Spuzzum is about the response of an Aboriginal community to events beginning with Simon Fraser's visit in 1808 and ending with the Second World War. Based on a long collaboration between ethnologist Andrea Laforet and the late Annie York, a Nlaka'pamux resident of Spuzzum, this book gives voice and shape to the people who created, and re-created, the life of this community during this time.

Encounters between Spuzzum people and Europeans are explored through narratives, personal memories, and family albums of Spuzzum people, as well as through missionaries' journals, explorers' accounts, and other archival records. In the final chapter Andrea Laforet examines both Nlaka'pamux and European ways of knowing the past in the context of current literature from anthropology, history, and ethnohistory.