My name’s Henry Pennier Jr, but everyone calls me Jumbo. It’s not that I’m a big fellow, but I guess I was a pretty big baby. When I was born the doctor told my mom and dad that I was a little Jumbo, and the name stuck.

Like my dad, I was a logger most of my life. I worked in the bush for over fifty years, starting when I was sixteen. That was the year my dad told me it was time I started earning my own keep and taking care of myself. So he brought me to a...

Henry Pennier was not the sort of person who attracted a lot of attention during the first sixty-five years of his life – especially from ‘white people.’ So, family members recall him being a little surprised when, in 1969, Wyn Roberts, a young linguist from Simon Fraser University, travelled ninety kilometres east of Vancouver on Highway 7 to interview Pennier about the Halq’eméylem language and related Stó:lõ Aboriginal traditions. As a ‘half-breed’ who had spent his years negotiating an identity in the ‘no man’s land’ of Canadian racial politics, Pennier found a certain irony in being identified by an academic as...

Early in 1969, after I had returned from a research trip to England, as a linguist I became interested in the possibility of doing work on the Salish Indian dialects in the Haney-Mission district of British Columbia’s Fraser River valley, east of Vancouver.

The purpose was to try certain theories I had developed about Phonology,¹ a branch of my Linguistic discipline, against data from a language very different in its sounds, structures and grammar from anything I had studied previously. Dr. P.W. Davis, now of Rice University, Texas, was my colleague at the time, and he was working with an...

My name is Henry George Pennier and if you want to be a friend of mine please you will call me Hank.

I am what the white man calls a half breed. Even Indians call me half breed and why not since I have been one all my life from the time I was born in 1904 at a very early age.

I call me Pennee-err but my grandfather called himself Pennee-aye when he arrived in this here Fraser River Valley of British Columbia in the late 1870’s, only it wasn’t called British Columbia until later on.

I don’t think...

I was less than a year old when my dad had an accidental death while hunting in 1904. I had three brothers and two sisters and lucky the boys were the older ones so they helped out our mother quite a lot.

We lived in a wooden frame house, twenty-four by forty feet that was partitioned, and had an upstairs room. It was on a eight acre piece of a eighty-seven acre homestead adjoining the Chehalis Reservation on the Harrison River.¹

There was an old wagon road down to the Chehalis settlement two miles to the south, then we took...

I was 16 in 1920 when I got my first job in the bush. It was with a little camp at Othello¹ about five miles east of Hope on the C.P.R.’s old Kettle Valley branch line. It crossed the Fraser at Hope and then ran up beside the Coquahalla River into the mountains heading for the Merritt district. That old line is long gone now but she sure was one fine piece of railroading in her day and I sure didn’t like the C.P.R. much for abandoning her. But I suppose business is business.

My job was wheeling sawdust. It...

Things got damn tough in the ’30’ s. No jobs to be got hardly.

I had a friend Jack, that owned an old car and when he gassed up at a service station he would put only one gallon at a time in for fear that his back tires may blow up on account of the weight. Another friend owned a drug store at the Five Corners at Chilliwack. When I went to visit him one November day he says to me I can’t sell any of my medicines, nobody seems to be getting sick. But on the other hand...

I folded up my umbrella for good in 1939 at the end of the season on the west coast and came back here to the Harrison district which I haven’t left since. So in 1940 I started with the Canadian Forest Products at Harrison Mills and for the next 19 years until 1959 I worked my logging trade in all kinds of jobs. You name it and I done it. And as I think about it now if I was the same age again and you gave me a choice of what I wanted to work at the rest of...

So now it is 1972 and 13 years have gone by and I am 68 years old but I am not an old man yet by a damn sight, although with only the little bit I can get around I sure as hell act like one.

Since 1965 home has been this little rented place of an acre size in the corner of the 50 acre dairy farm that used to be the old George Ashby place on the Nicomen Trunk Road east of Mission City. If you ever drive out this way I am easy to find, right on...