 My name is Gamara. I am of the Crow people from Champaign-Zak First Nation. My English name is Harold Johnson. Longo People's Place, Kodei-Dan-Kai. We started that in 1995 and it is an educational tourism operation. Educating visitors and interested peoples and organizations about the pre-contact history of First Nations people here in the Yukon. It's a First Nation tourism business, so it's open to all people and we've had elders homes come out and book with us and we've had school groups and so it's open to all age groups and it's wheelchair accessible also. The camp itself is like a walk through museum. It would be like taking a walk back in time a thousand years ago. It's how our people lived here off the land with animals like thousands of years ago. You'll see caribou fences, fish traps, deadfall traps, eagle feather gopher snares and you know all the things that our people use utilize to survive in this country. Yeah it's kind of it's been compared to like a living museum and you know because like we try to build everything back to the original sizes and everything. We have winter shelters and in the summer we build summer shelters and smoke houses and underground cash, meat caches, caribou fences. It's all in one area that we take people through on a guided tour explaining the usage and the times people use these things in that. 2019 will be 24 years and next year will be our 25th anniversary. Education because this is the Yukon is probably one of the harshest countries in on the planet and our people survived here for thousands of years and how we survived here has always been my curiosity because I've been raised and raised up here and you know runner trap line and hunting fish and everything else but you know that's all with the convenience of 2019 skadoos, cars, boats, you know rifles and everything else but not so long ago right here our ancestors they've had their own ways of surviving here for thousands of years that was proven by time successful and I was I'm always curious about history and so it became like just a natural curiosity and then I I'm old enough to remember a lot of old elders that didn't go to mission school even and I'd asked talk to them about the old ways and the old stories and once the old people know that you're really interested in it they will share and they'll give you information you know as as they see and then just to share that information and again you know because like this land is so rich with stories and history that predates some contact yeah it's resilience it's you know it's it brings back you know when people because I deal with a lot of school groups also and when I see like young first nations people like especially little woods when they come to the tour and they how they act and everything and you can see they're just so proud of themselves and their history you know when they when they learn how a deadfall works or you know carousel snares or anything yeah you know then they seem like it instills pride in the in the kids and that you know a lot of the barriers are like it's kind of um up to me as an individual whether I succeed or fail or whatever like if there's because as far as I'm concerned um there's no real failure in my work there's various variations of success but there is no failure because you know we are bringing educating people and you know as long as um barriers probably I can see capacity like having young first nations people go into this business of um cultural tourism and that um because the wage competition and you know everything else that um that's um capacity development and I think that would be one of the biggest barriers because the camp is uh kind of like a living museum and it's there but without people it wouldn't be living it would be like any other museum I guess you know a bunch of dead objects in a blind glass almost but it's it's the people that bring the camp to life like interacting with um first nations people because that's what a lot of um my clients want to do they just want to talk to a first nation person about you know their history and hear from them so it's probably that's one of the barriers it's going to be um product development and finding really good enthusiastic people that are educated in the you know the history and everything of of the area but we did do a course last spring in May and um well we hosted we supplied the facilities and um it was through I believe it was I know um Yukon Wilderness Association was part of it and um Yukon First Nation Tourism Association and YTG tourism and the participants stayed at the camp and used the camp as their base and um they ended up taking like a one month course and I think they ended up with like Wilderness First AIDS with Water Rescue um FoodSafe um Superhost and a few others so they're what they're starting to go it's starting to it was a pilot project last year so you know would do more of things like that it would be great but you know like um Aboriginal tourism is a growing industry and it's just going to continue on from here probably lifelong learning and adapting you know because our people had to you know we were our old ways have uh are gone so we've had to adapt and learn new ways really fast and on the fly and our people have been like adapting and and um it's like lifelong learning you're never too old to stop learning you know just down the way here about maybe a kilometer down the road um there's an old trail that comes right through this valley from through the coast all the way through to Huchai and up through probably to Fort Seltard and um along that trail just down here there's a whole group of um rocks probably maybe 10 15 rocks all kind of in a scattered along the trail yep and um the elders took me there in the early 90s before I started the camp because they knew because I was talking to them about the camp and so they're they're helping me that um showing me different things and they took me over there and they said when you bring kids around here take them to this place because this place here is um all these rocks here were people at one time and they were all traveling together and they ran into another person and that one group of people started to harass and bully that other person picking on him and but what they didn't realize that he was a very powerful medicine man and what he did it was he turned them all into stone right there and they've never moved since and the lesson the old people were saying was that that's why you don't want to be a bully because on the trail of life you'll never move from that spot you'll always you know that that's your your existence wow that's pretty powerful um so the land has like lots of stories like that and I like um encourage everyone anyone that to talk to the elders and you know because the love whoever we're we're not we don't have as many elders with that ancient knowledge as we used to and time is not really on our side on this so to add in terms of um gathering knowledge and you know keeping these old stories alive and these old lessons enough when I first started building it in 95 um it took me like from early spring and we opened in I think it was in July of 95 but I got lost in the background building fish traps deadfall brush camps and everything like that and then when I had to come out and strap on an apron and and use a hammer and saw and everything to build a lake the tea and bannock structures and outhouses and things um it was hard to be it was so much better to go back there and just work with the natural world and you know what was there and everything oh yeah as opposed to measuring and cutting and pounding oh I see what you're saying yeah working with skin and you know tying things together and everything wow yeah two different totally different worlds I remember when I first started this um um in 95 I I told an elder then that um I said well I'm relatively a young guy um if I work pretty well around the clock for the next five years I'll have this whole camp built and it will just be a self-runner and I'll go off do something else and he said no you're going to be there rest of your life so I don't know I hope we are we are expanding all time like every year we try to add more to the the back of the pre-contact camp or we're been expanding like last year we have we did a we have a cook shack indoor cook shack people can use now and showers gravity fed showers and this and we had wall tents and this year we're building um some modern traditional shelters nice so we're constantly trying to grow and expand and you know you got too much time invested in it now to quit or do anything else too old to do anything else now