A river’s tale

The Heart of a River 
by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes (illustrated by Nichola Lytle)

Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2024
$25.00 / 9781771606998

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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Imagine that you are water, proposes Eileen Delehanty Pearkes in her children’s book The Heart of a River. Imagine you are the Columbia River as it travels from its Canadian source to the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon. It’s a long swim–2,000 kilometers. 

Now imagine you are a salmon fighting its way upstream to spawn. The salmon’s story involves the river’s 20-million-year history.

Readers soon learn how “volcanoes erupted and lava bubbled” to change the Columbia’s course and how the water carved a path through glaciers and “sculpted the mountain terrain.” And they learn about environmental changes that shaped the river’s course and the level of its flow. 

As she traces the path, Pearkes (who divides her time between California and British Columbia) explains how Coho and Sockeye and Chinook salmon climbed onto the back of the river’s current and moved up in its waters to a birthplace in the Columbia Mountains. 

The Heart of a River is buoyed by the colourful illustrations of Nelson artist Nichola Lytle. She shows wetlands and reed grasses thriving on the shore; songbirds and ducks join the rushing waters that make the music of the river.

Five thousand years pass before the waters meet the Sinixt First Nation. They are the first inhabitants of the river and they live with it in harmony. These Lakes People survive by understanding their environment and the ways of the river. The river explains: “The Sinixt lived the life of river people. They fished for the salmon I carried on the back of my current. They dipped their tightly woven baskets into the clean water at my edges.” They took what they needed and followed the rhythm of the river. The river then recalls, “They stroked the stillness of the Arrow Lakes with their carefully carved paddles and maneuvered their sturgeon-nosed canoes through my currents.”

The storytelling river also remembers two hundred years ago, when it encountered the rough waters of white settlers searching for farm land and the gold and silver that lay hidden in the surrounding mountains: “There on my banks, they lit fires and invited the First People in to trade hides.” Unlike the Sinixt, “They wanted furs, not river food.” 

About 150 years after the “people as pale as river stones” arrived. The river describes how they “devised a way to take my river heart for their own uses, to change how I had flowed for millions of years.”

Then came the dams. “I could not imagine why they would do such a thing to me.” 

With the dams, the river is “interrupted by a prosperity I do not recognize whose spirit is impoverished and silent.” The river laments that the new people know so little “about my purpose, what I was born for.” The river realizes it is tamed but it is hopeful that someday the waters will again flow red with salmon, for it is the “giver of life and freedom.” 

Heart is a welcome companion to A River Captured, Pearkes’s expansive study of the Columbia River. It is a poet’s eye recap of that study replete with the author’s deeply felt connection to the river and to the Sinixt people. It is also a glimpse at the salmon spirit she invokes. 

The book is likely to appeal more to the early teens than youngsters, but the little ones will get excited by the idea of rolling along on the waves of the fourth largest river network in North America. By reading Heart, they will also get a good hit of education to go with the ride. 

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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. He’s recently reviewed books by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Vince R. Ditrich, Aaron Williams, Michel Drouin, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw (Brett D. Huson), Haley Healey, and Keith G. Powell for BCR; he also contributed an essay about trade unionist Harvey Murphy.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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