Tobacco in Stó:lō Historical Consciousness. Change and Continuity Through Intersectional Stigmas and Honours

Abstract

While a few Indigenous peoples in what is now BC and Washington permacultivated local tobacco species the Stó:lō and other Coast Salish did not. Rather, tobacco came to the Stó:lō through a series of complicated social and trade networks and then through colonial incursions. As a result, tobacco has long held an ambiguous position within Stó:lō historical consciousness. Today, as in the past, various Elders and Knowledge Keepers alternatively discuss tobacco’s place as either close to, or far from, their cultural, ceremonial, and spiritual lives. In this dissertation, I apply an intersectional lens to investigate the history of tobacco within the Coast Salish world over the past two centuries. Throughout, I underscore Stó:lō agency while providing a postcolonial critique of the white-supremacist philosophical roots of the health, economic, environmental, and spiritual impact of colonial tobacco within Indigenous society. The pre-contact lower Fraser canyon and upper Fraser Valley were the center of intertribal trade and exchange networks anchored around the salmon fisheries. Arranged marriages facilitated the integration of high-status Indigenous women from neighbouring Interior Salish communities who brought with them ceremonies and healing practices associated with tobacco. While the marriage and trade relationships were highly valued, tobacco and its associated ceremonies were viewed by hereditary elites as posing a challenge to more locally grounded rituals and spirituality. A related tension accompanied the introduction of western industrial tobacco following the fur trade and settlement. Some Stó:lō people, however, and especially those from the commoner classes, embraced tobacco as a symbolic form of class agency in the early-to-mid 19th century. For them, tobacco increasingly symbolized democratization for a burgeoning Coast Salish working class. Meanwhile, a pre-existing Coast Salish temperance was being reframed within a fluid social and gender system that was in part fostered by the emergence of health and hygiene anxieties relating to industrial tobacco-related illnesses. Over time, as residential schools and related assimilationist policies worked to erase Stó:lō culture, many Stó:lō intellectuals, Elders, and Knowledge Keepers came to endorse a hybrid Christian and Salish spirituality that stigmatized industrial tobacco smoking habits while supporting the emergence of local expressions of pan-Indigenous-style tobacco-centred spirituality from the late 1960s through to the present.