Eileen Delehanty Pearkes Interview – Sinixt Displacement

Interview with Eileen Delehanty Pearkes discussing the displacement of the Sinixt.

Title Screen: Circular logo on a black backdrop. Logo is an image of four waves turning into wheat on the left end. The title “Stories Beneath the Surface” is circled around the image in capital letters.

Interview with Eileen Pearkes – a white woman with shoulder-length white hair, white glasses, and a pink shirt sitting in front of the water.

Revelstoke Museum and Archives logo in the bottom right hand corner.

Transcript of Narration:

The displacement of the Sinixt had a lot to do with the British Columbia government
and their general attitude toward Indigenous people as settlers moved into the region,
into this particular region, around the 1880s/1890s.

And the emphasis of settlement had to do with gold extraction and with agriculture.

In this particular area it was a twist that we had the international boundary so close.

(Instrumental music begins in background).

[Video of Sinixt woman carrying a sturgeon-nosed canoe across the screen with trees in the background].

We had an Indigenous people who traveled back and forth traditionally across the border, well this was not a border for them.

[Video clip of misty mountains with trees showing through the mist; cuts to video of Columbia River with fall foliage surrounding the river].

Twenty percent of their traditional territory was in what we now call Washington State, and eighty percent of it was surrounding the main stem of the Columbia.

[Video clip of birds flying through the mist; cuts to video panning the Columbia River with trees on the side and mountains in the background; then cuts to a video of cars driving up to the ferry on the river].

When the settlers moved in they had far less places where they could filter out into, and so they naturally drifted south in part because the U.S. had established a reservation there 30 to 50 years earlier.

[Video shows reflection of trees and clouds in the water; cuts back to Eileen Pearkes talking].

And so for the Sinixt there was a safe haven there where families could gather and be present and here there were just unending pressures on their traditional territory because of mining and settlement and many other factors.

[Video zooming into the Columbia River with mountains in the background; music changes].

[Video of Eilieen Pearkes speaking].

I think it’s important to emphasize when we talk about displacement, I think the way the
historical record treated this issue and the way the crown government of British
Columbia continues to position themselves on the issue of the Sinixt in their displacement, is that they were just sort of naturally drifting away from their traditional territory, which in fact is absolutely untrue and not borne out by their own version of the story.

[Video pans over sandbars on the river with logs lying around sporadically].

Their own version of the story is they were in a sense refugees who had nowhere safe that they felt they could be.

[Video fades to black].