profiles of B.C. characters and events for broadcast. She comments that listening to him interview people in his gentle, unhurried way was to be, “transported to another place and time…What I learned from Imbert Orchard: slow down and savour the details.”
Orchard tapped memories like some people tap maple trees. The stories flowed, and the range of experience was remarkable. He asked about places like Port Essington on the Skeena River, a canning community that no longer exists yet is no less a part of the story of British Columbia. He met Joseph Coyle, who moved from New Jersey to Alaska then to Aldermere, near Smithers, where he launched the area’s first newspaper and described how his newsprint was carried into the valley by the legendary packer Cataline. (Coyle went on to invent the egg carton.)
In his collection, we hear first- and second-generation memories of a vast province being opened up by riverboats, railroads and cattle drives. Imbert listened to Annie York of Spuzzum tell him about her grandparents’ recollections of Simon Fraser as he descended the river to Lytton during his search for the mouth of what he thought was
the Columbia River. And he heard her sing the same Aboriginal songs that would have greeted Fraser. He drew out the stories of homesteaders on Read, Hornby and Theodosia Islands, tales of pioneers who followed Aboriginal grease trails and Alexander Mackenzie’s route into the Bella Coola Valley. Orchard teased out details that would otherwise have been lost forever, and in retelling their experiences, the pioneers
re-experienced these events like they happened yesterday.
In 1980, my friend Brad Daisley had a summer job cataloguing the Orchard Collection. Two things stood out for him from that experience. “The first was the misconception that oral history is nothing more than ‘grandpa’s stories.’ Listening to Imbert’s recordings was like crawling inside history and being part of it. These were living people who cried, laughed, who sighed as they recounted not just the extraordinary events that made British Columbia, but also the mundane occurrences, so often forgotten by historians, that were the foundation for those more important events. Conventional history tells you about building the early roads from Vancouver to New Westminster; Imbert’s people make you feel every single wheel rut along the way. And unless you know how much those ruts hurt, you will never know why a new road was built.”
The second lesson was the realization that Orchard’s work was unique in this relatively young province. “Starting his recording in the 1960s allowed Imbert to capture the voices (the actual sounds) of some of B.C.’s earliest European immigrants and of the Aboriginal people who knew of the first contacts… Add to that the incredible quality of Imbert’s recordings and you have one of the best oral history collections in the world.” Jean Barman, one of the province’s most important historians, has called Orchard’s work one of the “two principal sources for getting at the everyday attitudes and actions of everyday people in British Columbia, historically, from their own perspectives.” (James Matthews is the other.) The recordings have been a fundamental component of her ongoing research on British Columbian history.
Although I never met Orchard (he was hired by the CBC the year I was born), we do share a few things in common. We’re both refugees from Ontario who have been smitten by our adopted province—its landscape, its people and a history you can still reach out and touch. We both became public radio broadcasters because we were drawn to this most personal of electronic media, where connections are made solely through the sound of the human voice. And we have both travelled much of the province to record interviews. I’ve been fortunate to meet with people like the late Nisga’a leader James Gosnell, who with arms outstretched boomed that his people had lived in the Nass Valley for thousands of years. I’ve met farmers in the Peace River Valley who worry their land will be swallowed up by the next dam project, and I’ve met scientists who are tracking orca whale families in Johnstone Strait.
Things have changed at CBC since Orchard’s time. We don’t interview the pioneers any longer. We don’t honour stories from our elders as he did. And we don’t send people off to gather interviews that won’t necessarily make it to air. To be sure, some of our longer-form documentary work does capture our times in a compelling way, and more CBC Radio and tv archive material is available through our Web services. Thankfully, we also employ people like archivist Colin Preston who sees great value in the treasure that Imbert Orchard left us, but worries it may be the last such archive.
“Those of us who ply the craft of Sound & Moving Image archiving these days are unlikely to have the challenge and pleasure of preserving and creating access to a contemporary collection as rich and complete as Imbert Orchard’s. It’s a vexing paradox: there is more ‘content’ in the digital world, yet collections of ideas and memories are more fragmented than ever. The operative term in the production world is ‘paralysis by analysis.’ We have more ‘bits’ of information than we can possibly deal with, but all too often we lack the ‘frame’ to place the content within a coherent whole. We can ‘aggregate’ material from all sorts of sources, but what of its provenance, its context?
“That this seminal Orchard Collection was preserved and catalogued so well is a wonderful confluence of happy accident, Orchard’s own diligence and the professionalism of the B.C. Provincial Archives.”
It’s easy to ignore the past. In a province where many people come from elsewhere, it’s no wonder we’re missing that sense of where we’ve come from, and how it informs where we may be going. In this sense, Rob “Lucky” Budd’s efforts to re-ignite interest in these stories is encouraging and exciting. Just like a field that grows vigorously after lying fallow, the stories in Orchard’s collection may generate new interest in the province’s history and its pioneers. Listen to the sound recordings of Orchard’s interviews and resist the urge to regard these voices as quaint and distant. Try to imagine yourself in their time—inside their dreams and struggles. They’re not so different from our own, and they may have lessons for us yet.
Imbert Orchard, CBC radio producer and oral historian, on a field-recording trip in northern B.C., 1971. Photo: I-67699
INTRODUCTION
Imbert Orchard
and the Story of the Province
_____
“I’m surprised how few people know about our
great characters and the people who are semi-historical,
semi-legendary that are in B.C. We’ve got just
as rich a background as any part of this continent
in that way, but we don’t know it yet.”
IMBERT ORCHARD, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH J.J. MCCOLL, JUNE 1973
WHEN THE Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) hired Imbert Orchard in its Vancouver office in 1955, little did the broadcasting company realize what a legacy he would leave. As a regional editor he was responsible for receiving and reading television scripts, but it was a chance encounter with Constance Cox, an elderly Native woman from Hazelton, that changed his future. The day she walked into his office and declared, “The other day I saw a program about the [Klondike] Trail of ’98; I was there!” then proceeded to tell Orchard how the CBC had got the story all wrong, he had no idea that his decision to write her biography would be the genesis of one of the largest oral history collections in the world. Still, he borrowed a tape recorder from his secretary and began to record Cox’s story.
The interview tapes sat around for a few months until Orchard and CBC producer John Edwards
