaka’pamux people themselves. The land is found to be the living
expression of the Nlaka’pamux as found in the pictograph panels, placenames, storied
landforms, and the trail; it is the container for all that’s happened there. Being an
untouched wilderness valley, the richness of the Stein Valley/Nlaka’pamux storyscape
serves as a living representation of a storied landscape and of the land as Indigenous
meaning and being in contrast to the re-coding, re-naming and re-mapping that
accompanies colonial/settler presences that erase and silence the Indigenous presence.

The People Are in the Land and the Land is in the People: The Importance of
Storyscapes in Cultural Heritage. by Christine Elsey, Professor Emeritus, Social,
Cultural and Media Studies, University of the Fraser Valley.
3
Normally and regrettably, such colonial erasures are accomplished through Western
cartography, through settler renaming and re-framing and the ultimate layering of a settler
presence over the pre-existent Indigenous presence so as to obscure, remove, obfuscate the
age-old Indigenous presence on the land. Therefore, “According to Armstrong (2000), Hall
(1997), and Sor laten (2006), there is a signi icant danger of Indigenous homogenization
through global mass economic culture, which both includes but also transcends the
boundaries of national state governments” (Elsey, 2013).

Works Cited
Absolon, K., 2011, K., Kandassiwin, How We Come to Know, Halifax/Manitoba, Fernwood
Press.
Armstrong, J. 2006, Sharing One’s Skin, Cultural Survival Quarterly 30, 4 (Land and
Resources in the Americas). Posted July 9, 2010. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/
publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/sharing-one-skin
Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places, Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache,
Albuquerque, NM:,University of New Mexico Press
Brody, H., 1981. Maps and Dreams, Vancouver, BC.: Douglas and McIntyre,
Cruikshank, Julie, 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Land, Knowledge., Colonial Encounters and
Social Imagination, Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.
Elsey, C. J. 1997. “Report on Cultural Resources in Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park
Background Document. Appendix 1. Kamloops, BC: “ Ministry of the Environment, Lands
and Parks.
Elsey, C. J. 2001. Self, Body and World: A Phenomenological Reinterpretation of BC.
Ethnography of Aboriginal Peoples. PhD. Thesis, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Simon Fraser University.
Elsey, Christine, 2013. The Poetics of Land and Identity Among British Columbia Indigenous
Peoples, Halifax/Manitoba, Fernwood Press.
Feld, S.A. 1996. Waterfalls of Sound, An Acoustemology of Place Resounding, in Steven Feld
and Keith Basso (eds.), Bosavi, New Guinea, in Senses of Place, Sante Fe, NM, School of
American Research Press.

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Frideres J. R. and Rene Gadacz, 2005, Aboriginal People in Canada, 7th ed. Toronto,
Ontario, Pearson Education.

The People Are in the Land and the Land is in the People: The Importance of
Storyscapes in Cultural Heritage. by Christine Elsey, Professor Emeritus, Social,
Cultural and Media Studies, University of the Fraser Valley.
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Grieder T., and L. Garkovich, 1994. Landscapes a Social Construction of Nature and the
Environment. Rural Sociology, 59, 1.
Hall, S. 1997. The Local and the Global: Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minneapolis Press.
Ingold, T., 1996. Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment, in Roy
Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui (eds.), Rede ining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication,
Toronto, Ontario, Berg Publishers.
Kahn, M. 1996. Your Place and Mine: Sharing Environmental Landscapes in Wamira, Papua
New Guinea. In Steven Feld, Senses of Place. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
M’Gonigle M. and W. Wickwire. 1988. Stein The Way of the River, Vancouver, BC: Talon
Books.
Silko, L.M. 1996. Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit:Essays on Native American Life
Today, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Sor latten, L. 2006. The Aboriginal Intellectual in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in the
Shadows:Between Indigenous Localism and Globalism, Canadian Journal of Native Studies,
26, 2: 383-404.

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York, A. Daly, R., Arnett, C. 1994. They Write Their Dreams on Rock Forever:Rock Writings of
the Stein Valley of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC: Talon Books.