Shelly Boyd Interview – Connection to the Water

An interview with Shelly Boyd, Arrow Lakes facilitator for Colville Confederated Tribes, where she talks about the connection to the water and the river.

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 Shelly Boyd – a Sinixt woman with dark hair in two braids, wearing an orange tank-top. She is sitting on a log in front of a river.

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

Transcript of Narration:

(Shelly Boyd speaking in sn-səlxcin, the traditional language of the Sinixt)

English:

I just said that my name is um, I was actually named after my grandmother Prasát but my English name is Shelly Boyd. And I was acknowledging this river, [gestures to the river behind her] we call it the big water. 

As our people were pushed further and further south [gestures with her hands], we never left the water. And as a matter of fact the place where I would say 80 percent of Arrow Lakes people, Sinixt people, live is in the Inchelium community, or are from the Inchelium community. 

In our language it’s Inchelium, and it means the sound of the water or the place by the water [gestures with her hands]. And I think that, maybe it makes sense when we look at this [turns slightly and gestures to the water behind her] you know look at this landscape this was a freeway. 

It wasn’t just, it wasn’t just a river. And in our language it’s translated into a big river, into big water, and it’s the same word for the ocean. And I think it’s easy to forget that this river is connected to that ocean, and what happens to this river happens to that ocean, what happens to that ocean happens to us.