Sharing the harvest

laget hiyt toxwum (Herring to Huckleberries)
by ošil (Betty Wilson) (illustrated by Prashant Miranda)

Winnipeg: Highwater Press, 2025
$24.95 / 978177492118

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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You don’t have to be a grandparent to like this children’s book, but it helped me warmly embrace ošil’s tender story about a little girl and her grandma and grandpa, members of an indigenous family from the Tla’amin Nation on British Columbia’s southwest coast. The story is made more precious for being bilingual. 

Yes, for what is probably the first time ever, parents and grandparents are able to read their children to sleep at night in the Tla’amin language. How? It is through the efforts of Tla’amin teacher and author ošil (Betty Wilson).

ošil lives on BC’s Sunshine Coast and has been a teacher for 25 years. Her lifelong passion has been to revitalize her native language. That quest entails researching and archiving words and phrases. 

The story draws on ošil’s own childhood experiences at harvest time when she and her grandparents would replenish the food supply with fish, clams, and berries. 

We begin by accompanying young ošil and her grandfather to fish for herring and collect their eggs. She “hears seagulls squawking and seals and sea lions braying. They’ve come to feast!” ošil explains how she and her grandfather sink cedar branches into the water to snag the eggs.

We then catch up with her, wearing her cedar bark hat, as she rides along in a dugout canoe while her grandfather catches herring: “He lifts the rake and shakes it so the fish slide off—and it’s raining herring all over me.”  

Next comes the harvest of thimbleberry and salmonberry shoots followed by the berry retrieval. Huckleberries are a favourite for making “thick berry soup” with “freshly baked oven bread.” ošil describes how her grandmother pulls the berry bush down into her basket, “shakes it and gently runs her hands down it. The ripe huckleberries fall right in.”

At this point in this lovely story, I am reminded of my own experiences of picking huckleberries with my mother. She shared ošil’s grandmother’s “good heart and good mind.” I also remember being scared by a black bear during one huckleberry hunt. We were invading the bear’s territory and I learned a lesson: be careful where you pick.

Sharing the harvest is a key theme of the story. Everyone gets involved. “We do it all together.” We move next to clams and littleneck clams that grandma shucks and fries. She then spears sea urchins, reluctantly: “Grandma and grandpa love to eat the sea urchins fresh, but not me—they’re too soft and mushy!”

Little ošil loves camping trips best of all, especially when they involve harvesting adventures to Ahgykson Island when she sleeps tucked in between her grandparents by the open fire.

During the chum salmon run, she and her whole family “smoke and store the salmon so we can eat it all winter long.” ošil’s job is to gather dried ferns to lay salmon on. “We collect more ferns when those ones get slimy,” she says. 

This delightful memory beams to life with the colourful illustrations of Prashant Miranda. He hails from Bengaluru, India, and now travels Canada’s west coast where he “documents his life through his watercolour journals.” Readers can consult a map of the Tla’amin region, read about traditional foods, and benefit from a glossary of terms and pronunciation tips.

Herring to Huckleberries inspires us to be more sharing, community-minded, and aware of nature’s abundance (and the importance of preserving it). The story of little ošil presents parents and grandparents with a wonderfully positive opportunity to reflect on those values and discuss them with children and adults. 

Ron Verzuh is a writer, historian, and great grandpa. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by Nathan Hellner-Mestelman, Dietrich Kalteis, Graeme Menzies, Ron Base and Prudence Emery, Geoff Mynett, John Moore, Tom Langford, Ron Thompson, John Ibbitson (ed.), and Bob McDonald for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
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, 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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