 Hello everybody, it's great to see you virtually. Thank you very much for the invitation to share today. Really looking forward to just sharing our family's story and sharing some of the perspectives from here in Neuchonal Territory with regards to our efforts of moving forward and beyond some of the inherited colonial traumas that many of our people have been forced to endure. So I've titled this presentation, which is a Neuchonal term meaning where we want to be. And through conversations with elders and speakers and knowledge keepers throughout our respective territories here on the west coast of Vancouver Island, this term really resonated as a alternative to the term of decolonialism. Decolonization in my mind brings with it these connotations that are associated with heavily focusing upon colonialism and its impacts, which is necessary. But what it seemed to really be deprived of was the cultural aspects and the ancestral worldviews that go along with the resurgence and the revitalization efforts that are currently happening with regards to decolonial inaction or decolonial action on the ground in our territories. So today's presentation of Hefmach-Sakin is really a snapshot of where my family currently finds ourselves. So we're living here on Mears Island now. So we have 11 children all together, a large family bringing back another tradition amongst our people of having the large family group. Our two oldest are living with us right now. They've moved on to Victoria to pursue their careers and educational paths. But the rest of the children are with us and really bring a certain type of an energy and a uniqueness to these approaches of returning to the land and putting decolonial theory into action. And so I hope that there's benefit for those of you that are viewing and hearing our story a little bit more. And we share these visuals and the story as a means of propelling us forward as a people beyond the trauma. So with that, I'll launch into some of the visual components here and we'll go from there. So where we are is on the western coast of Anchorage Island. And so we're situated just off of Tofino. And this area has become a mecca of a, has been growing exponentially as a result. And it's been this ever-changing and evolving type of an environment. I recall when I was younger that it was a very busy environment with logging and with the fishing industry. And my father was directly involved in those pieces. He emigrated from Finland at an early age. The Finnish side of my family went for a vacation here to the western coast of British Columbia. And they absolutely fell in love with what they saw because it reminded them of Finland. So they picked everything up and moved from where they were located in Ontario after they moved from Finland. And they created a home here. And so these images that I'm sharing here are just to give some context on where we're located. Very much in the very center of Vancouver Island on the western coast. And this is a territory that we find ourselves situated within, which is my roots on my mother's side. And so for the last 17 years as a family, we've been engaging and reconnecting and reestablishing a relationship with our traditional territories. And this experience has come with a lot of trials and tribulations. We stepped out onto the land with the sense of a necessity and urgency and emergence of having to reconnect with our territories in a way that was going to nurture us as Colossus, indigenous people. And to share those teachings immediately with our children who were very young at the time when we first started to come out. And so that experience is looking back in hindsight was a lot easier said than done. There was a lot of ups and downs, a lot of successes and a lot of challenges that we experienced. We would come out periodically through the warmer months, generally from May to September and retreat back to Port Alberni, Tumas, we call it in our language. And we would sit with elders and knowledge keepers in the Alberni Valley and wonderful and amazing people, right? These the resource people that we have and make these connections with with elders and bring food and medicine back from the territory to share with them. Our children were engaged in this process and would go and harvest the foods and medicines that we were learning about with the elders. And then we would go into town and we distribute it to the elders who had so generously shared teachings with us. This was sort of in a way establishing surrogate grandparency. I unfortunately didn't have grandparents who survived to the later stages in my life. I lost my grandparents at a very early age. And the connection of the education and the history and the language and the culture and the spirituality all got severed as a result within my generation. But when we traced the lineage back, we could appreciate that it really is only one generation for my family where we have been that disconnected from our land and from our culture and from our language. And so considering that, we felt that it was really important to bring our family and our children out to the land again and to learn the hard way in some in some regards to shine a light on some of those areas that were really dark for us. And questioning why was that disconnect in place in the first place was one of those first stages that we had to approach. Sitting with elders, sitting with other people around the community, cause and non-cause or indigenous, non-indigenous alike. We would engage in conversations and start to unearth and unpackage what turned out to be intergenerational colonial trauma. And so that's the catch phrase, so to speak, that we can really use as an umbrella type of a term to capture all of these different elements that have influenced, that have acted as barriers or challenges for us as indigenous people and really ultimately have contributed to leading us up to where we are today. And so that in a nutshell is today's presentation, but from our family's eyes and from our perspective of what that feels like at the ground level to be involved and to initiate an experiential type of a decolonial steps forward, at least in our mind. I'll just switch the slide here. So we're here in what's known as Takoist. Interesting history all around for this particular site for countless generations. You know, the way that we used to be, Ko'opit cannot, is, you know, we come from a whaling and a warrior ancestry here on the western coast of Vancouver Island and Neutronal territories, a commonality that exists between all 15 of our nations that are identified today. These 15 nations represent a series of different dialects within our language. They represent different house systems and chief friendships, hereditary chief friendships that have survived and existed in these territories for thousands of years. Our hereditary chiefs that we call Taihi Hotwit can trace their lineage all the way back to the time of creation of human beings. And so it was only in recent times of colonial history where some of those ancient pieces of ancestry, of lineage, of roots as we refer to them, that we started to lose track and focus of how interconnected we truly are to these territories and to one another. So, our common phrases that we hear in our language that remind us of the significance that we are all from one source, that we all trace our roots back and our lineage back to one source. And that's at the time of creation, according to our epistemology and our worldview. And so that legacy and that depth of diversity and of richness and of knowledge and wisdom is something that we are only recently displaced from. And when we start to appreciate that more, that we're only a generation or two, in most cases, vastly separated from that knowledge base of who we are as cause people, then it starts to shift from a sense of urgency and emergency to a sense of hopefulness and of strategizing of moving forward as opposed to being stuck in a certain space and place of colonial trauma. Now, of course, having said that, it's easier said than done to to remove yourself from some of those environments. And we can appreciate that there are many people, many families in our territory still who are reeling from the impacts of colonialism. And it's in real time for them. The abuses and the hardships and the addictions and the displacement and the disconnect are all very deeply rooted still now for a lot of our families. So our effort of returning out to our territory is really designed around clearing a pathway for other families, especially young people to follow and to start to forge their own paths forward as well. And to reemerge as close people in this world today, that builds upon the strength of our ancestors, and also carries forward the resilience that we have manifested through these processes that we've endured through colonialism. So the way that we used to be, as I mentioned, is a deeply spiritual and and land based type of a connection that we have. I have some images here from Edward S. Curtis. And so these were some of the earliest photographs of some of our people in the channel territory. Back then we were known as nutca nutca nutca Indians. Both of those terms actually mean nothing to us, which really references or brings to light the fact that there was very little to no communication happening between mummas need the European people and cause our people until recently, when we self identified as new channels, the people where the mountains meet the sea. And so when we were first encountered, and we first had interactions with Captain Cook and the British and the Spaniards who first arrived in the late 1700s, early 1800s, and the American trading ships also. We were again referred to mistakenly as nutcan Indians nutca from our perspective comes from a term where a beachkeeper went down when Captain Cook arrived. And as our beachkeepers do, instructed them to go to safe harbor. And so the term that would have been used as nutca si etchum nutca si etchum means literally for you to go around the point or go around the bend for safer harbor in this context. So the term nutca derived from that type of a communication that became a miscommunication for 200 years. And in that 200 year process of colonialism, there really was no opportunity for our perspectives and our stories and our realities to really be addressed or to be told in a meaningful way. And now we fast forward to 200 years ahead. And we're we're still picking up those pieces that were shattered and fragmented of who we who we were co-op, it cannot. So I have here a picture of a traditional doctor that we'd call Ushtaq and Ushtaq or spiritual doctors who had powers and abilities to be able to remove spiritual sickness from our people. And we were essentially a very, very healthy people, according to all accounts on both sides of the narrative of colonial history. We lived to very old ages. We were very physically active, and we're noted for being as such. The harvesting that took place in our territories was conducted in a way that, you know, over the last decade or a little more, we become a little bit more cognizantly aware of the 100 mile diet and reducing our impact on, you know, climate change and some of those pieces. So when we reel it even further back is is traditional indigenous people of these lands, our source of food and materials for building and for clothing and for transportation, they were all harvested from the local immediate area. Also, you know, being a wailing people, we engaged in deep spiritual activities that we call Ushtaq of cleansing in the water and asking the spirits for guidance and asking the ancestors for guidance and for strength and for medicines to be able to conduct these really large scale efforts such as a whale hunt so that we could provide for our community, for our families, but also to have enough to be able to trade with neighboring nations. And so we were a very innovative and entrepreneurial people here on the western coast of Anchorage Island and we had deep trade systems that went far inland and all the way up and down the coast to Alaska to California. So our our impact in traditional times was vast and our interconnectedness with many other indigenous people was was great as well. So there's a bit of a misunderstanding when the history books tend to look back at the way that life was for our ancestors. And we're often fed the narrative, especially, you know, when I was going to school, high school, especially that we're savages and he then and that things were extremely difficult and challenging for our people. And yet the stories that are shared with us by our elders that have survived through colonialism, speak to this resilience and this strength and this fortitude that was connected to the natural world around us. And in that interconnectedness with the natural world, we started to have these insights and abilities to be able to be more like how the animals and the birds are responsive to changes and shifts that are happening in the environment. And to be able to be reactive in those types of ways. So the ability that we developed eventually to be able to go out in these small canoes, puppets, as we call them, with a crew of about eight people to harpoon whales was such that it required years and years and years of spiritual conditioning and preparation first in order to be able to accomplish this physical feat of capturing a whale. The relationships that we formed with the whales and with all life as we as we know it speaks to that concept of his show kish tawak that we are all one and interconnected. And that doesn't only mean human beings or cause people that includes it to the whales that includes such to the animals that includes mama to the birds. It includes all of the animals that live in the ocean and the sea. And so all of these life forms and plants to and every all of these different beings that we co inhabit this world with is part of that interconnectedness. And human beings are just one part in that overall aspect of life of teachness as we call it. So just to really quickly go through these stages of being whaling and warring warrior like people were strong, we were proud, we are healthy people. That is the ancestry which we come from. The territories that we live in today, hardly reflect the way that we're our ancestors used to be masterfully crafted into this environment and woven into the fabric that is this land and is this way of life that we are as cause people. So that's a little bit of co-op it can off of the way that we used to be. Now, obviously, things have changed pretty significantly and they share another term of quissa putt mit ten quissa putt mit ten refers to the changes that happen to us. And these changes happen very rapidly over a short period of time. Things happen so quickly that it was very, very difficult for our people to keep pace with the rapid level of change of transformation of hardship that was about to come falling down on us in very significant ways, especially at first. So now we can see that there's physically a lot of difference as what we call mama people who floated on the water, who came to our territories and changed our way of life forever, seemingly from something that was so deeply intact that had a root system like the mycelium like the mushrooms that have this patchwork and this network that that is nestled underneath the forest floor and provides information back and forth in this reciprocal type of a manner that we had. We were a part of that type of intricate system of life. And suddenly it was very disrupted. There was a sever that occurred and it became very, very difficult for us to return to that way of life. And when we traced back the roots of where these changes started and occurred, we can appreciate that at the onset, it started with the arrival of mama, but then it led into trade and we contributed to that trade. It led towards the the presence of disease, smallpox and measles in the mid 1800s while Vancouver Island was establishing itself as a colony. And while British Columbia was establishing itself as a colony, more and more mama people were arriving in our territories. And through this process, disease also made its way on to our shores. And so as smallpox and measles started to spread through our communities, we unfortunately felt a decimation in our population up to 90% of our population was gone in just over a 10 year period in the mid 1800s. Such a huge impact on an orally based culture that's land based that is dependent upon intergenerational components of grandparents raising and teaching grandchildren, those grandchildren going through the elevations of life, contributing as adults and in their families and their houses in the community. And eventually those children become grandparents themselves. And then the reciprocity kicks in and those grandchildren become grandparents who teach their grandchildren. And so that cycle, that's what we call hope. That's our education system. And at the core of it has always been the grandparents and the grandchildren. And so who did we lose the most in that 10 year period of smallpox and measles? It's the most vulnerable portions of our population, even still today are the ones who are most directly impacted with disease. It was the children and the grandparents. And so we noticed then at that particular juncture in history, that that was the falling point from that, that state where we were at to a different level of being that we have found ourselves within. And so, you know, that we can trace the roots to that particular moment in our in our history has caused people. And so from that point on, though, we recognize this seemingly downward spiral of events that that in concurrent fashion manifested as a result of that first wave of epidemics. And so as we were reeling with a huge amount of loss in our families and in our communities, we still managed to find ways to persevere. We still we still survived. We still had our culture and language intact, our spiritual practices, our food harvesting practices. In fact, it wasn't until 1900 when the turning point in population occurred where we then as indigenous people across this province became the minority. So up until that time, indigenous people were still the majority population, despite these hardships that we were experiencing initially. And so by just prior to the 1900s, the British North America Act was passed. Canada was formed as a dominion. This put into place the fiduciary obligation of the federal government to take us as boards under their care. It created the Ban Council system. It created the status card system, and it created the reserve system. And then it also created the residential school system. These were all intentional mechanism sorry, mechanisms that were put in place to to change us to transform us in their in their mindset as of the momentary people to civilize us as well, to Christianize us to make us like all other Canadians. Well, in that process, it became evident that that was not possible, that there was an element that's what we call Seamock Steve, the spirit of our people just would not succumb to a lot of these challenges no matter how hard they were for our people, that we would still find a way to persevere with our identity somewhat intact, albeit fragmented or abused or harmed or traumatized or broken. It still managed to have some form that was intact. And so by this point, by the shift that happened around 1900, it became mandatory for our children to have to attend these schools. They were directly removed from the parents and from the families and from the communities. Many of these processes we have open dialogue about today now and we're very fortunate to live in a time where we can have these direct types of conversations, not only with one another in these types of forums, but for those who have been directly impacted at the kitchen table to have these conversations as well, to have it with their own loved ones, to be able to have this time and space and patience to allow for the healing to occur at a family level, so that a grandparent can share those stories with a grandchild from a place of hurt and harm, but in a way to to protect them with the knowledge that's being passed on. And so, you know, those are really important pieces of the legacy that we continue to move forward with as Indigenous people. I share here some images of a school that was called Christie Residential School, located on that same exact spot with the map that I showed you where we're located today. Christie Residential School started in operation around 1900 and it was in operation and in effect here specifically in this site where I'm living with my family now for almost a hundred years. And the horror stories and the atrocities that were committed at this particular site are reflective of those that have occurred across this country and across this planet with Indigenous peoples being displaced and removed from their families, from their lands, and from the culture. So, the story is the same one. The story is a story of horrific trauma and experiences that no child should ever have had to endure. And again, despite this happening, some of the elders who were present at this particular school were the same elders who sat with us and shared language and shared spiritual teachings and shared cultural teachings and shared history. They still retain those pieces somehow, some way. I'm always amazed by that level of resilience that and I'm also very fortunate that I didn't have to persevere through a similar type of hardship because I think that it takes people of certain strength and fortitude, what we call haksuk, having that strength inside. We also refer to it as nasuk, having that resilience inside these young people, these children, who managed to find that and to to call upon it and to be able to hold on to what they believed and knew was the most important pieces. We are forever in debt and grateful to those people who managed to not only survive these systems, but to carry forward some elements of who we are as koas people and that importance and significance. So, honoring to those people, you know, and not to discredit the numbers and the toll that keeps ticking itself up higher and higher of unmarked graves that are being discovered, but I can appreciate that beyond the numbers and the figures that are being generated, one of the most underlying important pieces is at the ground level for the people who have directly been impacted by these institutes, by these systems of confirmation and change, that those are the people who are dealing with reality day to day and are not looking at those totals and those figures. What they are looking at is the realities that they have been inheriting through this process. There's young people in our communities who don't know any different other than the abuse that they've been born within and that's hurtful in general as koas or indigenous people that we have such a vast number that a disproportionate percentage of our people still are living out these realities today and so that's what really has prompted us to return to a site like this that, you know, we hear these horror stories and when we made the move back here, people were asking us from home and from other places because there were many indigenous people who were shipped all over the place to different residential schools to intentionally displace by large tracks of land from their homeland and from their communities and from their people to break those pieces and so there were many people who attended this particular school and we've heard from a lot and a lot of people still hold a lot of those really hard feelings towards this space and this land and I can appreciate and I understand where that comes from but living here with our family what we grew to understand right away is that the land isn't responsible for those pieces. The land has this legacy of this place where our ancestors once thrived and over the short period of history of just less than a hundred years which is a small piece compared to the overall history of our people that it had become a place of hardship and pain and suffering, yes, and so there's a reality that's there that we're addressing still but the land is healing and the land is open to a different way of providing itself to nurture and to heal and to grow with us as well so we see it in this image in this in this molded image there where things are leveled and cleared and you know these houses that are foreign or constructed in the territory as these places to take our children to and so when we started to move here we first started going off to see Treve where it's another inlet away from here and this is where we find ourselves today so I wrote this term kwa'apaknish kahui and where we are today as opposed to where we were ancestrally and where we were through colonial history here's yet another chapter of who we are as callous people here's another page of you know the story as it moves forward and we're living out that story in real time today so today it looks a lot different here where it used to be Christy residential school this is a shot from outside the forests have taken over again you know there's a lot of the elements the birds and the animals that have come back and returned and now we are returning to the space in a different way in a healing stage in a recovery stage in the stage where we're looking for solutions to move beyond colonial trauma in our own lives and so we come to a place like this not because of the residential school history that was here but because of the ancient history that was buried in that brief time of of colonial history and in the process of removing some of those elements it really kind of brought home and personalized some of what this means in this picture we see the mountain that's right behind us and on the far left of the picture it goes to a point and this point is known as cliff pitch cliff pitch is a place where my mother was born and raised for the first 12 years of her life she was born and raised in this area she was fortunate to not have to go to residential school she instead went to the day school and housed it which in many regards wasn't quite that different from the residential school system but my mother was born and raised here speaking class being raised by her grandparents she was considered to be quite phenomenal because before the age of one she was speaking in full sentences and cost to the elders and they really considered her to be a very remarkable human being and so she carries this energy with her and when she when she lived on the land here she has all these memories of of this life that she lived before everything else changed so to me she embodies and personifies the impacts of colonialism because she was born in a more ancestrally attuned world and then she had to move to the city to Port Alberni to escape being taken into the residential school system my grandparents decided to baptize the children and go move into town off the land in order to protect their children from having to leave them and in many ways that was very successful at least keeping the family together and intact but in other ways it was equally as disrupting and hard for my mother and her siblings her older siblings she also came from a large family but her older siblings were all taken off to residential school she was the cat she was in the middle and from her to every sibling that was younger they all moved to the city they stopped speaking class they stopped speaking our language they had to hide their accent in order to fit in in the public school system and to get work they had to blend in and to conform and to assimilate so the the end outcome wasn't very different and so whether it was attending one of these schools specifically or indirectly there was still a lot of change that was happening during this particular generation so this picture of her she we're sitting at Cliff Beach and she's recalling when she was a young girl herself and she never thought in in those times when she was living here definitely didn't think of the changes that we're about to ensue there were barrels of bluebeats that they had at their home in the site and she recalls that her and her siblings would take the bluebeats and scatter them on the beach as a game for fun well when we found out about this my children were very excited and we went out and they were looking through all the beach rocks and finding bluebeats and my mother she couldn't help but find it somewhat humorous because as a young child she never dreamt that she would be sitting there with her grandchildren one day searching for these same bluebeats that she was playing with as a child on this exact same beach and so that full circle aspect of coming back home and returning back to the land and and and even though there's these generational divides and that the assimilative policies and practices that were put in place by the colonial governments and by those institutions did their work to try to thwart us and to change us and to disconnect us here we still find ourselves back where we started again and I think it's a beautiful analogy of our people in general you know the curiosity and the amazement and the experiences that our children hold is something that they're going to carry with them for the remainder of their lives and that they have this connection with their grandmother who lived in this exact same location before the whole residential school system really kind of blew up in the way that it did or you know and didn't quite have the same that are impact so these little bluebeats we call them chahapia they represent to us that value and that significance of what we hold dear and it's not so much like a monetary type of a value in this case more so that their grandmother was the one who placed these out on the beach for them and now they're finding them this many years this many decades later is part of that resurgence and revitalization and that's what these bluebeats speak to us about they speak to us about reconnecting with ourselves as cause people and reconnecting with our lands as cause people so we take the state of trauma that we found ourselves in we call it colonialism we call it intergenerational trauma we have many different labels in English for these pieces they manifest themselves in different ways in forms of abuse or addiction or other forms of harm that we cause to ourselves or to one another and this perpetuates and manifests out of control and this is where we unfortunately find ourselves generally speaking as indigenous people is finding ways to overcome this trauma and that we have to unpackage these pieces because trauma has become so deeply set in our way of life that it has become normalized it's become familiarized and we have to separate some of those pieces from what has become normal and familiar to reminding ourselves that this was introduced and that it's harmful and so trauma in that sense it starts to take on this form where it looks like family it looks like culture it looks like these different pieces but when we start to identify it for what it truly is then we start to make those steps forward in our healing and recovery from the impacts of trauma so how do we go from a site like this this is one of the classic pictures of Christie residential school and its earlier stages how do we go from that to where we are today without addressing those really important pieces those significant elements of what that school system represents and what it actually truly did to our people here we have a picture of the graveyard that's just behind where I'm situated today and just the fact that a school has a graveyard is telling enough of the level of impact and the level of hardship that was experienced in these types of institutes we're still in the process here of like many of the other sites of the ground penetrating sonar and the different assessments that are going to be done of the property and so we're in that state right now but we also know that we have to keep moving forward that we can't just hold on and wait and delay further we need to we need to prioritize our healing and our recovery in a way that's going to really be meaningful for us and our families this site here known as CACOAS became a family development and treatment center from 1980s to early 2000s so for over 20 years it was a treatment center for families for a six-week program and I participated in that as a counselor with children and youth and for families and I helped with the transition where moved from here on Mears Island to outside of Port Alberni so in the other time that I was here it was a time of transformation of helping the programs and the staff and the CACOAS development center transform and move from here to another location and again I find myself here with my family and we're looking at transforming this landscape once again so we start to tear apart these old structures and it became a campground from 2015 until the onset of the pandemic became known as the Lonecone Hostel and Campground and so what happened is these structures that were inherited from the residential school system became a family development center for a couple of decades and then for nearly one decade became a hostel and a campground where people would come tourists would come and camp in the area and there was this surreal nature to it because there's a graveyard there's these elements of the residential school and yet there's tourists who would come through with their tents and hike the area and there but not really see the full picture and so we were tasked with coming here returning here living here as a family and dismantling some of the old structures and so these pictures show that as we dismantled the hostel and the campground components that were built in 2015 we started to unwrap this history that was there of this old structure that was buried behind these this facade and this aesthetic aspect of this beautiful cedar wood and these cedar logs that were put in place to cover up and as we stripped it apart we started to see the real truth of what these structures were and what they represent and that they've been here for a long time and there's an element to that and an analogy that really speaks to our efforts to pull apart some of the colonial aspects and not just aesthetically cover it up but expose it for what it is and find ways to reuse and salvage what's remaining in a way that is going to work for us and so in a physical manner that's what we've been doing with this site in a physical aspect we've been stripping apart these buildings in anticipation of building a home for ourselves and also building a land-based school so that we can take people and families and young people especially and do language immersion and cultural immersion directly in our territories and so we are taking elements from the old residential school and reusing them in a way that they probably never realized that they were going to be used either just like my mother's story and how she didn't realize that she would be here with her grandchildren one day and so in that process we find ourselves naturally walking this path of what we might refer to as decolonial action he's Mexican where we want to be and leading that path forward in our own way as a family that works for us so I have some pictures of my children and some of the area around here we spend time with them on the land here and they have the opportunity to learn and to grow alongside this natural environment that is re-taking over the space and seeping back in where as before that would have considered to be invasive right and the bushes and the trees and the things would have been cut and leveled now we let it grow wild and free again and that's essentially what we're doing with our children as well they're growing wild and free and the amount of learning that happens for them in this environment as opposed to a closed school environment is tremendous and it really has been the pandemic that has fast-tracked that opportunity for us to return out here full-time we would probably still be in the Albarnia Valley if it was not for the onset of the pandemic and nudging us back out onto the territory full-time so the children they have these opportunities to be in the space to bring their laughter to bring their joy to bring their playfulness and to learn our stories to learn our language to learn our history in a space where it was forbidden and prohibited to do that for some time and that in itself is a healing aspect having the children's laughter having their energy here has changed the space in a way that we could not have done ourselves as adults as just the parents the children do it naturally they know the history of this space they're not afraid of the spirits or the other aspects that may be associated with those hard times what they feel is that reconnect that opportunity to redevelop and grow as a close person again and they embrace that and they nurture that because they know that it's important and they walk that path and lead by example for us so these are some of the elements that we bring back to the space it's not that easy and these are challenging aspects and the work ahead for us is filled with a lot of challenges when we're looking at overcoming colonial traumas and reclaiming our spaces and our territories reclaiming our identity as cause or indigenous people it requires a lot of effort and work and we can appreciate that and it's just like parenting it's just like creating something that is going to share a beautiful message or creating something that is going to go out there and change people's lives or at least share a story that was once silenced or not shared it's going to do all those different things and so being able to share with an audience of very creative creative people such as yourselves is really uplifting to me because those are the forms that we use for communication by our ancestors to tell our stories we are still living our stories and we still need to express those in creative and artistic manners to be able to share with young people especially because the young people are listening the young people are watching and they are needing these types of things to be shared because they weren't for so long we started to develop this protocol this understanding of of how we weren't supposed to talk about certain things and if we did we would be punished or we would be in trouble for it the potlatch system the feasting system that we have was criminalized for 67 years the Indian hospitals were established and removed people who were sick from our communities and families and was treated very much like the residential school system the day school system was also put into place in fact even the public school system has these certain qualities and elements that are still displacing and disconnecting us from our true identity as individuals at least in my mindset and so we've gone through a lot and we have endured a lot but we've also survived so teach swee is our word for survive it literally means to live through teach swee and so we've lived through these elements we have carried forward to the best of our ability the culture the language the spirituality the connection with the food systems the connection with the natural environment we are returning to this way of life where we are dictated again by the sun rising and setting by the tide going down and the tide coming up just the same way that our ancestors did we observed the 13 moons that our ancestors did and so we're breathing life back into these practices not only for ourselves not only for our children but for the rest of our community as well as they navigate their way through these hardships of colonial trauma we are working at creating spaces that will welcome and will host them in those nurturing moments where they want to return to our land where they want to return to the cultural identity of coheseness of being a cost person and we know that that time will come for many of these people and maybe it's the younger people in those families that require that extra nurturing that when they elevate through their stages of life and become a parent or become adults themselves and eventually become grandparents that we can repair that cycle of hajupa that that sever that occurred that it doesn't have to be an impediment or a challenge to us anymore but rather instead we can reclaim our our connection and our role here in our territories and part of that is honoring the truth and the history that has occurred over the recent time and being transparent with one another about the source of colonial trauma and abuse and all those different pieces that have become a common part of our way of life today so these footprints that we set in the sand are new to us and by venturing back out into this territory that was scarred for some time that we are putting an imprint back in place that belongs here that is not foreign that is not harmful and when we do this we are also reminded that there are other beings that have been doing this as well so we see the wolf print and that we're living in this close proximity and this harmony with the natural world and the animals that are around us that they are still here too and that they're wheeling from the scars and the damages of colonialism also that the land is healing that the land is finding a way to reclaim itself in these places and spaces and so we are not alone in this process sometimes we may feel as such as just human beings but if we go back to that concept of Hishokish Tsawak and how we are all one and interconnected and how that doesn't just mean us as human beings but that means all of us as life forms that share these spaces with one another that we are all healing and recovering that we are all together in this and that when we look at the natural environment and we take a step back and allow ourselves to not think from such a rigidly structured human way of thinking of the world around us that has in most ways is quite introduced of thinking that we are in control or that we are the masters of this land when we humble ourselves and we remind ourselves that we are a part of this overall aspect of life then we start to understand more that the natural world is communicating with us U'ushwa'ish we say sometimes it has something to say U'ushwa'ish Mamati sometimes the birds have something to say or U'ushwa'ish Hitakasi sometimes the forest has something to say Naatai all you have to do is listen and that's the teachings that we got from the elders when we were in the city it was a lot harder to be able to do that when we took the big step to come and live out here on the territory in the land that was repairing and recovering and healing itself then we started to really appreciate that in a different way then we started to listen to what the birds are saying and funny enough there's a bird here a crow that we have in is our word for crow there was a cat that used to live here and they used to communicate with each other apparently the crow and the cat the cat was taken away but the crow still was looking for it and communicating and so the crow makes these sounds where it goes meow meow like this and it's sitting up on the trees and it's looking for the cat and it's such a beautiful reminder of the communication that happens from the natural world that that cat that lived here managed to find a way to connect with the crows with the birds and knew that importance of listening and communicating with the natural world that it has something to share and something to say and it constantly is reminding us to listen to pay attention and it's we're doing that to the best of our ability and our children are leading by example with that and so the beauty and the hope and the vision is that in their lifetime that they won't have to go through a lot of these same steps that we've had to just to get back to where we're at just to speak our language just to practice our culture just to harvest our foods or to practice our spirituality that for them it might be naturalized again and that that will become the normal as opposed to the colonial trauma that has become normal and familiar so this is our story and this is where we find ourselves today our goal is to keep moving forward with our children as they branch out and have their own families then that tribe grows and we're very fortunate that we have 11 children all together and so that each of those children will represent their own family units eventually and that those families will be reconnected with the land and that other families who are making similar steps will also find their way back out onto the land and so we find ourselves in this hosting type of a space you know in the strangest of environments a former residential school where we are clearing away for our families and our people to return again and to overcome very directly for some of our people to overcome that colonial trauma to overcome the horrendous nature of that some of their loved ones had to directly experience here in the specific location but we can use it in a different way by re-establishing a relationship with the land again so Cacovas it's known as ancestrally as this place that was a beach for beheading which is it speaks to this very different form of this way of life that existed amongst our ancestors before but those severe levels of punishment or of exercising some sort of action against perpetrators and abusers and people who were causing harm speaks to how significant it was in times past when those types of atrocities were committed to our own people that we were very vigilant about dealing with those types of situations and this site also reminds us of that too in its namesake and so we honor the the significance and the importance behind those pieces as well that we again must approach these issues and the people who are causing the most harm in a vehement manner where we're going to be putting holding them accountable to the actions that are ongoing in our communities and that is a part that speaks to a resurgence of hereditary governance and hereditary systems and leadership that is emerging at the same time as all of this where now we are starting to see and feel and experience those steps forward that are healing in nature that are meant to support and that are meant that they're coming from a place of love and that are also painful because these aren't easy things to address or easy things to talk about when it's directly impacting you within your house and with your family these aren't easy things to address or to talk about when it's happening in real time within your house or within your life and so we hold this space and we hold these cultural teachings and language in a way that young people will be able to gravitate toward something different in their reality in their future and so our children are a model of this True. I'll leave it there because I do want to leave some time for any questions or comments that might emerge through this I appreciate that there was a lot that is shared with this particular story it's an ongoing story we in many regards are learning as we're going forward as well I instruct language with the University of Victoria and with North Island College and I do that from this same site where it used to be forbidden so there's all these different elements that are all playing themselves out in real time for us but I do want to honor the time that we're at I really appreciate the opportunity to share our story today and I really am looking forward to any further conversation that this might spark so thanks again to Connie to Sydney for the gracious invitation to share today True. Nassaf, thank you very much inspiring I'm going to give you a clap even if we can't if you wanted to quit sharing your screen I think Alex can open it up and start inviting people so we can start to see other faces on screen it was so moving and the way that you talk is how often our speakers shared knowledge and it's that idea of being present and really knowing what you're saying so I really appreciate that perspective of bringing slides in and being able to openly communicate about it and with it and in such a deep level just seeing your family it's just such a joy to know that that work is being done I don't know if we lost you oh yeah you're still there okay I notice I'm broke but I'll see if it works okay so I think we have a question so we'll just open it up oh I'm not going to be able to say it's true you say a good right thing I really enjoyed and learning more about my family and our people and our land so that was more of a comment than a question and I think that resonates with everyone is that it's just so incredible your perspective and can you talk about when you're talking and presenting because a lot of people write things down and you know prepare but you are prepared because of you speaking from a place that's within can you add to that a little sure I'm like I love writing I love doing those pieces when I went to school I was madly writing notes all the time and then as I started to get more into a role of public speaking I was referring to my notes all the time and this wasn't too problematic until I started to sit with elders and become more language focused and I got scolded in a very loving way but scolded nonetheless and to put the book away and because I would be reading from the book when elders would be speaking to me because I wanted to make sure I was saying the right thing but I was really reinforced with the teaching that I want to hear you I want to talk directly to you and I want you to I want to know that you're listening to me and that was a really good lesson for me to be led through and so I put the book away and I would just sit and I would talk and I would listen and then suddenly I realized I don't need to refer to the written component that much anymore and this is something that has become a naturalized part of our life too but I would go home and I'd still scribble all my notes down after but in the moment it's really important to be able to be present right and so coming from a source of Tremoc Stee also is one of those pieces where it's easy to talk about things that are very important to you and that are a part of your life so we're sharing this open candid sort of exposure that we don't share that often but it's important to sometimes like in this case I just wanted to like we do gift virtually I'll end up in the mail shortly it's one of Karina Hunt's pieces so we will be sending that off in the mail usually we would hand it over to you if you were in this space so there you go but thank you so much and we hope to have you back definitely and hopefully in person next time with some of your brew and children would be great yes thank you and hi Natanis your wife beside you hi thank you for joining us we really appreciate it and uh we'll connect soon again yeah let go to shachibia so you take care you too take care