Her parents were Mary Ann Longshem, a Secwépemc (Shuswap) woman, and Christopher (Alex) Tappage, a Métis man.

According to the Canadian government's Indian Act, as a woman she lost her native status and membership in her band after marrying a "non-Indian".

[1] Evans lived in a log cabin that had no electricity or running water and made all of her family's clothing[3] as well as baskets and gillnets for fishing.

[4] Tappage's stories were recorded by Jean E. Speare, a non-Indigenous woman she met in the late 1960s at a Native crafts booth in Williams Lake.

Speare recorded Tappage speaking about her life during the time of western settlement, including stories about midwifery, mending fishing nets, smallpox, the Cree practice of stealing Shuswap women,[5] and the impact of alcohol to First Nations people.

[6] In her examination of mid-20th-century First Nations literature, Stephanie McKenzie writes that Speare's transcriptions of the stories, especially in her account of a gold rush stage heist "The Holdup" captured Tappage's use of repetition in her phrasing, a quality that was "suggestive of an older and more refined artform".

[5] In her review of The Days of Augusta, Linda Warley called it a foundational text of the Shuswap literary tradition.

Warley generally praises the work, suggesting further research into Tappage's life, and offers a critique of Speare's level of transparency about her editing process and role as a non-Native editor of a Native narrative.