Written as I Remember It

Elsie Paul, a Sliammon elder, has spent her life and career in service to others. In recognition of a lifetime of effort dedicated to supporting First Nations well-being, she received an honorary doctorate degree from Vancouver Island University in 2010. Paige Raibmon is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Harmony Johnson is Elsie Paul’s granddaughter. She holds a BA from Simon Fraser University and has served in a number of policy and executive roles in BC First Nations organizations.

Joseph Weiss, Wesleyan University:

Paul moves fluidly between these different affects in her narration, as any gifted storyteller and scholar might.

Holly Doan:

Written As I Remember It is warm and honest, partly a memoir; part ethnography; part Farmer’s Almanac. It draws on a Sliammon Elder’s oral history of a skilled and prosperous people who lived and died here long before they built a company town and named it for an English surgeon…[it] captures a vanished world that survived for 10,000 years, and was just as worthy as mill towns with telephones.

Susan Roy, Department of History, University of Waterloo:
An eloquent and powerful text that invites the possibility of transformational listening … Elsie Paul brings great emotion, sensitivity, pain, and humour to the events and moments that have marked her life.

Wendy Wickwire, Department of History and the School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria:
In this superb example of oral history and knowledge sharing, Elsie Paul brings to life the history of the twentieth century as she lived it. It is told through a wonderful line of poignant, personal stories and teachings that keeps the reader turning the pages.