Retired historian plans for the future: a Q&A with Sonny McHalsie

After more than 40 years with the Stó:lō Research and Resource Management Centre, historian Sonny McHalsie has retired, leaving a legacy as one of the most respected Stó:lō historians of this era.

But he’s not completely done.

Last week, we wrote about McHalsie’s decades-long career, his many accomplishments, and his impact on how people view the Fraser Valley’s history. (You can read that story here.)

We spoke to McHalsie shortly after his last day of work, asking a scholar of the past about his own personal future.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

FVC: What are your plans now that you're retired? Are you going to be taking a bit of a step back? Do you have some personal projects that you're wanting to start work on?

McHalsie: There are three books that I'm looking at. One is going to be on my family, including both Nlaka’pamux ancestry and also Stó:lō ancestry. I [have been] collecting the information for years and years now, probably over 30 years of gathering all this information. And so I just need to put it in book form. The biographies of certain elements, for instance, Captain Charlie—something on him, something on Dennis Peters, my grandfather and so on. Different people in my family that played a big role with inspiring me to where I am today.

McHalsie has previously talked about Captain Charlie, whose Halq'eméylem name, Sexyel, referred to how he hunted grizzly bears by shuffling from side to side. Sexyel would dare a bear to lunge at him, then thrust a carved bone vertically into the animal’s mouth as it clamped its jaws shut. You can listen to McHalsie tell the story here.

My children are well aware of them, and there's some stories that I’ve shared with them … but I just want to make sure it's all written down, especially for my grandchildren and their grandchildren. I want to make sure they know all about our history today.

The other one is a book on my career, mainly with elders. I'll be focusing on place names, focusing on elders, mainly the elders that shared their knowledge with me, and then, of course, the names they’ve shared as well. So it won't be a full place name thing, or it's not going to include all place names, because I think the big focus is on the elders.

For instance, if they shared something with me and actually lived it— what they talked about, they actually lived it. For instance, the late Andy Commodore said that whenever you go back to a place that your ancestors used, make sure you spend the night so your ancestors can get to know you. So at that time, I didn't understand what he meant by that. But over the course of the years, learning from other elders and learning more things about our culture and our perspective on our spirits, ancestors spirits, I realized what he meant was our ancestors are all around, and … we need to be up there at nighttime so they can get to know [us]. It falls back to Elizabeth Herrling talking about … when you find the place that your ancestors used, you have an obligation to go back there and use it …

I remember quite a few years ago, Steven and Gwen Point ended up doing some spiritual work for my family. They visited for a while and I was talking about my spiritual experiences. We had ancestor spirits bothering us at our house up in Boston Bar. And one of the things that Stephen had mentioned, he said, ‘You know Sonny, you talk about this as a spiritual encounter. You actually had this experience where that involved your ancestor spirits.’

Point suggested others have had similar experiences, and could benefit from reading anything McHalsie were to write about his personal spiritual encounters.

He said, ‘But because you know that that's what that is, you’ve got to write a book about it, so that people can relate to that and go, “Oh, gee, that happened to me. I didn't know that's what was happening. I didn't realize that was an ancestor spirit that was connecting with them.”

So that’s been in my mind. I never really thought about doing a book just on that, but at the same time, I think parts of that can be incorporated into the book I’m writing on the elders.

FVC: You said you had a third book that you were thinking of as well?

McHalsie: When you look through Brent Galloway’s Upriver Halq'eméylem dictionary … sometimes we look for an English word in the English part of the dictionary and think that there should be a Halq'eméylem word for this English word. And sometimes it's a shock. It's like, what? We don't have a word for that? It's just weird, right?

McHalsie is referring to a large, nearly 1,800-page dictionary, published in 2009 by linguist Brent Douglas Galloway. In the 1970s, Galloway founded the Halkomelem Language Program at the Coqualeetza Education Training. He died in 2014 at the age of 70.

The thing is, Brent Galloway was still working on that dictionary when he published it. I think he was pressured to get published. I think he was gonna retire … but he got it published, and I don't think he had finished with it yet. So when COVID hit, I started looking at the literal translations of place names, because it's a whole new thing, right? So that's why I wanted to do that. Go through that dictionary, go through the Halq'eméylem part and check the Halq'eméylem words that have an English translation in the Halq'eméylem area, and cross-check it with the English list to see if it actually appears in the English part. If it doesn't, put it down and add a second … appendix, or something, that if somebody's looking through the dictionary, they can look through what I have and figure, ‘Oh, these words are actually in there, just not in the English part.’

McHalsie said there are also other parts of the language and culture he wants to work with. He has spent a lot of time reading Galloway’s dictionary, and wants to share connections he’s found between certain words. He also wants to tackle what he calls the “misuse” of Halq'eméylem.

A lot of people think hóy chexw means ‘thank you.’ But it translates to ‘you're finished.’ So a Stó:lō speaker when they’re finished speaking, they should say Ulh hóy. Okay, hóy is finished. Ulh is for me. I'm finished.

Because the emphasis is on the oral history, the oral aspect of our traditions … people that are listening, rather than saying ‘thank you,’ when I said 'I'm finished, they would say hóy chexw, ‘you're finished.’ … Chexw is you. Hóy is finished.

I think what happened is people probably heard our elders saying hóy chexw, and thinking that they're saying ‘thank you,’ because society’s … emphasis is more on thank you. First thing when someone speaks, the emcee or whoever is in charge, ‘Thank you very much for sharing your words, speaking to us.’ The emphasis is on thanking them for whatever it was that they said. But because ours is an oral tradition, our emphasis is on: were you listening? Were you actually listening? Because you heard me say ulh hóy, so now you're saying hóy chexw. I keep telling it on my tours, but I still keep hearing people—and there's a lot of respected people out there that say hóy chexw for thank you—not realizing that they're saying ‘you’re finished.’ You gave me a cup of coffee, and now you said you're finished? It doesn’t make sense.

McHalsie heard that specific linguistic miscue beyond the upper Fraser Valley. Between present-day Abbotsford and the lower Fraser Canyon, the upriver dialect of Halkomelem—Halq̓eméylem—dominates. Between Vancouver and Langley, the downriver dialect—hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓—is most common. The dialects are very similar, but have differences in pronunciation. (Coast Salish communities on Vancouver Island speak a third dialect: Hul̓q̓umín̓um̓.)

Another one is hay ce:p q̓ə, which is a downriver way of saying hóy chexw. I wasn't able to prove it for a long time, because I'm not familiar with the downriver dialect, but I was at the Capilano University just before COVID hit, and I did a talk or presentation at the university, and this young guy come up, and he's raising his hands up in respect. And that's when he's going hay ce:p q̓ə səy̓em̓, hay ce:p q̓ə meaning thank you, respected person.

I said, ‘Are you saying thank you?’ He said, ‘Yes I am.’ I said, ‘Well, you know what? I don't think you're saying thank you.’ I told him, ‘Upriver people think that hóy chexw means thank you, but it means you're finished. And when you just said hay ce:p q̓ə, the downriver way of saying hóy chexw, and I believe it means you’re finished as well. I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure I think that's what it is.’

So he pulls out his cell phone. He said, ‘I'm gonna text my linguist.’ So he texts the linguist—I don't know who the linguist was— and asked the linguist: what does hay ce:p q̓ə mean? The linguist texted back and said, ‘You’re finished.’ It didn't say thank you. It said you finished.

FVC: It sounds like the work that you started in your career, you're not giving it up yet. You want to keep on working on it.

McHalsie: Yeah, keep working and eventually publishing a book. Getting away from the nine-to-five stuff and just concentrate on the books. Plus, I want to travel. I want to buy a travel van—there’s a certain van I want to rebuild—and I want to travel in that.

FVC: What are you most proud of in your 40-year career, and what kind of legacy do you hope to leave to the next generation of Stó:lō historians?

McHalsie: I take a lot of pride in the place name work that I did, and how it evolved into the Bad Rock Tours. I had 10 different tours that I was able to do between Yale and Surrey. I started off with one upriver tour that went from Chilliwack up to Yale and back down, and that's evolved a lot too. I really added a lot of information to that tour.

McHalsie said he might still lead some tours on a contract basis, but that he wants “to actually be retired.”

One of McHalsie’s most prominent accomplishments involves his contributions to the Stó:lō-Coast Salish Historical Atlas, a landmark book that discusses Stó:lō history and includes a map of Stó:lō places and their name meanings. He and the team were working to include as many place names as possible but, McHalsie said, “we had a cut off date.” He said some of that work is still ongoing. That includes entering place names into an increasingly complex digital mapping system. There have also been advances in understanding the place names themselves, even when the name was already known.

FVC: Is there anything else about your career that we haven't talked about that I should know?

McHalsie: I think the final thing is that I'm still learning place names. We're still learning about it.

A good example is stitó:s, at Vedder Crossing. So if you look in the Atlas, stitó:s—according to Elizabeth and Rose Green, who contributed a lot of their knowledge to the last place name research that was being done and incorporated into the Atlas—they said that stitó:s means soft touch. And so they said Promontory Hill and Vedder Mountain are so close there at Vedder Crossing that they're almost touching. But they're not. So that's why they said stitó:s means soft touch.

But when I looked up the literal translation: the S is what's called the normalizer—that's when I realized that the majority of our place names start with S—then ti means ‘over there,’ and tó:s means ‘bump.’ So ‘a place where, over there, you bump’, right? So now we’ve got to put that together. So what does that mean? Because knowing the name and knowing what it means, doesn't let you know too much about it other than its location. We have to connect that together with the word, Ts’elxwéyeqw, meaning ‘the backwaters,’ but Ts’elxwéyeqw also has to do with ‘as far as you can travel by canoe.’ So as far as you can travel by canoe was from the mouth of the old Chilliwack River and entered the Fraser River at the east end of Chilliwack Mountain, all the way up to Vedder Crossing. So you understand that we can only paddle from the river to Vedder Crossing. Why? Because stitó:s: over there, you bump. When you bump, the water gets shallow. You can't paddle anymore.

McHalsie spoke about the artwork at the roundabout just before the Vedder Bridge. The design by Bonny Graham and David Jimmie features a circle of paddles sticking into the ground.

When they put that in there, they didn't know the meaning. That's how the Spirit works, right? We believe in this spirit that does things right. So Bonny [Graham] and David Jimmie … I'm not sure what their thoughts were, designing it, but in the end, when you actually look at those paddles, the way they're sticking into the ground at the bottom, it's almost like stitó:s, over there you bump, over there your paddle bumps bottom. It almost fits. The piece of artwork that they did, before I even found that out, and it fits the meaning.

There is still considerable work to be done on place names, McHalsie said. Several people continue those efforts. For one of the projects, McHalsie had been interviewing Stó:lō people about the English names they use for culturally important places. That work will continue, with a student taking over the interviewing duties.

We have this report that has a whole bunch of English names, and it's not a complete report. If we spend more time with people, we’ll find out all these Stó:lō English names of places that usually have to do with traditional use, or spiritual things, different things. I think if we, if we still spoke of Halq'eméylem, the names of those places would be in Halq'eméylem.

After the interview concluded, McHalsie called back after giving our final question more thought. He had arrived at one final sentence that he felt summed up the work he had done in his career.

Our place names are the key to understanding our culture, and our history, and our relationship and connection to our land.