Lady Franklin Rock Place Naming Performance Histori..

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Xeyxelómós and Lady Franklin Rock: Place Naming,

Performance Historiography, and Settler Methodologies
h eat her davi s- fi sch
5 November 2011.1 New to British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, I found

myself on a Halq’eméylem place-name tour, led by Naxaxalhts’i (Albert
“Sonny” McHalsie), the cultural advisor at the Stó:lō Research and
Resource Management Centre. The turnaround point of the tour, just
north of the present-day town of Yale, bc, was a large rock in the Fraser
River known as Lady Franklin Rock. I was immediately interested in
the place name, as I was in the final stages of writing a book about the
disappearance of her famous husband, Sir John Franklin.2 Although I
knew Jane Franklin was a prolific traveller in her own right,3 until Nax-
axalhts’i mentioned that the rock’s name commemorated her visit, I had
Copyright © 2017. McGill-Queen's University Press. All rights reserved.
no idea that she had ever travelled to the Fraser Valley. While at the site,
I was compelled by Naxaxalhts’i’s stories explaining its historical and
mythical significance in Coast Salish culture, particularly how he blended
traditional knowledge, contemporary archaeology, and oral narratives,
but as I got back on our tour bus, I found myself wondering why the
rock came to be named after Lady Franklin. I was immediately inclined
to read the place name as an extraordinary case of a “remote” locale
named after a woman who actually visited it, an example of the com-
plex power dynamics that shaped women’s roles in the colonial era. Al-
most simultaneously, I recognized that my focus on the commemorative
renaming of the rock privileged the moment of colonial encounter, re-
enacting historical erasures that overwrote continuous Indigenous pres-
ence at the site, presence that Naxaxalhts’i’s stories so clearly underlined.
I realized only in retrospect that my inclination to view Naxaxalhts’i’s
work as fundamentally performative, rather than consider its “onto-
logical instrumentality,” underlines the pointed question that Dylan
Robinson poses later in this volume: “to what degree does performance
Performance Studies in Canada, edited by Laura Levin, and Marlis Schweitzer, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017.
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68 Heather Davis-Fisch
studies efface a colonial enterprise in its desire to understand, and per-

haps in the process normalize, Indigenous cultural practice as ‘perfor-
mance first’?”4
9 March 1861. Lady Jane Franklin was visiting the Fraser Valley as
part of a two-year circumnavigation of the globe after receiving con-
firmation, in 1859, that her husband had indeed died on his final
expedition. From 5 to 17 March 1861 she and her niece Sophy Cracroft
went on a sightseeing trip up the Fraser, perhaps because Lady Franklin,
having “a lively curiosity in scientific matters,” was “very much inter-
ested in the technical side of gold mining.”5 Twelve Indigenous men
paddled a canoe with Lady Franklin and Cracroft up the Fraser River to
see the “Big Falls,” a wide waterfall spanning the river. As they returned
to Yale, the women received a flattering surprise: a large white banner
with the words “Lady Franklin Pass” was stretched across the river, the
name “bestowed by the inhabitants of Yale” in honour of Lady
Franklin’s visit. The banner was “saluted from the opposite bank, by
dipping a flag (the Union Jack) 3 times.” The women then stopped in
town, where Lady Franklin presented each of the paddlers with a “gay
cotton handkerchief” and a “good feast of bread, well smeared with
treacle.”6 She was further honoured with an address read by William
Burton Crickmer, the Anglican cleric at Yale, which declared, “The in-
habitants of Yale … esteem the present as the proudest moment in the
annals of our country and in the existence of our Town” because “to-
day is our Town of Yale forever linked in history with the name of one,
the memorial of whose abundant kindness and wifely devotion will
never die.”7 These cultural performances, recounted by the middle-aged
Cracroft in letters home, are memorialized by the place name Lady
Franklin Rock. This chapter asks what these performances meant: to
Crickmer, as their director; to their intended audience of Lady Franklin,
Sophy Cracroft, and other settlers at Yale; and to the Indigenous par-
ticipants, who – to continue the theatrical metaphor – seem to have
been cast as stagehands, both essential to the performance’s success and,
at least in my reading of Crickmer’s intentions, meant to fade into the
event’s mise en scène.
Decolonizing methodologies are quickly becoming ubiquitous in the
Canadian academy, particularly in the wake of the final report of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Few would argue that this is not
an important and welcome development, especially for those disciplines
with histories intimately linked to colonial epistemologies. It also,
however, raises critical questions about how such methodologies are
Place Naming, Historiography, and Settler Methodologies 69
deployed, notably by settlers invigorated by an earnest sense of respon-

sibility for righting colonial wrongs, and whether such methodologies,
when applied by settlers, might not in fact contribute to ongoing ap-
propriations of Indigenous knowledge. Métis scholar David Garneau
argues that while decolonization is “collective work, it sometimes re-
quires occasions of separation – moments where Indigenous people take
space and time to work things out among themselves, and parallel
moments when allies ought to do the same.”8 Robinson takes Garneau’s
argument to one of its logical and performative conclusions in his
2016 essay “Welcoming Sovereignty,” making the injunction for “non-
Indigenous, settler, arrivant, ally, or xwelítem” readers to “please stop
reading by the end of this paragraph,” explaining that the following
eight pages of the essay “are sovereign space, written for Indigenous
readers,” and that non-Indigenous readers should return to the chapter
after this break.9 Garneau and Robinson’s comments raise the question
of whether it is ethical for settler scholars to apply Indigenous or de-
colonizing methodologies that emerge from specific Indigenous episte-
mological frameworks and suggest that scholars of settler ancestry
might instead work with – but at times apart from – Indigenous schol-
ars to develop decolonizing methodologies that emerge from their own
histories and world views. How, then, might settler allies value Indige-
nous world views and methodologies, acknowledge the ontological
and epistemological limits imposed by their own genealogical baggage
and positions, and avoid appropriative research models?

Early in “Welcoming Sovereignty,” Robinson poses three questions
to what is, at this point in the essay, a readership comprising both In-
digenous and settler readers: “What is the place from which you read?
What is the positionality of reading? How does this positionality situ-
ate your responsibilities as a reader and what do you do with the knowl-
edge you gain from this act of reading?”10 These questions form a
germane starting point, as they allow me to begin within Indigenous
frameworks, but also explicitly require me to position myself as settler
and to specify that the place from which I write is one separate from
Robinson’s. I am a Xwelítem,11 a non-Stó:lō person, and a recent settler
to the Fraser Valley; a white woman whose United Empire Loyalist an-
cestors emigrated to the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee
and Anishinaabe peoples, near what is now Kingston, on; and a scholar
invested in performance studies, particularly in the use of performance
studies as a way to investigate the past. This positionality leads to my
sense of responsibility for better understanding the ongoing effects of
these genealogies, both familial and disciplinary, and for investigating

how intercultural performance has been complicit in colonization of the
lands now known as Canada. More specifically, this chapter explores
settler performance history on the lands on which I now live as an un-
invited guest, and contends that the 1861 renaming of Lady Franklin
Rock attempted to change how both Indigenous peoples and settlers
understood the place and their relationship to the landscape.
In this chapter, I apply what I am tentatively terming a settler
methodology, one that might be characterized as positional, transparent,
intertextual, and imaginative. By positionality, I mean acknowledging
the position from which I read and taking responsibility for its impli-
cations on my reading practice. This chapter includes moments of what
I call “settler creep,” moments when my writing naturalizes my own in-
terpretive practice as a settler, as it did when I assumed Naxaxalhts’i’s
work was fundamentally performative. When these moments arise, I’ve
attempted to be transparent about them rather than erasing them. I’ve
also attempted to be transparent about the limits of my knowledge as a
settler in these territories. Naxaxalhts’i generously shared his knowl-
edge of the rock’s histories and his interpretation of Crickmer’s renam-
ing with me; I have also considered a range of Stó:lō perspectives – on
story, place, and history – shared in oral literature (narrative perfor-
mances “captured” in written form). However, there may well be other
relevant stories that would inform my understanding of the meaning of
the performances; these stories may not be accessible to me because I am

not a member of the communities to whom they belong and have not
yet built necessary relationships that would permit me access to them.12
My reading practice is intertextual in that I attempt to strategically po-
sition Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories and theories in relation to
one another in order to bring Indigenous perspectives, often transmit-
ted orally or in oral literature, into conversation with Euro-Canadian
perspectives transmitted through supposedly objective archives, pro-
viding space for Indigenous knowledges to inform my interpretation
of Euro-Canadian artifacts and archival documents. Finally, I see my
methodology as imaginative, in the productive sense used by Greg
Dening when he points out, in his reflections on ethnohistories of in-
tercultural contact in the South Pacific, “Both European Strangers and
Polynesian Natives of the past are distant from us now.”13 Retroactively
ascribing motives and reactions to Reverend Crickmer or Lady Franklin
might appear both ethically and methodologically simpler – because of
my own position and because of relatively voluminous archives – than
doing the same in relation to the Indigenous male paddlers; Dening’s

comments remind us that performance historiography is always, to
some degree, hypothetical and reliant on imagination.
I situate performance historiography as one of the disciplines I men-
tioned above, one that has been – and often still is – intimately linked
to colonial epistemologies. At the same time, I suggest that performance
studies might provide theoretical and methodological tools for decolo-
nizing this field, specifically in relation to intercultural performance and
ways of reframing settler reading and analytic practices.14 While it is
clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the differences between
Western and Indigenous historiography, it is helpful to outline features
that distinguish many Indigenous cultures’ ways of recounting the past
from Western traditions. Arapaho scholar Michael Marker identifies
“four themes of indigenous ways of understanding the past that are dif-
ficult to integrate into the conventions of Western historiographies.”15
Two explicitly relate to the role of place in history: first, “the often cen-
tral theme of relationships with landscape and non-humans,” and sec-
ond, “an emphasis on the local landscape as containing the meaning of
both time and place.”16 Marker calls for an approach to history that
recognizes how “Indigenous historical narratives place human beings
in a landscape that is understood to have mythic forms converging with
everyday forms of experience,”17 emphasizing that “for indigenous com-
munities the past is located in the local and traditional territory.”18 Iden-
tifying “the circular nature of time and the ways oral tradition is
integrated with recurring events,”19 Marker notes that in Indigenous
oral history, “the sense of linear time [is] folded and curved to account
for the merging of events and characters; this create[s] a circular and
recurring moral universe within an indigenous epistemology.”20
For me, the themes Marker outlines resonate with Joseph Roach’s
description of how culturally significant places connect performances
across time. “Behavioral vortices” are places whose “function is to
canalize specified needs, desires, and habits in order to reproduce
them”; these places provide space for “condensational events” to occur,
events that “gain a powerful enough hold on collective memory that
they will survive the transformation or the relocation of the spaces in
which they first flourished.”21 Here, Roach is drawing on French histo-
rian Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire: sites “where memory
crystallizes and secretes itself” that emerge at particular historical turn-
ing points when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up
with the sense that memory has been torn.”22 Lieux de mémoire exist
when real environments of memory – milieux de mémoire – no longer

do.23 Place names, in Western cultures, are common examples of lieux
de mémoire. Frequently commemorating historical events or honouring
specific individuals’ local significance, such place names also overwrite
prior cultural memories. This interplay of memory and forgetting is ob-
vious in the place names of settler colonies like Canada. For example,
Yale, bc, was founded as Fort Yale in 1848, named after James Mur-
ray Yale, the chief factor of the Columbia District; its name continues to
mark the town’s fur-trading history. Today most of its inhabitants are
members of the Yale First Nation, a self-governing First Nation that
draws its name from the name of the fort, demonstrating the ongoing
and pervasive power of lieux de mémoire.
In many Indigenous cultures, however, traditional place names mark
the past differently, constructing not only the past but also “social trans-
formations and … personal and social identities.”24 Place names mark
traditional and continuous relationships between people and the land-
scape; colonial performances renaming culturally significant places are,
then, no less than attempts to sever these relationships, eradicating mi-
lieux de mémoire through the creation of lieux de mémoire. Roach and
Nora both suggest that cultural place memory relies not only upon a
“will to remember,”25 but also upon acts of forgetting. This cultural
amnesia is frequently an “opportunistic tactic of whiteness,” a means by
which anxious colonial authority can be exercised through careful and
strategic acts of erasure.26 This process, however, is rarely completed:

traces of the past almost always remain, and, as Roach argues through-
out Cities of the Dead, such traces frequently remain in performance.
This chapter examines a range of cultural memories that remain as
performance traces, beginning with the details of the 1861 performance
that inaugurated Lady Franklin Rock and arguing that it appears to be
a carefully orchestrated ritual through which Reverend Crickmer com-
memorated the extent to which formerly “wild” territory had been
tamed. I will then turn to Stó:lō oral traditions concerning the rock to
better explain what, exactly, Crickmer might have imagined he was
“taming.” Like many Aboriginal peoples, pre-colonial Stó:lō transmit-
ted knowledge orally through two types of historical stories: sqwelqwel,
describing the relatively recent past, and sxwōxwiyám, stories from
the myth-age describing the acts of transformers named Xexá:ls. I am
not aware of any sqwelqwel about Lady Franklin’s visit, but a well-
known Stó:lō sxwōxwiyám explains the origins of the rock and its
Halq’eméylem place name. This sxwōxwiyám plays a critical role in a
sqwelqwel about the rock, the story of the first direct contact between
Stó:lō and Europeans and of an earlier renaming of the rock.27 With
these contexts in mind, the 1861 performance might be considered what
J.L. Austin terms a misinvocation, an act that Crickmer did not have
the authority to perform.28 Finally, returning to consider the 1861 re-
naming in its immediate historical context, I contend that Crickmer’s
performance was less stable and even more troubling than it might
initially appear: the renaming enacted the colonial agenda it attempted
to celebrate as a fait accompli. Examining the histories “forgotten” in
the rock’s renaming reveals that the 1861 performance functioned as a
colonizing act that attempted – not entirely successfully – to erase pre-
contact cultural memory associated with the rock and demonstrates the
cultural power of place naming as a performance genre.
The Rock as Lieu de Mémoire
The performance Lady Franklin and Sophy Cracroft witnessed appears

to me to have been a carefully stage-managed climax to their excursion
to the Big Falls, its theatrical impact reliant upon imperial symbols
adapted to the colonial landscape. Cracroft’s account mentions Rev-
erend Crickmer reading an address at Yale; however, she underplays his
role as the de facto director of the performance. The women arrived in
Yale the evening before their canoe trip and visited with Crickmer and
his wife, who had invited the “most respectable people” of Yale to tea.29
The next morning, Ovid Allard, the Hudson Bay Company agent at
Yale and one of Crickmer’s guests the previous night, provided the
women with a “large and commodious canoe, manned by a dozen stal-
wart Indians.”30 Cracroft recounts that the “12 Indians” who paddled
the canoe were “all dressed in red woollen shirts, with gay ribbons in
their caps, in honor” of Lady Franklin.31 Costumed, but not in any form
of traditional Indigenous dress, their clothing was reminiscent of the fa-
bled voyageurs of Canadian history. Little did the women know that
Reverend Crickmer “had prepared a SURPRISE for the Great Explorer’s
Wife”:32 while the women were “conducted up the river,” Jason Allard,
Ovid’s twelve-year-old son,33 “constructed a big banner bearing the
name ‘Lady Franklin’s Pass,’ which was hung at the entrance to the
mountain cleft”34 after the women passed it on their way upriver. Jason
must have had help: the terrain on both sides of the river is rugged and
the river, even at that point, is fairly wide. Crickmer, who was in the
canoe, remembered how as they passed the rock on their way to the Big
Falls, Lady Franklin disgustedly remarked, “What, Mr. Crickmer, has

this magnificent Pass no other name than The Little Canyon?” One can
imagine his nervous anticipation for the surprise he had orchestrated; as
they travelled back to Yale, he was “in terror that there had not been
time to do as [he] had implored the sign-writer on calico, on a pine
pole.” Crickmer’s fear dissipated when the canoe rounded the turn in
the river, “the tableau above” came into view, and he was able to de-
clare: “Now, Lady Franklin, this Pass has a name, which will last as long
as the hills.”35 The banner was “suspended from the rafters of a salmon
drying shed,” suggesting how Stó:lō architectural features were repur-
posed in service of the colonial performance. The banner was then
“saluted from the opposite bank, by dipping a flag (the Union Jack) 3
times,”36 likely by Jason Allard and his now anonymous helpers. Be-
cause of the scale of the natural setting, the salute was performed not by
individual hands but by the British flag itself, an implicit approval of
the renaming by the empire itself.
Why did Crickmer name the pass after Lady Franklin? The settler
community certainly wanted to honour her with its gesture of respect.
Beyond acknowledging her status as the “Great Explorer’s Wife,” Crick-
mer’s address at Yale stressed her exemplary character and her “abun-
dant kindness and wifely devotion,”37 indicating that her significance
was not limited to her fateful marriage.38 At a time when few white
women even lived in the colony, the visit of a dignified woman like Jane
would have been remarkable to them. Her presence at the pass itself
was even more extraordinary simply because the area was so difficult
for Xwelítem to access. It was not uncommon for explorers to name
places they “discovered” after women – Lady Franklin’s name had al-
ready been given to a bay and an island in the Arctic – but it was far less
common for a “remote” place to be named after a woman who had ac-
tually visited it.
The place-naming performance commemorating Jane Franklin’s
presence at the site is suggestive of changes in attitudes toward both
gender and place. First, we might interpret the place name as a sign of
progress in the social position of women. It was at least mildly trans-
gressive for an aristocratic British woman to step outside the bounds of
her conventional social role and behave like a woman of the frontier –
or even an Indigenous woman – rather than of the metropole, visiting
a site only Indigenous people could access; the place name commemo-
rates Lady Franklin’s unorthodox behaviour. We must recall, however,
that it was Crickmer who named the place. Any feminist reading of the
Figure 2.1
View of the rock, looking north up the Fraser River, taken 9 March 2015.
Lady Franklin Pass is on the left side.
place name must be tempered with recognition that the power to name
landmarks remained the domain of (white) men. Second, we might con-
sider that the place name marks a turning point in how the territory
was imagined by the (white male) settlers responsible for naming. In the
half-century that followed Simon Fraser’s “discovery” of the river, the
Fraser was transformed into a fur trade corridor and then into a rela-
tively accessible waterway that facilitated more diverse trade between
the coast and interior. The resource-based frontier, the domain of rela-
tively transient and rough men, had by 1861 begun to give way to a set-
tler colony, an extension of the civility and domesticity of the British
Empire and a place where families might emigrate. Lady Franklin rep-
resented the precise qualities the emerging colony valued. In 1861 Lady
Franklin was sixty-eight years old, an advanced age at the time, and her
niece was forty-five. Inscribing her name on the pass symbolized that
Fraser’s wild river had been so civilized that even an “elderly” woman
could glimpse the canyon’s pristine beauty.
Sometime between 1861 and 1867,39 the place name shifted from
Lady Franklin Pass to Lady Franklin Rock, which is what the rock is
often called today. Lingering uncertainty about why and when the name
shifted is symptomatic of the rock’s status as a site of cultural memory
with the power to generate affectively compelling but historically unre-
liable narratives. Anthropologist Andrea Laforet recorded two stories
about the rock that suggest its ability to generate both evocative stories
and historical misremembering. One informant, apparently unaware
that John Franklin’s death was confirmed in 1859, described how Lady
Franklin went to Yale to passively wait for her husband, who was plan-
ning to descend the Fraser on his return from the Arctic. Lady Franklin
“used to get the Indians to take her across and she’d sit on the rock all
day waiting for her husband.”40 The second story ascribes a more active
character to Lady Franklin and inspired a commemorative plaque,
erected in 1973, which read: “The Rock thwarted Lady Jane Franklin
in her efforts to proceed up the river in search of her husband.”41
These stories of Lady Franklin’s actions at her namesake rock demon-
strate that once a place name is fixed to a site and to a history, creating
a lieu de mémoire, the place name can become a placeholder, holding
open a space that can be filled with a narrow range of cultural narra-
tives and from which outlying cultural memories are excluded. Pierre
Nora’s description of lieux de mémoire relies on the distinction between
lieux – sites at which “moments of history” are “torn away from the
movement of history, then returned”42 – and milieux – “real environ-

ments of memory”43 – and aligns each with a competing way of know-
ing the past: history and real memory, respectively. History is “the
reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer
… a representation of the past … an intellectual and secular produc-
tion”;44 memory, in contrast, is not mediated or intellectualized but “so-
cial and unviolated … affective and magical.”45 Nora suggests that
history is characterized by an alienated relationship to the past, while
memory is characterized by an ongoing interaction with it; lieux are sites
where the past is commemorated by those in the present, while milieux
immerse those from the present in the past. While the binaries Nora sug-
gests are perhaps too tidy, his suggestion that history “is perpetually sus-
picious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it”46
– often through the creation of lieux de mémoire – is helpful. The place
name Lady Franklin Rock, as a lieu de mémoire, emerged from Crick-
mer’s desire to memorialize a present moment and create history by mon-
umentalizing a natural landmark. The cultural impulse to remember her
presence at the site required what Roach calls “public enactments of for-
getting”;47 this is seen in the name shifting from the pass to the rock and
the stories that reflect very different memories of her agency. Recogniz-
ing these errors in cultural memory draws attention to a much more
troubling instance of strategic forgetting: that committed by Crickmer
when he named the pass after Lady Franklin, overwriting Indigenous
place names. This recognition changes the scope of the question con-
cerning why Crickmer chose to rename the pass after Lady Franklin
and raises another, perhaps more provocative one: What was at stake if
Lady Franklin’s visit was not remembered?
The Rock as Transformer Site
Naming the site after Lady Franklin not only memorialized her visit but
also overwrote – or attempted to overwrite – Stó:lō histories of the
place. The Stó:lō world view that place is intimately linked to both tem-
porality and oral traditions is manifested in sxwōxwiyám, transforma-
tion stories that comprise one of two key genres within oral traditions.
Sxwōxwiyám describe “the distant past, ‘when the world was not quite
right.’”48 During this chaotic time, Xexá:ls, “the transformers who are
also known as the three bear brothers and the bear sister … were given
a responsibility to travel through the land to make the world right …
transforming … ancestors into mountains or into rocks or into re-
sources.”49 Transformer sites mark the actual remains of specific ances-

tors; stories about these ancestors help listeners “acquire the necessary
cultural knowledge needed to make healthy decisions in a variety of sit-
uations.”50 The word sxwōxwiyám refers to both the temporal period
and the stories from the period,51 demonstrating Stó:lō understandings
that time, narrative, and place exist in a complex interrelationship.
In December 2013, Naxaxalhts’i shared one sxwōxwiyám about the
rock with me.52 In his iteration of the sxwōxwiyám, Xexá:ls53 was walk-
ing upriver beyond the present-day town of Yale, and when he reached
the west bank, he heard about Xeyxelómós, a shxwlá:m (“Indian doc-
tor”) who “was using his power the wrong way” by asking people to
pay for his help.54 Xexá:ls called for Xeyxelómós to do battle with him.
Xeyxelómós initially refused, but after Xexá:ls transformed his sister,
Siyt’l, into an underwater rock downriver from Lady Franklin Rock,
Xeyxelómós travelled through a tunnel to do battle with Xexá:ls.55
Xexá:ls stood at Th’exelís, a “little rock point on the west bank”; Th’ex-
elís, which translates as “showing his teeth (in anger),” is distinguished
Figure 2.2
View of Xeyxelómós and the pass, with Th’exelis at the right of the image.
Photo taken 9 March 2015, looking down the Fraser River from the west bank.
by a set of white lines in the rock, marking where Xexá:ls scratched his
fingers during the duel.56 Naxaxalhts’i described the battle: “At one
point Xexá:ls cast a thunderbolt, a lightning bolt to Xeyxelómós and he
missed him. But the … the lightning bolt went right into the rock so if
you go up there you can see this vein of quartz rock, it’s about two feet
wide, about eighty feet long. And eventually Xexá:ls defeated Xeyx-
elómós and transformed him into stone, so that’s the large stone that’s
in the river that’s now known as Lady Franklin Rock.”57
The banner reading “Lady Franklin Pass,” according to a sketch

Crickmer made, was hung between Th’exelis and Xeyxelómós, indicat-
ing that the 1861 performance constituted an attempt to overwrite two
of the Halq’eméylem place names associated with sxwōxwiyám. Both
are significant place names in Stó:lō culture, not only because they com-
municate cultural teachings but also because they provide physical evi-
dence of Xexá:ls’s presence. A Stó:lō elder interviewed by anthropologist
Gordon Mohs58 told him that Th’exelís “represents a continuity of the
present with the past,” leading Mohs to comment, “Th’exelis is where
Xa:ls left his mark on the earth so that future generations would re-
member his passing … Th’exelis is an affirmation of Indian spirituality
prior to the coming of the Europeans.”59
In order to register the cultural significance of renaming a place, as
Crickmer did, it is critical to understand that Stó:lō place names fall
into three categories. The first includes names referring to the “histori-
cal happenings” of sqwelqwel. Geographic place names comprise the
second category. Place names in both groups evolve over time, reflect-
ing “the ongoing historical experiences of Stó:lō people” and changes in
the significance of landmarks. Names in the third category are “associ-
ated with the miraculous events from sxwōxwiyám”; they refer to land-
marks that are the physical remains of Stó:lō ancestors.60 Transformer
sites seem to allow for the “touching time” that Rebecca Schneider de-
scribes in Performing Remains; in viscerally collapsing past and present,
they facilitate profound affective experiences.61 Although different “sub-

jective meanings” of transformer stories might emerge in different eras,
the stories themselves possess “an inherent significance … that must be
preserved intact and in unaltered form.” Transformer sites are where
the “ancestors come to share their perspectives” with Stó:lō people,
marking a material and ongoing connection between Stó:lō and their
ancestors; as a result, these place names are “truly sacred and meant to
be unchanging.”62
One of the first examples of contact between Stó:lō and Europeans,
which incidentally took place at the rock, demonstrates how sxwōx-
wiyám influenced Stó:lō world views and actions, indicating how the
meaning of transformer stories could be both preserved and adapted
to new cultural circumstances. When Simon Fraser passed by the rock
during his 1808 descent of the river, he heard about the sxwōxwiyám
of Xeyxelómós.63 In his published journals, Fraser relates how “the na-
tives informed us, that white people like us came there from below; and
they shewed us indented marks which the white men made upon the
rocks, but which, by the bye, seemed to us to be natural marks.”64 The

indented marks to which Fraser refers are almost certainly those of
Th’exelís, and the rock that he refers to as “the bad rock” is likely Xeyx-
elómós. For both Fraser and Stó:lō, however, the encounter appears to
have been marked by misreading. Fraser, perhaps because of his inter-
preter, misinterpreted who Xexá:ls were, thinking Stó:lō were referring
to white people or Europeans visiting the rock.65 Fraser’s name for the
rock collapsed the difference between Xeyxelómós the shxwlá:m and
Xeyxelómós the rock into metaphor – the name was the same for both
because both were “bad” – rather than recognizing, as Stó:lō did, that
the rock was the transformed shxwlá:m. Stó:lō also misidentified Simon
Fraser: Naxaxalhts’i, recalling a story he attributed to Jason Allard, told
me that Stó:lō thought “Fraser was Xexá:ls returning.” Fraser and his
men, arriving from the direction from which Stó:lō believed Xexá:ls had
disappeared, “not only looked different physically, but they dressed
oddly and were in possession of technology that could not be readily ex-
plained with reference to existing indigenous experiences. Confronted
with the new situation, … they tried to fit the newcomers into their ex-
isting historical understandings,”66 demonstrating how the transformer
story was adapted to incorporate new cultural experiences. Because
Stó:lō assumed Fraser was Xexá:ls, they took him to see the scratch
marks as a way of “asking him if he had been [t]here before”;67 the
scratch marks were not only a visible sign of Xexá:ls’s past actions but
also a mnemonic device reminding Fraser of when he, as Xexá:ls, left his
mark on the landscape.68 The sxwōxwiyám is crucial to the meaning of
the sqwelqwel, the story of Fraser’s visit, exemplifying Keith Thor Carl-
son’s claim that Stó:lō history “is filled with significant points of inter-
penetration” across time and between ancient and recent history.69 In
this example, the rock seems to act as what Nora terms a milieu de
memoire – a real environment of memory – in which the distant and re-
cent past come together at a spiritually and historically significant place.
Fraser’s renaming of the rock, although based on a misinterpreta-
tion of the sxwōxwiyám, preserved Indigenous historical narratives and
place-based epistemologies in its “translation” of the Halq’eméylem
Xeyxelómós as the “bad rock.” In contrast to Fraser’s renaming, Lady
Franklin Pass and Lady Franklin Rock attempt to erase Indigenous
knowledge by commemorating only European presence at the site. Fur-
thermore, if one takes Naxaxalhts’i’s indication that such place names
must be preserved seriously, questions about the legitimacy of Crick-
mer’s 1861 renaming as a performative, in an Austinian sense, arise. In
How to Do Things with Words J.L. Austin notes, regarding successful

performative utterances, “for naming the ship, it is essential that I
should be the person appointed to name her, for (Christian) marrying,
it is essential that I should not be already married with a wife living,
sane and undivorced, and so on.”70 The performance by which Crick-
mer attempted to rename the pass was unsuccessful because it was both
a misinvocation – “there [was], speaking vaguely, no such procedure”71
for changing a place name associated with sxwōxwiyám – and a mis-
application – Crickmer, not having the authority to rename the places,
was not “appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure in-
voked.”72 When we consider the effects of Crickmer’s performance, it
is clear that the legitimacy of his action has not mattered much: despite
the shift of the name from pass to rock, his commemoration of Lady
Franklin has survived in everyday usage by both Stó:lō and Xwelítem.
The Rock as Geological Palimpsest
To return to the question of what was at stake if Lady Franklin’s visit

was not remembered, it should now be clear that commemorating Lady
Franklin’s visit also constituted an attempted erasure of Indigenous
histories represented by Halq’eméylem place names for the site. Such
cultural amnesia is often strategic; in the case of Lady Franklin Rock I
contend that it was a tactic that facilitated the appropriation of In-
digenous lands by settlers in the new colony.

Intercultural relations in 1861 were almost unrecognizably different
from those Fraser experienced in 1808. When Fraser reached what is
now known as the Fraser Canyon, the landscape was getting the best of
him. This stretch of the river was virtually impassable in sections and
Fraser had to rely on the knowledge of Indigenous guides and on In-
digenous architectural structures – pathways on the sides of the canyon
– to survive. By the time Fraser reached “the bad rock,” his “Native
guides were not simply passive facilitators in the background … but
actively guided the newcomers through a landscape entirely their
own.”73 The story of the “bad rock” also preserves the memory of how
Fraser became the object of Indigenous people’s knowledge through his
insertion into Stó:lō sqwelqwel, showing that the unequal power dy-
namics of colonialism that we often expect to see in intercultural con-
tact zones had not fully emerged at this historical juncture. The most
significant catalyst for the changes that took place by 1861 was the 1858
Fraser Canyon gold rush, which saw 30,000 Xwelítem miners arrive in
a territory whose population included “less than a hundred non-Native

men.”74 The governor of Vancouver Island, James Douglas, concerned
about the impact of mining, petitioned the British government to create
the mainland colony of British Columbia. The 1858 proclamation of the
colony led to debates about how to negotiate with First Nations; the
colonial government and settlers wanted to avoid what they perceived
as expensive treaties, like those negotiated east of the Rockies.75 Dou-
glas, compared to his successors, appeared to be genuinely sympathetic
toward Indigenous peoples’ concerns.76 However, he believed that treaty
negotiations would not help Stó:lō survive colonization and that the only
way they “could escape physical extinction” was by “embrac[ing] the
notion of their own cultural extinction.”77 The key to this extinction lay
in permanently changing Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land,
curbing their migratory nature, and transforming them into farmers.78
It was not enough to mandate lifestyle changes: Indigenous under-
standings of land had to change.
One of the ways that colonial governments and religious authorities
severed Indigenous attachments to traditional lands was by changing tra-
ditional place names. McHalsie and Thom argue, “The renaming of the
landscape was an important part of the colonization of British Columbia
by Euroamericans and the marginalization of the indigenous language,
culture, and traditions.”79 Place renamings were cultural performances
that were frequently achieved with the help of theatrical mises en scène.
When Reverend Crickmer renamed the rock, he used the natural land-
scape as a backdrop to emphasize the performing object – the banner –
at the centre of the event. The performance’s affective impact on the
British ladies relied upon a range of theatrical elements: props, gestures,
and costumes symbolizing empire and the history of settlement in
Canada. Renamings were not only performative in a theatrical sense but
also constituted performative utterances, in Austin’s sense.80 The success
of these performances relied upon the colonizers’ assumption that they
indeed had the right to perform such acts, an assumption that – as I
indicated earlier – is certainly flawed if we imagine the perspective of
Indigenous spectators at such events. The importance of renamings, as
performatives, lies not only in their illocutionary power – their effect of
naming a specific site81 – but in their perlocutionary power – the broader
effects of the naming.82 Renamings attempted to change not only how
Indigenous people referred to significant places but also how they un-
derstood their fundamental relationship to place and territory: “Nam-
ing was an exercise in suppressing the Aboriginal landscape – its myr-

iad of historical and ancestral relationships – emphasizing instead the
moment of discovery and ‘cultural territorialization.’”83
When I asked Naxaxalhts’i how he thought the Indigenous paddlers
might have reacted to the 1861 renaming of the pass, he remarked,
“Well, I think that would have been like right at the time where the
missionaries are trying to get them away from those sorts of stories
[sxwōxwiyám] … and trying to believe in the Bible and that sort of
thing. … So, I don’t know how they would have felt about that … De-
pends how much the priest had explained to them about what was
going on, I guess.” Here Sophy Cracroft’s account might yield an im-
portant clue. She writes that when the canoe arrived at the pass, the
paddlers “stopped their paddling and we were told that this name was
bestowed … in honor of my Aunt’s visit” and that, after the banner was
saluted, “the Indians to whom it had been explained, worked their pad-
dles more vigorously than ever.”84 Naxaxalhts’i explained that the east
side of the rock is a xá:xa, or taboo, site, because it is where Xeyxel-
ómós’s third eye was when he was transformed: “Stó:lō people aren’t
allowed to go back behind there … If we do we could suffer from much,
it is referred to as xó:lí:s … a sickness that causes you to twist up and
die if you do something that you are told that you’re not supposed to
do.”85 The paddlers witnessed the renaming and had it explained to
them. While their “vigorous” paddling might have reflected enthusiasm,
as Cracroft implies, it also seems possible that the paddlers rushed away
from the xá:xa site because of the offence of renaming a place associated
with sxwōxwiyám.
It is uncertain whether Crickmer was aware of the Halq’eméylem
names associated with the pass or was familiar with the sxwōxwiyám,
so it is unclear whether he was fully aware of the cultural impropriety
of renaming the rock.86 Naxaxalhts’i shared an analogous example with
me, however, that explains why Crickmer might have deliberately at-
tempted to overwrite the sxwōxwiyám. In the 1860s, a priest from St
Mary’s Residential School in Mission, bc, took children to a mountain
near Hope, where Stó:lō believed a stl’áleqem, a spiritually potent being,
lived.87 The stl’áleqem at the site was a serpent, referenced by the
Halq’eméylem name for the mountain.88 The name of the mountain was
changed to Devil’s Mountain in an attempt “to create a new identity
for the place to erase the first, the Aboriginal[,] identity.”89 This new
identity was cemented through the priest’s action of taking children to
the xá:xa site to prove that it was not spiritually powerful.90 Crisca
Bierwart suggests that the name change to Lady Franklin Pass was a
“superficial act, not a direct superimposition, but one that in its very
superficiality implies that a base of colonial power had been estab-
lished.”91 However, I suspect that the renaming was no retroactive re-
flection of established colonial power but an act that, like the children’s
visit to Devil’s Mountain, actually enacted that colonial power through
performance. If renaming places was an unspoken part of colonial pol-
icy – as McHalsie, Thom, Oliver, and Carlson all suggest – and if colo-
nial place identities were enacted through affirmative performatives and
ceremonies asserting colonial authority, then the renaming of the pass
must be understood within this context, as an act whose real effect was
to colonize the landscape.
Lady Franklin Rock, as a place name, commemorates the visit of an
aristocratic woman to a nascent colony, signifying her exemplary char-
acter, the newly tamed landscape, and locals’ affective attachment to
memories of her visit. The renaming performance took place in an anx-
ious socio-political atmosphere, when the imperial cultural values that
the name, as lieu de mémoire, attempted to memorialize were contested
rather than established. Roach notes that the “anxiety generated by the
process of substitution” – in this case the substitution of a colonial place
name for a Halq’eméylem one – “justifies the complicity of memory and
forgetting.”92 So too, renaming in order to forget Indigenous ties to the
land was essential to the colonial project. Roach also points out, how-
ever, that such substitutions are rarely completely successful: collective
memory “works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely,”93 and
the forgetting upon which collective memory relies is limited by its vast
scale, particularly for “those who ha[ve] the deepest motivation and the
surest means to forget.”94
The complex and incomplete forgetting Roach refers to is evident in
how traces of pre-colonial understandings of the rock’s meaning and
history remain in the present. For example, Bierwart notes that Stó:lō
often “disclaim the name’s adherence to the landscape … saying, ‘It’s
called Lady Franklin Rock, in the white man’s language’”; even speak-
ers who don’t know Halq’eméylem “can use this disclaimer … to indict
cultural colonization.”95 This suggests that Stó:lō might recognize that
Crickmer’s renaming of the rock was, to use Austin’s terminology, a
misapplication. Another example is Naxaxalhts’i’s place name tours,
called “Bad Rock Tours” in reference to Fraser, which educate Stó:lō
and Xwelítem about the pre-colonial history of the territory by sharing
the stories embedded in Halq’eméylem place names. Naxaxalhts’i’s

tours not only decolonize the landscape by remembering pre-colonial
understandings of place and drawing attention to how colonial perfor-
mances renamed and reconstructed the landscape, but also decolonize
participants through immersion in the natural landscape and exposure
to Indigenous understandings of the relationship between individuals
and place. Naxaxalhts’i’s stories, told during place name tours, indicate
that despite colonial attempts to sever Indigenous relationships to land,
precolonial understandings of the landscape endure.
Xeyxelómós/Lady Franklin Rock is not only an example of the inti-
mate relationship between performance, colonization, and landscape
that emerged in the Fraser Valley in the second half of the nineteenth
century but also a case of a geological palimpsest. Jonathan Gil Harris
explains that “palimpsested” manuscripts perform in at least three tem-
poral registers: supersession, the production of “a ‘living’ after that is
opposed to a ‘dead’ before”; explosion, in which the “‘old’ text shatters
the integrity of the ‘new’ by introducing into it [the] radical alterity” of
the past;96 and conjunction, in which the infinities of the past and pre-
sent “converse with each other.” Like an author, the place name Lady
Franklin Rock attempts to overwrite and erase the pre-colonial place
name Xeyxelómós, but pre-colonial memory persistently erupts at the
site, evidenced in the intercultural encounter of 1808 and in Naxax-
alhts’i’s performances of cultural memory today. Linda Tuhiwai Smith
explains, “Coming to know the past has been part of the critical peda-
gogy of decolonization,” and “transforming our colonized views of our
own history … requires us to revisit, site by site, our history under West-
ern eyes.”97 While Tuhiwai Smith’s remarks pertain to how Indigenous
peoples’ views of history and landscape have been colonized, it is cru-
cial that Xwelítem also come to know the past through place-based his-
tories. Sites like Xeyxelómós/Lady Franklin Rock allow the conjunction
Harris describes at work in palimpsests, providing a space for the an-
cient and recent pasts to converse in the present, and through the con-
versation that such a site facilitates, decolonization of place memory
might begin.
n o te s
1 My thoughts on settler methodologies have been greatly enriched through
conversations with Dylan Robinson, Jill Carter, Karyn Recollet, and the par-
ticipants in the “Indigenization, Settler Methodologies, and Intergenerational
Responsibility” seminar convened at the 2016 Canadian Association for The-

atre Research conference.
2 John Franklin was commander of an ill-fated expedition in search of a North-
west Passage, which disappeared in the central Arctic in 1845. The two ships
under his command, hms Erebus and hms Terror, were located in 2014 and
2016, respectively. See Davis-Fisch, Loss and Cultural Remains.
3 According to Penny Russell, Jane Franklin “saw and recorded more of the
world than most women of her generation.” “Wife Stories,” 38.
4 Robinson, “Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection,” this volume, 211–12.
5 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, xv.
6 Ibid., 56–9.
7 Walbran, “Lady Franklin’s Address.”
8 Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces,” 23.
9 Robinson, “Welcoming Sovereignty,” 7.
10 Ibid., 6.
11 Xwelítem is the Halq’eméylem word for non-Aboriginal people; however, its
literal meaning is “hungry people,” which carries significant historical and
metaphorical connotations. Because I am writing in Stó:lō territory, where
the Indigenous language is Halq’eméylem, I will not italicize Halq’eméylem
terms.
12 And, of course, some Indigenous knowledge may never be accessible to those
outside a given family or community.
13 Dening, Performances, 57.
14 Both Virginie Magnat and Ric Knowles employ performance studies in pre-
cisely this manner in relation to contemporary performance. Selena Couture’s
2015 dissertation is an excellent, extended example of how performance stud-
ies might be employed to decolonize performance histories from a settler per-
spective.
15 Marker, “Teaching History,” 98.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 104.
18 Ibid., 105.
19 Ibid., 98.
20 Ibid., 101.
21 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 28.
22 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7.
23 Ibid., 7.
24 Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 7.
27 The understanding I have gained of Stó:lō oral traditions – both oral litera-
ture and oral narrative – concerning the rock is deeply indebted to the work
of Stó:lō cultural experts, most notably Naxaxalhts’i. In interviewing Nax-
axalhts’i, I have applied Stó:lō scholar Q’um Q’um Xiiem’s (Jo-ann Archibald)
guidelines for how researchers might learn cultural teachings by developing
relationships with cultural experts and allowing these experts to direct the
learning, in Indigenous Storywork, 36–8.
28 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 17.
29 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 54.
30 British Columbian, 2. Allard, a lifelong hbc employee, appears to have had
generally positive relationships with the Indigenous population around Yale;
this may have been helped by his marriage to an Indigenous woman.
31 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 56.
32 Qtd. in Stackhouse, Churches, 26. All italics in quotations from original.
Crickmer’s scrapbook reveals what happened behind the scenes of the re-
naming and suggests that Crickmer was “performing archivalness,” that is,
engaging in “saving activities that displayed the intensity of [his] emotional
engagement” in the performance. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 95.
33 Cherrington, Fraser Valley, 119.
34 McKelvie, “Jason Allard,” 250.
35 Stackhouse, Churches, 25–6.
36 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 58–9.
37 Walbran, “Lady Franklin’s Address,” 2.
38 Crickmer’s attempt to rename the pass after Lady Franklin was somewhat
controversial at the time – the Daily British Colonist commented that the ef-
fort was “a most inappropriate one.” “Arrival of the Caledonia.”
39 The first use of “Lady Franklin Rock” that I have found occurs in the title of
an 1867 photograph, Looking down Cariboo Road to Fraser River and Lady
Franklin Rock, Stereo View, held in the bc Archives.
40 Laforet, “Folk History,” 253.
41 Qtd. in Bierwart, Brushed by Cedar, 52.
43 Ibid., 7.
44 Ibid., 9.
45 Ibid., 8.
46 Ibid., 9.
48 McHalsie, Schaepe, and Carlson, “Making the World Right,” 6.
49 Albert (Sonny) McHalsie, interview by Heather Davis-Fisch, 9 December
2013.
50 Carlson et al., “Spoken Literature,” 188.

51 McHalsie, interview.
52 Before beginning, Naxaxalhts’i orally footnoted the story, telling me that he
heard the story from Agnes Kelly of Shxw’ hamel, with additions from Tillie
Gutierrez of Chawithil.
53 The term Xexá:ls generally refers to the group of transformers. Some elders
use the singular term Xá:ls to refer to just one of the brothers. In the colonial
era, Xá:ls is sometimes also called “Little Christ,” reflecting the widespread
impact of Christianity (Carlson et al., “Spoken Literature,” 185).
54 Naxaxalhts’i explained that the story’s cultural teaching – that when people
with special power are asked for help they are not supposed to refuse or ask
for payment – is still alive today.
55 Stó:lō understandings of their territory include the existence of a number of
tunnels that function as “portals” linking places that appear to be geograph-
ically distant (Carlson, Power of Place, 7).
56 McHalsie, “Halq’eméylem Place Names,” 151. There are alternate versions
of this sxwōxwiyám in both Stó:lō and Nlaka’pamux cultures (Mohs, “Sto:lo
Sacred Ground,” 12). The most notable difference in Stó:lō variations ap-
pears to be in the name of the shxwlá:m, who is called Kwiyaxtel in the ver-
sions shared by Mohs (12–13) and Lerman (“Lower Fraser Indian Folktales,”
146–7). McHalsie and Thom also record a variation in which Xeyxelómós is
transformed into a rock downriver from the rock with the quartz vein
(Halq’eméylem Place Names, 6–7).
58 Mohs’s informant is “TG,” likely Tillie Gutierrez.
59 Mohs, “Sto:lo Sacred Ground,” 13.
60 McHalsie, “Halq’eméylem Place Names,” 134.
61 Schneider, Performing Remains, 35.
62 McHalsie, “Halq’eméylem Place Names,” 134.
63 Naxaxalhts’i expressed skepticism about whether Stó:lō would have shared
the sxwōxwiyám story with Fraser.
64 Fraser, Letters and Journals, 100.
65 Fraser’s editor notes that there was no record of “any visit by white men to
this vicinity before Fraser’s arrival” (100).
66 Carlson, “Reflections on Indigenous History,” 62.
68 Carlson points out, “Tellingly, the name Xexá:ls is derived from the same
proto-Salish root as the verb ‘to write.’” Power of Place, 66. Th’exelís marks
a precise instance of Xexá:ls actually inscribing his presence on the landscape.
69 Carlson, “Reflections on Indigenous History,” 64–5.
70 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 8–9.

71 Ibid., 17.
72 Ibid., 34.
73 Oliver, Landscapes and Social Transformations, 94.
74 Carlson, Power of Place, 161.
75 Carlson, “Legacy of Broken Promises,” 60–6.
76 One reason may have been that Douglas’s wife was of Indigenous ancestry.
77 Carlson, “Legacy of Broken Promises,” 67.
78 Carlson, Power of Place, 168–9.
79 McHalsie and Thom, Halq’eméylem Place Names, 2.
80 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 4–5.
81 Ibid., 117.
82 Ibid., 121.
83 Oliver, Landscapes and Social Transformations, 86.
84 Cracroft, Lady Franklin, 58–9.
86 In 1808, Stó:lō shared the story with Fraser, but it is unclear whether they
would have shared it with Crickmer. Some Stó:lō sxwōxwiyám were known
by Xwelítem, evidenced by the inclusion of a sxwōxwiyám concerning the
origins of the first salmon ceremony in the Daily British Colonist, 11 March
1861. In 1862, however, Colonel Moody commented that Stó:lō were “loath
to show” culturally significant sites to government surveyors. Qtd. in Carlson,
“Legacy of Broken Promises,” 71. Carlson argues that Stó:lō quickly learned
that “not disclosing the location of sacred sites ultimately proved a more ef-
fective means of preserving a site’s spiritual integrity.” Ibid. I have found no
evidence that clarifies whether Crickmer had heard the sxwōxwiyám.
87 McHalsie, “Stl’áleqem Sites,” 8.
89 Ibid.
90 Carlson includes an extended account of this event in Power of Place, 189–
91.
91 Bierwart, Brushed by Cedar, 52.
93 Ibid., 2.
94 Ibid., 6–7.
95 Bierwart, Brushed by Cedar, 54.
96 Harris, Untimely Matter, 15.
97 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 36.

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2

Xeyxelómós and Lady Franklin Rock: Place Naming,

h eat her davi s- fi sch

5 November 2011.1 New to British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, I found

studies efface a colonial enterprise in its desire to understand, and per-

deployed, notably by settlers invigorated by an earnest sense of respon-

and positions, and avoid appropriative research models?

these genealogies, both familial and disciplinary, and for investigating

the performances; these stories may not be accessible to me because I am

doing the same in relation to the Indigenous male paddlers; Dening’s

when real environments of memory – milieux de mémoire – no longer

strategic acts of erasure.26 This process, however, is rarely completed:

The Rock as Lieu de Mémoire

The performance Lady Franklin and Sophy Cracroft witnessed appears

Falls, Lady Franklin disgustedly remarked, “What, Mr. Crickmer, has

movement of history, then returned”42 – and milieux – “real environ-

The Rock as Transformer Site

sources.”49 Transformer sites mark the actual remains of specific ances-

The banner reading “Lady Franklin Pass,” according to a sketch

they facilitate profound affective experiences.61 Although different “sub-

rocks, but which, by the bye, seemed to us to be natural marks.”64 The

How to Do Things with Words J.L. Austin notes, regarding successful

The Rock as Geological Palimpsest

To return to the question of what was at stake if Lady Franklin’s visit

digenous lands by settlers in the new colony.

a territory whose population included “less than a hundred non-Native

ing was an exercise in suppressing the Aboriginal landscape – its myr-

the stories embedded in Halq’eméylem place names. Naxaxalhts’i’s

Responsibility” seminar convened at the 2016 Canadian Association for The-

50 Carlson et al., “Spoken Literature,” 188.

70 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 8–9.

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