When Larry Grant showed his wife the first two chapters of Reconciling: A Lifelong Struggle to Belong, his new memoir, she said that reading it felt exactly like listening to him speak. Coming from someone who has spent more than a few decades hearing his stories, this wasn’t intended as a compliment — but it’s exactly what Grant and Scott Steedman, his co-author, had been aiming for.
Reconciling is presented as fragments of conversations between Grant and Steedman, most of them rooted in different geographical locations that hold weight in Grant’s life. The first starts on Musqueam Reserve No. 2, where Grant stands on a bank of the stɑl'əw̓, the Fraser River, not too far away from UBC’s Point Grey campus. Grant spent most of his childhood growing up on the reserve, and still lives there today.
Even though Grant didn’t attend UBC as a student until after he had retired from working the trades, he’s now an adjunct professor and the Elder-in-Residence at the First Nations House of Learning. However, he knew the campus long before he started teaching here.
A lot has changed since Grant was a kid. He and his friends would harvest kelp along Wreck Beach to sell to merchants who used it in food or medicine. There was also herring roe, smelt, salmon and oolichan to be caught, sometimes even mussels, clams and crabs — they’re all long gone from the area now. Even the beaches themselves didn’t always look like this. Before clean sand was shipped in to make the area more desirable for swimmers and other beachgoers, it was more of a marshland, with high grasses and diverse wildlife.
“For Larry, the real connection to all this land is the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language,” writes Steedman in Reconciling. “Every little nook and cranny has a hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ name from before contact.” Grant’s mother, Agnes Grant, was one of the last fluent hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speakers and was deeply invested in learning about Musqueam traditional stories and rituals. People came to her for help figuring out the name for a certain plant in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, and she knew the genealogy of the main Musqueam families — with certain hereditary names came certain fishing and hunting privileges, so people would also pay her visits to discuss protocol.
Agnes had no desire to get married, but she caught the attention of Hong Tim Hing, a Chinese immigrant who had paid the head tax and entered Canada under a fake name. After some negotiation, Agnes’s father gave permission for the two to get married. They later had children together, Grant being the second of four.
The Musqueam and Chinese communities became “intertwined” because “Indigenous people were denied integration within the surrounding community, and the Chinese were denied citizenship, denied access to a lot of land,” Grant says in Reconciling. Neither group could enter professions in fields like health care or law; Indigenous people couldn’t even access post-secondary education unless they were pursuing theology. At the time, the local Indian agent — one of several federal bureaucrats who tracked and controlled Indigenous people across Canada until the position’s elimination in the 1960s — wanted the Musqueam to adapt to “Canadian ways” by doing more farming instead of fishing or hunting, and the Chinese immigrants happened to have a background in farming. “So these two marginalized groups—one with a background in farming but no land, the other with land but no tradition or desire to farm it—found one another.”
Racial tensions plagued every aspect of society during Grant’s earlier years. He went to Lord Strathcona, a fairly multicultural school where slurs of all kinds were constantly thrown around. On top of that, he lived the challenges of two distinct communities: on the one hand, his dad’s side was affected by the head tax forced upon Chinese immigrants, and on the other side of the family, he witnessed the effects of residential schools, the Indian Act and the Potlatch ban.
In the eyes of the law, however, Grant wasn’t Indigenous. “Indian” status was patrilineal, and Agnes had married a non-status man. “It was a really odd mindset for a child to understand,” Grant says in the book. “It was like you didn’t belong anywhere. The Canadian government didn’t recognize Chinese as citizens at that time, and didn’t recognize us, other than as bastard, half-breed children of our mother.”
In one way, at least, this was fortunate — it made Grant and his siblings ineligible to attend residential school. Many of Grant’s cousins were sent to St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in Mission City, and Grant’s wife is a residential school survivor as well. Unlike others in his life, Grant was encouraged to embrace his Indigenous ancestry. Agnes was diligent about educating him on his culture and language, and urged him to hold onto it. As he grew up, however — this was at the peak of World War II, when he was surrounded by more pressure than ever to adopt a “Canadian mindset” — he stopped speaking hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓.
In 1998, Grant’s family encouraged him to enroll in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ classes that UBC was developing. “Rediscovering a half-forgotten language after all that time was a strange, complicated experience, one that slowly rebuilt his connection to the far-away world of his mother and her upbringing in another century, when everyone spoke hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and saw life through that lens,” writes Steedman. There were times when the words wouldn’t come to him, but Grant slowly started to remember the language. He was always the oldest in the classroom and wasn’t afraid to correct his younger peers or the professor.
He was eventually asked to co-teach the courses, which he still does to this day alongside linguistics PhD candidate Fiona Campbell. Dr. Patricia Shaw, the founder of UBC’s First Nations and Endangered Languages program, thought Grant’s ancestral knowledge should be appropriately recognized, and she insisted that Grant be hired as an adjunct professor. Grant never even attended university, and instead spent four decades working in the trades as a highly-skilled auto mechanic and longshoreman, among other things. But maybe repairing connections with language and the trades have something in common, at least in Grant’s case: “That’s what he’s done since he was a child, with gutters and furnaces and diesel engines, but also with culture and language: fixing things, helping people out.”
Shaw was absolutely right: Grant’s ancestral knowledge is valuable, not just from a linguistic standpoint, but in how much he remembers — at least a century’s worth of information, experienced firsthand and observed from those before him — about the lands we’re on now, from the shores of Wreck Beach to the streets of Chinatown. Steedman told me that he was stunned by the scope of Grant’s understanding of the land, even the areas he doesn’t see very often. It was even more surprising to him when he considered the fact that Grant had spent the majority of his time on the reserve, somewhat detached from life in the city except for a few periods when he lived in Chinatown.
For Grant, the Musqueam reserve is home, but so is Vancouver’s Chinatown, and so is Sei Moon village in Southern China, where Grant once shared wordless tea with relatives he barely knew existed. These places are all home to him now, but the process of accepting them as such has taken nearly a lifetime.
“When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb: reconciling, a process we’re all going through, Indigenous and settler, immigrant and Canadian-born. ‘I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self,’” writes Steedman. Grant is still living with the hurt and trauma of spending most of his life having his identity stripped away from him, then given back, then taken again. It’s taken a while for him to come to terms with who he is.
“I’ve got to the point where every day I thank my father for coming all this way, and for meeting my mother,” Grant says. He’s had to come to terms with the fact that his own father was a foreigner in his country — and that’s a part of who Grant is, too. “It’s taken me years to accept that, to be able to say it out loud. If you can’t do that, you can’t reconcile,” he says.
“And once you’ve sorted that out, it’s a lifelong journey to maintain it, without judging. Then you can help others.”
