‘You could feel my heart smile’: A modern take on Halq'eméylem music

If you want to learn a language, you can take a class, consult a dictionary, or download an app. Or, maybe, you can sing.

For the minds and voices behind Good Medicine Songs, music can be both fun and a tool for reconciliation that can help revitalize the Fraser Valley’s original language.

A group of Chilliwack students recently joined Good Medicine Songs—a collaboration between musicians, Stó:lō elders, and Halq'eméylem educators— to perform and record a bilingual song called “Step In the Right Direction” at Shxwhá:y Cultural Centre. The performance was the culmination of months of work at three different Chilliwack schools and released to coincide with the 48th annual Chilliwack Indigenous Awards.

You can watch the video for Step In The Right Direction below. At the bottom of the stroy, you can find videos explaining the song lyrics and how to pronounce the song’s Halq'eméylem words at the bottom of this story.

A good direction

Since 2019, Good Medicine Songs has created more than a dozen songs in both English and Halq'eméylem. The project is a collaboration between Stó:lō elders and singers including Eddie Gardner, the late Ethel Gardner, Jonny Williams, and Siyamiyateliyot (Elizabeth Phillips)—the last fluent Halq'eméylem speaker. (The project also includes Lower Mainland musicians Holly Arntzen and Kevin Wright; You can find all the participants here.)

Williams, a grandson of Siyamiyateliyot, was recruited to Good Medicine Songs as an artist to design a pamphlet and booklet for the project. But with dozens of years in language education (his voice is featured on websites like FirstVoices, where people can hear pronunciations of Halq'eméylem words, including those in this piece), Williams joined the team writing the songs and putting them to modern instruments.

Williams said he has long wanted to incorporate Halq'eméylem into more modern musical structures, with a goal of broadening understanding of the language. He says doing so will bring cultures together and help revive the language. But there’s also a personal element, with the project also giving him the opportunity to collaborate on songs with his legendary grandmother.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

FVC: What's the process of crafting one of these songs like?

Williams: It's a lot of fun. We do our song retreats. We did our first few in Forest of Echoes up in Cultus Lake. We went to cabins, and we would do a three- or four-day retreat. We try to create one song a day. Working as a team and working together, it just seems to flow. It just happens. It could start with one beat, or could start with one phrase, and all of a sudden we have a song. To see that building of that song—within minutes, it seems —all of a sudden, we’ve got this awesome beat, and then we’ve got this awesome chorus line, and everything's there. It's quite something to see, I guess. You have to be there to see it, to believe it.

FVC: It sounds fun. Do you normally start with the Halq'eméylem?

Williams: When we first started, we were starting with English. Now we're starting with Halq'eméylem first, and try to build around that. With ‘Step [In The Right Direction],’ it just came from a conversation [where someone] said ‘step in the right direction.’ So that was the English phrase and [we said] ‘OK now we need to build a song towards that.’

The same with my grandma: she mentioned that the ‘land is lonesome for the language,’ because she's the only speaker, and she's the one that could speak to the land—the land is lonesome to hear the Halq'eméylem language. So we've created a song: ‘The Land Is Lonesome For The Language.’ So some of [the songs] were developed through an English phrase or a comment. But some of them—like when we created our Stó:lō siyá:ye, that's ‘the river, my friend’—we created through Halq'eméylem first.

FVC: Have you found this helping your own knowledge and understanding of Halq'eméylem?

Williams: Yes, big time. It's really helped me grow in the language. I've been a teacher of Halq'eméylem for 25 years, and I teach a lot of beginners. When you teach a lot of beginners, that's all you're teaching and that's all your long-term memory. You're only retaining that much information. When you're not using all the words, you start forgetting because you're so focused on teaching beginner learners.

So when we were doing our song retreats, it was building my vocabulary higher by sitting with my grandmother and just learning and listening and using more language and to be able to sit and talk with my grandmother. We try to use more language when we're in our retreats, so it's helping me build my vocabulary and my fluency.

FVC: It sounds like you might be doing that in a way that might be more fun than the traditional language class way.

Williams: Even as a language teacher, I don't do the traditional language teaching style. I teach in what’s called TPR—total physical response. So I teach with motion and action. I don't sit in front of a class and say ‘repeat after me,’ or learn your alphabet, or learn sentence structures. I try to do everything orally. When I teach language, I have fun with it, and it seems to really help the students retain it a lot faster through TPR.

FVC: Are some of those principles part of the point of using song to introduce and communicate through Halq'eméylem?

Williams: That's the way I learned when I started my language journey in 1997. All my elders were singing everything. It seemed like that's all we were doing, but it made you remember the words more. It's working your muscles, because you're using different muscles than how we speak in English. It's muscles you’ve never used before, so singing really, really helps you work those muscles out.

FVC: I guess it's kind of the same way that you might remember how to sing a song, but it might be harder to remember if it was a poem.

Williams: It's like when you're singing a song, you learn it faster than when you open up a book and read a chapter and say, okay, ‘read that back.’

FVC: I saw the great video of you doing the song with the Chilliwack students. Those students are older, and you've also worked with younger students. Is there a difference between working with the younger kids and the older kids? What's it like working with the students?

Williams: It's always fun working with students. I've been a teacher for 25 years, and younger kids are always more open and eager. As you get older, it seems like you get shy. But with these students, they're already singing. We did one [song] with Imagine High and the rock band. That was another fun project because it's working with older students that are wanting to learn a song [and use] their instruments. It's a lot easier compared to ones that are like, ‘OK, you're going to go to this class now where you have to be here.’

All the students that we've worked with are amazing singers or musicians, and the things that have come together while working with all these students is a pretty amazing experience.

FVC: What are the challenges in using band instruments and when you're meshing traditional song elements and then more modern music elements?

Williams: Some of them are difficult, trying to get the right tone to match the Halq'eméylem word. So that's some of it. The other challenge is all these students never spoke a word of Halq'eméylem other than maybe ey swayel or something like that, right?

It's usually what a lot of students will remember in the language class, or that's been introduced in the schools. A lot of it is just ey swayel—you know, good day—but to have other words is a little tough. But they are able to do it because when we're practicing song, we're singing those songs, and they end up getting it.

I get so proud when I hear them all sing and when they finally get that note right and get that pronunciation. When we did that with Imagine High, my mom spoke about it—she’s also a language teacher and speaker—and she commented about the students about how well they were able to pronounce. She could understand them because they pronounced it properly when they're singing.

FVC: What is it like to try to integrate those instruments into traditional song structures?

Williams: For me, my heart’s happy; éy tel sqwálewel. A good feeling. Just to create it and to hear it. The only way you could say it is ‘you could feel my heart smile.’ That’s how happy it is to know that our language of Halq'eméylem is there. It’s not forgotten. It’s not going to die completely, [with] everything that has happened to our Stó:lō language, especially with the language almost being extinct—not extinct, because my grandmother’s been working for 50 years to revitalize our language and to record it, working with universities and Stó:lō Nation to revive our language. So it’s there, but all the work she’s done to get us this far, and to now have it in all these songs…

That’s the only way I could explain how I feel hearing Halq'eméylem to be put into other instruments other than our hand drum. It’s amazing. Since I started my language career it’s always been my dream to sing with instruments in Halq'eméylem.

FVC: Why is it important to include other instruments other than just the hand drum?

Williams: Going by my feeling, it brings it more to life; it makes everybody aware when everybody hears it, and we’re able to include all other cultures where the other instruments come from to bring us all together.

That’s the way I feel. It’s like we’re becoming one. That one feeling. I would say: Léts'e ó:lh sqwálewel: one feeling, where all of us are together. With all our instruments coming together, that makes our language stronger and more alive.

FVC: What is it like for you to be able to carry on what your grandmother has done and worked so hard at over her lifetime?

You can read our 2022 feature story on Siyamiyateliyot here.

Williams: It's an honour even being in the same room. She is everything to our language, to our culture, to our upriver Stó:lō Halq'eméylem community. The way my mom explains it is [Siyamiyateliyot] is royalty because she's our last one, and so to be in presence of royalty is such an honour, and to be able to still talk to her every day and to speak Halq'eméylem with her—I just wish I could understand even half of what she knows. Even though I've been doing this for 25 years, [with her] I still feel like a little child who is learning speak. So I want to further my education to be able to speak a lot more before it's her time.

She's our last one and she's 85 years old, and hopefully we’ll have many more years with her while I could still learn.