By Celestine Aleck (Sahiltiniye) of Snuneymuxw First Nation

I heard this story from Mel Good. He used to love to sit with the elders, and he would learn stories and names from all over.

Long ago in Musqueam two men from the village went down to the rock bed on the Fraser River to fish for sturgeon.

They were very hungry when they caught the first sturgeon and pulled it up. The men started a fire and gutted the sturgeon. While they were gutting the fish, the men complained about how the sturgeon looked, and they threw the remains in the bushes along the riverbed.

They cooked the meat on the rock bed and ate it right away. But the way they disrespected the sturgeon insulted all of the Sturgeon People, so much so that they all left the Fraser River. As time went by, the Musqueam people recognized that sturgeons were no longer in the river and they knew that something was wrong.

So the Musqueam gathered for a meeting to decide what it is they could do. At the meeting, Sea Wolf stood up and told them that they had insulted the Sturgeon People for the way they had prepared and cooked the sturgeon on the flat rockbed. Sea Wolf told them that they had to find a way to ask for forgiveness.

The people decided to send a beautiful princess down into the river to gift to the Sturgeon People. The princess had a goat fur rope wrapped around her as she went down into the river. The Sturgeon People accepted the Princess and turned her into one of their own kind and they came back to the river.

But the princess’s mother was so sad for the loss of her daughter that she would cry at the rockbed day after day, and one day as she was crying, the princess came up out of the water. She told her mother that she was happy living with the Sturgeon People and had asked her mother to no longer cry for her.

To this day, when you gut a sturgeon they have a white rope in their stomachs shaped like the goat rope that the Musqueams had made so long ago that was wrapped around the princess.