PEMBERTO words :: Lisa Richardson
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Wayne Andrew, Líl̓wat horseman and a legendary rodeo rider in his prime, told me recently how Pemberton got its name. A story his grandfather told him. Passed on from his grandfather. The first white people paddled into the valley in birchbark canoes. Pale with scurvy. “We used cedar dugout, not birchbark, canoes—so it was shocking on lots of levels,” Andrew shared. “What is this place?” the newcomers asked. ‘‘Puwámten’,” replied the Líl̓wat, meaning “the canoe log where the canoes beach, where people would pull up and berth their canoes.” (“Puwám” is the sound the canoes make when they beach on the log and “ten” is the tool used.) “Oh, that sounds like
the name of the surveyor general,” they said. And so they called the place Pemberton, after a mustachioed dude in Fort Victoria—the boss of the boss of the boss, the biggest honcho in the Hudson’s Bay Company. The sáma7 (pronounced “shama,” meaning “white folk”) were low on food and unwell, so the Líl̓wat welcomed them, shared dried meat and berries. Later, after a rockslide came down to where they’d set up camp, the newcomers moved further upstream, up the valley, closer to what is now settled as Pemberton. In Ucwalmícwts, the language of the Líl̓wat, the word for Pemberton, nkúkwmá, means “north.” The Líl̓wat were spread all through the valley and
BLAKE JORGENSON. ARTWORK STU MACKAY-SMITH
The railroad arrived in the Pemberton Valley in 1914. Electricity didn’t show up until 1951, and the highway finally opened in 1967. 50