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Book review by Ralph Maud
Anybody who knows anything about Oliver Wells - and that includes
Allan Fotheringham, who wrote the foreword to this book - knows he
was a good man. No dispute at all.
I never had a chance to meet him before he was killed in a tragic
automobile accident, but I have listened to tapes, many, many hours
of tapes, tapes about what he love to do, what he believed in, and
how to bring value to his community, which was Chilliwack, BC. The
tapes were interviews, made after his retirement from farming, with
his old friends and acquaintances among the Stolo
people. With Marie Weeden, Oliver Wells’s daughter, and the
linguist Brent Galloway, I put the best parts of these taped conversations
into a book called The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbors the title of
the book Wells himself meant to write from the tapes.
This book, published by Talonbooks in 1987 and now in its second printing,
cannot be beaten as local ethnology (which I swear is the best kind).
With great zest Oliver went where his curiosity led, and his informants
were infected by his pursuit of knowledge.
What was obvious from the tapes was his amazing rapport with the Chilliwack
Native people. I took it as a given and left to one side any inquiry
into its causes and antecedents.
Now, with the publication by Harbour Publishing of the history of
Edenbank Farm, much is made clear. There is no separate chapter on
the Native people; they just gradually and naturally enter the picture.
A.C. Wells and his son Edwin were very fair-minded employers and active
in Christian charity. Oliver and Sarah Wells inherited these qualities.
For instance, they both were fully involved in restoring Salish weaving
to the Chilliwack valley. The same for Native canoe-building. And
Oliver gave new spirit to many elders just in asking for their stories
and songs on tape.
Those immensely pleasant hours of listening to the Oliver Wells tapes
took place weekly for 10 years in the Edenbank dining room on the
large oak table, with the Luckakuck Creek running below. I was among
those sorrowfully affected by witnessing the struggle of Marie to
maintain her father’s property intact after it became no longer
a farm, Dick Weeden being a doctor in town and there being no miraculous
source of income from the land.
The personally most interesting part Edenbank for me was Marie Weeden’s
epilogue, which is instructive as to the way government operates silent
patronage to its supporters. It was the Social Credit years, and the
provincial government couldn’t see its way to designating Edenbank
a heritage farm and having its history available to the Canadian public;
the government couldn’t see it as a new home for the Fraser
Valley College, which would have been ideal; the cabinet wouldn’t
let the land out of the agricultural land reserve until, as a last
resort, the farm was sold to a friendly developer who had been waiting
in the wings and then 46 acres was suddenly available for high-end
housing.
I was able to see our current form of “lobby democracy”
up close on this one. Edenbank is now a strata-title gated community,
with the old building as the recreational centre for residents.
It is tragically ironic that Edenbank Farm, which always stood for
efficient land use and the ideal of service to the community, is now
fenced for exclusive and non-productive activities. Thus, this volume
from Harbour Publishing, as well as being a beautiful artifact, is
an eloquent symbol of a general trend toward enclosure and of the
old values that could reverse the trend if we heeded them.
By Oliver N. Wells, edited by Marie and Richard Weeden, Harbour
Publishing, 2003.
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