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Atsemal, the Dragon and the Laoyam Eagles
laoyam-eagles

The skookum story of two communities, a town doctor, a group of high school students and a canoe

It’s a typical summer day in the Coast Mountains near Pemberton. The translucent green water of One Mile Lake is a mirror, reflecting Douglas-fir trees that ring the lake and silver clouds and a gold sun that hang in the sky.

That reflection is broken as a set of paddles dip into the water and a canoe flies across the lake. This is the home of the Laoyam Eagles dragon boat team – a group of high school students between the ages of 13 and 18 from Pemberton and Mount Currie.

The Eagles practice here twice a week – in a canoe – throughout the year. Rain or shine.

But the canoe and the weather are just two of the many challenges that face a dragon boat team from a small town in the mountains. The Pemberton area also faces a number of natural, economic and social challenges.

This is where the wet Coast gives way to the dry Interior. There are tall mountains and flat valleys. Hot summers and cold winters. There is logging and tourism; agriculture and development; oldtimers and newcomers; natives and non-natives.

The 26-member team has just returned home from a gruelling two weeks of dragon boat racing in the U.S. with a boatload of medals – gold from an international competition in Long Beach, Calif., and two silvers from the International Dragon Boat Federation World Championships in Philadelphia, Penn.

The team also won gold in June at the renowned Alcan Dragon Boat Festival in Vancouver.

But this story isn’t necessarily about those achievements. This is about how the Eagles have overcome a set of challenges and helped create a true community out of those seemingly disparate elements.

It’s 1995 and Hugh Fisher, a family physician in Pemberton, is having a chat with one of his patients, Tamsin Miller. Fisher and Miller discuss the new high school in Whistler. Before then students from Whistler were bussed 35 kilometres north every weekday for school.

Pemberton is the kind of place where doctors and their patients talk about these kinds of things, as if they’ve ran into each other at the grocery store or post office.

They wonder what would make Pemberton secondary and its students unique. They decide on a dragon boat team.

"We wanted to choose something completely different that would give the kids their own sense of identity," says Miller, reminiscing about the talk. "But it couldn’t have happened without having Hugh in the community."

Fisher had arrived in town in 1991 fresh from medical school at UBC and a couple of years as an intern in New Zealand.

And if being a doctor wasn’t enough, Fisher was also a four-time Olympian – a kayaker who won gold and bronze medals at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

According to Fisher, he wanted to work in a small town and – as fate would have it – the local doctor had just retired. He was also attracted by the area’s lakes and rivers.

Fisher had a bit of dragon boat experience as well. He was part of a team that won a festival at Expo 86 and then went on to compete at the world championships in Hong Kong.

So with Fisher’s expertise and Miller’s enthusiasm, a Pemberton secondary school dragon boat team was formed.

"It just seemed like a good thing to do," Fisher says in retrospect.

Six kilometres east of Pemberton on Highway 99 is the small village of Mount Currie, home of the Lil’wat First Nation. The Lil’wat people’s traditional territory is a land of high alpine peaks and emerald green rivers.

According to the Lil’wat, the Pemberton-Mount Currie area is rich with tales of Atsemal, a mythical being with supernatural powers also known as the Transformer. They say Atsemal travelled here by canoe via the Fraser River, Harrison Lake and the Lillooet River system.

The Lil’wat have traditionally used dug-out cedar canoes as a tool for transportation and food-gathering.

"There’s a strong link between the Lil’wat and the canoe," says Fisher. "It’s an emblem in their myths and legends."

Laoyam is the Lil’wat word for "devil," the nickname of teams from Pemberton secondary. Eagles is the nickname of teams from the Xit’olacw community school, which is located on the Mount Currie reserve.

Once they reach high school, native kids from Mount Currie can go to Pemberton secondary or stay at Xit’olacw.

The Lil’wat take great pride in the Laoyam Eagles. The July edition of their community newspaper dedicated a quarter of its pages to coverage of the team.

Perhaps the formation of a dragon boat team jarred the spirit of Atsemal the Transformer.

"It definitely reawakened something," says Fisher.

The Eagles entered their first high school race in the summer of 1997. No one knew what to expect. They won.

Later that summer, the team paddled in the Vancouver dragon boat festival. No one knew what to expect. They have won the junior division for the last three consecutive years.

"It’s the most extraordinary phenomenon," Miller says.

Another extraordinary phenomenon is the way the communities of Pemberton and Mount Currie came together after this year’s races in Vancouver.

Fisher says he compared the Eagles’ times with those of other boats and decided to ask if the team could represent Canada at the world championships in Philadelphia.

"The team was performing at a very high level," he reasons. "But I didn’t really expect that we’d actually go."

The main reason was because of cost – $30,000 to be exact.

"Alcan (the main sponsor of the Vancouver festival) couldn’t give us any money," Fisher says. "So we went back to Pemberton hoping we could find some corporate sponsors."

That’s where Pemberton Mayor Elinor Warner and Gerry Mohs come into the picture.

"Gerry came up to me and quietly said ‘We’re going to get you there’ and I thought ‘Yeah, right,’" says Fisher. "Then he called the next day and said he had $30,000.

"I was astounded. I had to pick up my jaw off the floor."

Three local logging companies came forward to guarantee the funds until further money could be raised.

"It just snowballed from there and the money kept rolling in," says Fisher.

The response was overwhelming – more than $80,000 was eventually raised to fly the Eagles to Philly. Almost every business in the community contributed.

Mayor Warner says the team, not the fund-raisers, sold themselves. "They’re a pretty skookum group of kids," she says. "And they’re great ambassadors for Pemberton."

"Even people with no kids on the team were giving us money," Fisher says. "And no one in Pemberton is really very wealthy."

"The kids on the team represent every single type of family in Pemberton: farmers, loggers, newcomers and First Nations," says Miller.

In Philadelphia, the Eagles lost their first race – the 250-metre competition – to the German junior national team by less than 40 centimetres. "That’s a fraction of a canoe stroke," says Fisher.

The team came up short in their next race – the 500-metre competition – to the Germans once again, this time by one-third of a boat length.

So the Laoyam Eagles have two gold and two silver to show for their summer of paddling, just like the sun and clouds that hang in the sky above One Mile Lake. Not too bad for a dragon boat team from a small town in the mountains that practices in a canoe in all kinds of weather.

"I think it’s an amazing story," says Fisher. "Everyone who contributed shares in the success."

According to an ancient Chinese tradition, dragon boat racing began more than 2,000 years ago as a ritual to please the Dragon, a mythical being and symbol of water on the Chinese zodiac calendar.

Races were held during the summer solstice to ensure good crops and to please the Dragon, ruler of the rivers and lakes, clouds and rain.

Today, dragon boat racers carry out a ceremony before each race to honour the spirit of the Dragon – the spirit of coming together and working as a team for a common goal.

That spirit is something the communities of Pemberton and Mount Currie seem to already know. Atsemal the Transformer would be proud.



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