It's midnight. Five shíshálh women, all cousins, paddle their canoes through the black quiet in ?álh tew lích (Sechelt Inlet). It’s so dark they can barely make out the canoe in front of them. With only the sound of their paddles hitting water, they follow the path of their ancestors, who traversed these waters as their major highway for many centuries.
One paddler feels inspired to sing. Soon, all their voices permeate the stillness, echoing across the ocean surface. Unbeknownst to them, a couple at home in Sandy Hook hears their song and moves outside to listen to their rhythmic words.
ch’elkwilwet (Raquel Joe) recalls this canoe journey with enthusiasm and gratitude, sharing how it fuels her wall hanging “xaws sk’ilt” (A New Day), which portrays the Inlet and its dramatic purple sunsets. She wove it for the Weaving Reconciliation Project on the same type of traditional loom used by her ancestors. (This initiative was part of the syiyaya Reconciliation Movement for all peoples living within the shíshálh homelands.)
Elected as a new shíshálh Nation councillor in February this year, ch’elkwilwet still finds time to weave and perform as a lead female singer with the shíshálh drummers. She is creating shawls for a ceremony to honour survivors of residential school and has woven blankets, tunics, head bands, sashes and scarves. Her traditional name, passed down by her Uncle Phil, means “to weave back and forth and push through the warp.”
ch’elkwilwet teaches the she sháshishálhem language online for kálax-ay, the Capilano University campus in ch’atlich (Sechelt). Although no current elders speak it fluently, she says she’s not concerned how this might affect pronunciations. “Our language is going to evolve,” she says, noting that people today speak it faster than their fluent elders did. “I love it. It’s a really beautiful language that sounded very melodic. We need to keep it in the forefront. We don’t want it to go to sleep.”
While working for the Nation’s cultural department, ch’elkwilwet says she listened to more than 350 audio and videotapes of shíshálh elders speaking she sháshishálhem. Her knowledge of the shíshálh language, which she transcribed and translated into English starting in 1993, prompted her to become curator and cultural liaison at the Nation’s museum tems swiya (our world) in 2016. She held this position until her election to council this year.
As curator, ch’elkwilwet played a key role in launching the tems swiya exhibit Face to Face with Our Ancestors, which honours a burial site of four shíshálh ancestors. Archaeologists uncovered the 4,000-year-old remains of a chief, estimated to have died at age 50, his daughter, 20, and twin sons, 18, on the Nation’s territory surrounding ch’atlich in 2010. This discovery is considered one of the most significant of its kind in North America. No other ancient burial site in North or South America has contained what this one did: 350,000 handmade stone and shell beads, which are displayed in a case at tems swiya. And no other museum on the continent offers life-like forensic reconstructions, in state-of-the-art, three-dimensional animation, of a powerful Indigenous family.
ch’elkwilwet shared the poignancy of seeing the four reconstructed faces at Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of History in May 2017, where she attended the unveiling of a duplicate Face to Face with Our Ancestors exhibit, accompanied by shíshálh elder Jamie Dixon. “I started crying. I looked at the elder — he was crying. [I thought]: This is our family, our ancestors, at the Museum of History. Amazing.”
With a flutter of hands and gusto in her voice, ch’elkwilwet describes her excitement after receiving a phone call from an out-of-town curator, who had read about the ancestors burial site discovery in National Geographic. She soon discovered this call was from the Field Museum in Chicago, one of the top natural history museums in the world.
They wanted her to come to their museum, on an all-expenses-paid trip, to give a one-hour presentation about the ancestors burial site and exhibit. ch’elkwilwet was one of only 30 curators invited from across North America, including two others from Canada. Once there, accompanied by her husband Tim Joe, she listened to the impressive educational credentials of her fellow presenters, waiting for her turn to speak (she was the last to present).
“I didn’t go to school to be a curator,” she says. “I got the position through knowledge and culture and history.” (She took First Nations Studies at Capilano University and received a Native Adult Instructional Diploma from the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology.)
Recalling her “oh my gosh” reaction to the others’ academic expertise, ch’elkwilwet jokingly exaggerates what she heard: ‘“My name is Dr. Blah, Blah, Blah. I have eight PhDs, six bachelor degrees…’” With matter-of-fact simplicity, she describes her approach: “I said, ‘My cultural background is my elders. My teachers are my ancestors.’ I spoke to them [the curators] like I was giving them a museum tour. I spoke right from my heart.”
After her presentation, delivered with passion and “nothing technical,” she says people scrambled to talk to her and her husband, who has also given tours in the shíshálh museum. He told her, “This is awesome.”
This year, April 1 marked ch’elkwilwet’s 30-year anniversary of working for the shíshálh Nation, where she has been employed in every department except housing. As a councillor, the mother of five with two grandchildren says she brings a maternal attitude of caring and openness, promoting outreach and one-on-one connection. She shares two anecdotes of how her positive, approachable style of speaking from the heart, combined with good listening skills, have brought attitudinal shifts in others.
While ch’elkwilwet was museum curator, a male tourist told her that her lively talk about her culture and people shifted his perspective about First Nations peoples from judgment to respect. And an angry, traumatized local contrarian who she says never gives compliments told her: “I know you’re going to do good things with the Nation.”
In her words: “If I can change one person a year, that’s good enough for me.”
