Q&A: A Stó:lō artist on the connections between nature, medicine, and art

The land remembers. The water remembers.

Water has been cycled through generations, and combined with the tears of Carrielynn Victor’s ancestors. It nourished the medicinal plants she harvested from forests in Chilliwack. When water broke through the Sumas dike in 2021, Victor saw it remember and retrace its traditional path to the Fraser River.

“This water is me and this water is you and it connects us,” Victor said.

On National Indigenous People’s Day, Victor sat down with Chawathil podcaster Aaron Pete to talk about nature, art, history, and Indigenous connection. Victor, a Stó:lō artist, conservationist, storyteller, and medicine practitioner, shared her experiences with incorporating nature into art, discussed her passion for plants, and explored the importance of intergenerational connection.

Today, we are sharing an excerpt of that conversation between Victor and Pete, focusing on Indigenous medicine, Sumas Lake, and the concept of Tomiyeqw—the idea that decisions we make today should consider our future progeny.

You can watch a complete video of the hour-long discussion at the bottom of the article.

Nature as medicine

Victor has been passionate about the environment since her youth, and has worked on habitat restoration projects as well as nature inspired artwork. She is also a medicine practitioner, and Pete asked why she became one.

Carrielynne Victor: I love plants.

Aaron Pete: Did you always have that passion, and did it start to develop when you started to understand the environment around you?

Victor: I've always had a passion. For those of you who have been in Chilliwack for a long, long time, there was a lot, a lot, a lot of forested space 30 and 40 years ago. When I was growing up, we would just head out into the bush and do our playing. And certain times of the year, you know, you could suck on clovers, or eat fresh shoots or eat the berries, or you knew which bark you could eat. I don't think we realized we were engaging in medicinal practices or seasonal rituals of rejuvenation at the time. But as adults, those are kind of the terms we might give them. 

And so as I got into—I was probably like 15, or 16—I got into following around a late elder in Nanaimo, Snuneymuxw elder Ellen White, who's passed on now. And she used to do plant walks through the university. And I found it just fascinating how one plant could not just be useful or beneficial for one thing, but one plant could be, you know, it could have technological value, and it could have food value, and it could have medicine value, and at a different time of year it could be used for a different kind of medicine. And for men, it could be useful for this. And for women, it could be useful for that. Like one plant. So super fascinating. 

And then I did a bit of herbology. I took a certificate program with Dr. Jeanne Paul— some of you might know Dr. Jeanne Paul, she's a naturopath who focuses on Indigenous plants. And Dr. Jeanne’s focus is like, ‘Oh, let's learn as many things as we can.’ But, on a separate occasion, an elder said something that really hit home and said, working with plants is about relationships. And it's not about volume, it's not about numbers. How many hundreds of plants you know is good. But your relationship with them is the most important thing, because that's what you're sharing with the people who need the medicine. The more you know a plant, the better you can share it. And so I started to scale back, back, back, back, back, back. And now I just work with a handful of plants.

Seven generations

During Pete’s interview with Victor, he shared a number of images of her artwork, including this painting which had been commissioned for a group wanting a design of Tomiyeqw, the idea that our decisions today should make a better world seven generations into the future.

Victor: In this piece, the ancestors are in the clouds, and the Tomiyeqw generation is in the mountain. And so they're, they're at this high place, because there's this sacredness about high places, a lot of the mountain tops are story rich. And we look up, and we see the eagle and the eagle carries our prayers. And, you know, this concept of God being high, was introduced to our people. And it was accepted, because we already looked up that way. And so this concept of Tomiyeqw travels in both directions, in the imagery as well as it does in our history and our lives.

Pete: This is just incredibly beautiful. Like, when I think about the idea [of Tomiyeqw], you illustrated it perfectly. How did this come to you? Did you just sit down and dedicate yourself to this, was this in a dream? How did something like this come about where it's so clearly depicted?

Victor: I wish I could say it was a dream. That would be super fun. But it's not. 

It's just from being outside and being on the land base, and recognizing that you can dig deep and find your ancestors. You can go higher into the mountains and find your ancestors. They're everywhere. Their memories are everywhere. They're there, their objects are still there. The way that they left footprints on the land base is still there. And how it steered me is still present as well. 

And so it's just, it was like faces, you know, we see faces in the mountains. And we're not high, we do see faces in the mountain. And, and the water, right, like the water coming off of the woman's hair is important. Because like, I personally recognize that, that, you know, this is the same water that the dinosaurs had. And so if the dinosaurs had this water, and all the plants since and then maybe our ancestors cried, and maybe those tears are in this water. This water is me and this water is you and it connects us. And so to have a little bit of water kind of traveling through her hair is important too.

Sumas Lake

Pete had interviewed Victor once before, just weeks before the catastrophic flooding in 2021 that created a temporary return of Sumas Lake. At the time, Victor had recently finished a book and exhibit with The Reach Gallery Museum about Sumas Lake. The book Semá:th Xo:tsa: Great Gramma's Lake is available online.

Pete: Would you mind talking about this piece? It was right in this moment. You draw this piece, you're talking about the Barrowtown pumps, then like a couple of weeks later, we have an atmospheric river that really I think changes our understanding of the community we live in and the risks we face. And we're still working on trying to get flood mitigation to protect the valley. And we're starting to have this conversation around how do we do we bring the lake back? Do we leave the lake the way it is? Do we try and protect our communities? What was it like to create this piece and then see it a couple of weeks later have this impact?

Victor: It was wild. Because The Reach offered us these archival photos. And so I was sifting through archival photos—and the pieces are these interventions, digital interventions on the archival photos—just to kind of offer this modern flashback, right? And all the things about the lake that I thought it was were disrupted when we were making the book, how shallow it actually was, how seasonally large it was. But when it was out of season, it was quite small. And where the villages were in relation to where the villages are now. Very different. But getting to know the lakes through the photographs and then watching it show up on social media. It's crazy.

Pete: Do you think it should come back? 

Victor: Personally, I think the lake should do whatever it wants.

Pete: And in some ways it will.

Victor: I guess the lake’s going to do what it wants. And one of the things that I thought was interesting when I was drawing this map that shows up in the back of the book. And there's an outflow. And that's precisely where the dike breached. The dike breached where the outflow historically was, and was flooding back in back towards the lake, back towards the prairie. And I thought ‘wow.’ Our elders say the land remembers, and it sounds super epic and romantic. ‘Oh the land remembers.’ But the land remembers! The land remembered exactly, right. The substrate would be the same, and the pressure point is the same and boom, the breaking point of the dike was precisely where the outflow was.

You can watch the whole interview between Pete and Victor below.