 My name is Harold LaValley. I'm from Pipox First Nation, 3D4 area. I am First Nation Cree person from Pipox. I studied with the elders for many, many years. I, my area of expertise is traditional medicine, traditional gathering, traditional healing. I guess environmentalist is the word. I'm also a knowledge keeper. I'm a ceremonial person. I do ceremonies here in Pipox, here in Regina, and I share the knowledge that elders have passed on to me with the youth, the other people in general, and youth, and children. I go to schools, I go to university, I go to different conferences that invite me to share, and that is my purpose, I guess. Also in the summertime I do gather. I travel in to BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho for gathering. I start out in June, I finish in October. That the people start looking at our own culture and that it is validated, it's valid. It's not something Hocus Pocus anymore. The way it was tooled to us, at one time we had no culture because it was erased, wiped out. It wasn't valuable at one time to our people, even other people. So the government got what they wanted, but along the way I was in residential school and I went five years. During those five years I was invalidated. I was no longer pure, I was no longer somebody valuable, and I was going to hell. So I didn't give a crap about anything when I got out of school. I lived my life until I was 24 in a very careless way. It didn't matter if I was going to live or die. So that's the way I lived until when I got to 24 I went to my grandmother and I asked her, what's an Indian? So she told me, you will help your grandfather. So I started working with my grandfather for the next 20 years in Sundance Lodges and there I got to understand who I was and what I am. And I started hanging out with all the elders in PIPOC as well as other people to learn as much as I can, to validate what I was when I was a young boy from about maybe, I don't know, from being old enough to stay with my grandmother till I was about maybe 11, 10, 11 years old. I lived the culture. My great grandmother was born in 1885. She spoke no English, very little, and she was my first teacher. She passed away in 1979 and that's when I changed my life around. So I started wanting to know whether I was who I was. Yeah, for me it was a healing journey because I had to unerase the teachings that the church had given me, the values they had taught me. I had to undo that. I had to take that away. I was filled with so much fear because this Christian religion is a fear-based model and it never worked for me because growing up I felt so pure, so clean and so unafraid and then when I went after I left there I was so afraid of everything, you name it, alcohol and drugs were the answer. They took that fear away. Yes, it's very easy for me to help them because I went through it and I took them and explained that, these fears, where they came from, why they have them, or how to undo that. So I worked many into the drills to turn their life around, to help people to understand who we are as First Nations, to help the people to understand our spirituality, what we're made of, how we're connected to Mother Earth. I take medicines out, I show them, talk to them, explain to them, give them a taste, smell, if you want to smell it, and help them to understand what, I guess, you go to a pharmacist today, pharmacy. Well, the majority of those medicines belong to us with it. And all they were was synthesized chemicals, you know, to copy ours. That's what they have now, but the majority of those were ours, one thing. By the people coming back and the people coming forward, by the people that are coming here for help and medicine and traditional healing, by the hospitals that are calling, giving me to go there and work. Yes, today we have a place in the hospital where we can go work, where we can do large ceremonies. We are now being accepted that way. There's many, many people who are still suffering yet in addictions. A lot of that addiction is because of the fears and the fear of these religions and spirituality. I had to overcome my own fears. I had to face those fears that I had and go through the doorways of each fear. And as I look back, I saw that there was not a necessary fear. It wasn't something necessary. So I had to do my own growth and my own digging, my own walking through the doorways where there was a huge amount of fears that were put into brainwashing. Our own First Nation models, based on our spirituality, based on the knowledge that was passed on from generation to generation, that an understanding of Mother Earth, what Mother Earth is, how we relate to Mother Earth, and how we should continue to validate these important teachings that we don't destroy Mother Earth in order to have warmth today. There are many ways of having heat besides destroying Mother Earth. So that's continuing that destruction of waters, forests. You name it, it's being destroyed right now because of the almighty dollar. The traditional medicines that I have today and I carry were one time our food, our spices for our food. So all these healthy plants and medicines that we use, the roots, the leaves, the bark, the trees, the plants we use. At one time we were used and today we have to learn to reuse them again, relearn to use them again because they were healthy. Our people were healthy when that. We didn't have diabetes, we didn't have heart disease, we didn't have stomach problems because of these medicines. And these, what we call medicines were our food staple. A lot of them are food, but we use them for tea, for soups, for food sources. Modern medicine has its place, yes, because of the modern sicknesses that we are creating. But the traditional medicines are where it's at because of our connection with Mother Earth, the spirituality of it. When we gather our medicines, we gather with that medicine knowing that medicine has a spirit like us, the rock has a spirit like us, that we are all related under the creator. Mother Earth, that was our food source, our staple. But now a lot of it is gone. There's no prairie, very little prairie natural where the medicines are. There's very little left because of the farming and the poisoning of the land. The very most important one is how is our land acquired? We should be the richest people in North America, but we are the poorest people, we have nothing. The government won't allow us to have anything. This was all our land one time. It was given to all the immigrants that came. And now all we have is a little piece of land open reserve, which we cannot make a living out of. Our own people teaching our own culture, traditions, values, spirituality. Our own people having our own businesses, having our own businesses, having our own doctors, having our own pharmacies. Our own people having our own car lots. You name it, our people doing it. Them going and get the education. Everyone in the building the education that they need, as well as ours too. First Nations.