Reawakening memory and refusing erasure : Sqilxw legacies of resistance through familial stories of Mary Ann and Mary Terese

Nk’maplqs is unceded Sqilxw territory located at the head of Okanagan Lake, near current-day Vernon, British Columbia. The Sqilxw have consistently practiced their belonging through diverse modes of upholding responsibilities to this place. In the summer of 1867, settler ranchers Thomas Greenhow and Cornelius O’Keefe arrived at Nk’maplqs and began the process of claiming land by severing Sqilxw relations to place and belonging. Shortly after they arrived, both men married Sqilxw women, who they later abandoned to marry White women. Greenhow married Mary Ann (Sqilxw) and they had a daughter together named Mary Terese. In 1967, O’Keefe’s White descendants established the O’Keefe Ranch historic site to preserve their father’s story in public memory. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach that prioritizes Indigenous methodologies and feminist standpoint theory, I utilize storywork circle conversations with Mary Ann’s descendants alongside archival research and place-based methods to answer the question: How have Sqilxw women resisted settler claims to land and memory at Nk’maplqs? Our work brings to light the process of claiming settler place at the local level by demonstrating how Victorian-British settler ideologies of race, class, and gender produced the conditions in which Greenhow and O’Keefe felt empowered to sever their Sqilxw relations and claim unceded land for their cattle empire. Through our conversations, we demonstrate that the erasure of Sqilxw history is a crucial method of constructing settler belonging and Sqilxw unbelonging in order to firmly establish settler power on stolen land. Finally, by tracing acts of resistance and maintaining Sqilxw responsibilities among Mary Ann and Mary Terese’s descendants, this thesis emphasizes their refusal to be forgotten.Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)Graduat