Spuzzum, British Columbia

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Spuzzum is a tiny speck of a town in British Columbia, Canada. Because it is on the Trans-Canada Highway, approximately 50 km (31 mi) north of the community of Hope, it is often referred to as being "beyond Hope". The village was immortalized in the early 1980s by the band "Six Cylinder" in a song with the refrain "If you haven't been to Spuzzum, you ain't been anywhere."

The name Spuzzum may be a local variant of spatsum, a Chinook Jargon word for the reed used in basket-weaving. One source claims that the name is an Indian word meaning "little flat", and that Spuzzum was the boundary between the Coast Salish and the Interior Salish nations. ^[1]^:162

The town is often used in humorous contexts due to its small size - see for example "The Spuzzum Institute of Technology". Until it burned down at the end of the last century, Spuzzum boasted a single gas station, which served as the hamlet's most diverting roadside landmark. As if to sum up its comic status in local cultural life, both sides of a one-time sign on the Trans-Canada Highway read "You are now leaving Spuzzum".

Spuzzum is also the name of a First Nation of the Nlaka'pamux Nation.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ Akrigg, G.P.V. & Akrigg, Helen B. (1969), 1001 British Columbia Place Names (3rd, 1973 ed.), Vancouver: Discovery Press

[edit] Bibliography

Local elder Annie York's books are classics in the field of ethnobotany. They include:

They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever: Rock Writings in the Stein River Valley of British Columbia (with Chris Arnett and Richard Daly
Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939 with Andrea LaForet