 I'd just like to greet you in my language so you can hear the sound of it. I said, it's a really great morning to be here. And I'm a little bit nervous. I've been a really remote part of the Okanagan on the Pentech and Indian Reservation and I was born on the Reservation at home. And I grew up in a family that practiced hunting, gathering, tradition on the land. And I'm still immersed in that family. The role that I have in my family is as an archivist, recorder of history and knowledge keeper. By everyone in my family, even the ones that are older than me, I have older brothers and sisters who have different responsibilities. But my role has always been the historian and the family and the knowledge keeper and the family. So that has been impressed on me all my life. Subsequently, my upbringing and training is different than some of my sisters and brothers. We live in the same house but we have a different set of teachers. My name is the sound and sparkle of a small brook rushing along. Behind and surrounding us, embracing us, is our grandmother. Our grandmother who gifts us with the beautiful berries and the precious cedar baskets that take a year to make. I've been a resister and an activist. That was my grandmother Christine and she refused to speak English to us. She spoke some English but it was very, I guess, limited English. When we visited her, she always reprimanded us that we tried to use any English words and made sure that we just spoke Okanagan with her and all her family was like that. So for us, it was a really good thing. The communication in the home was always Okanagan. This is a book by Morning Dove whose in our language name was Hamismus. She published this novel in 1927. It's the first Native American novel that was published in North America. She was a great influence on my life. She influenced my thinking as I was mentioning with the books, primarily the book of stories. It was only later that I read this novel of hers, but primarily the book of the Okanagan stories. This just came out recently. This is her biography. So there's a photograph of her at around the time that she died. This is a photograph of her when she was younger. Right out of university, I became very interested in traveling around with the elders. As an interpreter, I started realizing these guys know more about history than anybody else in this valley. At that point, they identified education as a priority for us as a younger generation at that time to do as much research as we could to be able to provide the substantive information about who we were, how we used our land, and what our rights were in relation to that. It was a wonderful time. School districts were involved in developing that first research phase, and that's how I became involved. Growing up in a community that was also fractionalized by colonization, fractionalized in many ways in terms of the community itself gave me some insights and observations that I think could be valuable. One of the observations that I have is in regard to human relationship and the relationship that we have with each other and how that relationship we have with each other impacts what we do to the land. In other words, what we do to each other and how we look at each other, how we interact with each other is one of the reasons when things are happening to the land. Knog and our understanding of the land is that it's not just that we're part of the land. It's not just that we're part of the vast system that operates on the land, but that the land is us. In our language, the word for our bodies contains the word for land. So when I say, means that not only is my ability to think and to dream present always in that word, but the last part of the word means the land. So that in my mind, every time I say that word and refer to myself as I realize that I'm from the land. I'm saying that I'm from the land and that my body is the land. Every storyteller in the Okanagan, at least I won't speak for anywhere outside of the Okanagan, but in the Okanagan the storytelling tradition is very strong, mainly because of the kind of permaculturing that was practiced here as opposed to being nomadic or being an agricultural sedentary population. We moved around a lot, but we were semi-permanent. So a lot of the storytelling tradition is an art form that can be carried with you from community to community, from place to place. And so the tradition is old and it was in this area very much the art form that people practiced and took great pride in in terms of the skill as a storyteller. One of the things that happens in the storytelling process, when it's passed on from one individual to another, what I'm seeing inside when I'm recounting the stories of, say, my grandmother Josephine Armstrong, is I see her and I see her gestures and I hear her voice and it's like her presence becomes real again in real space in my mind. I can see her, I can see her body, her face, I can even see where she's sitting and she's the one talking and I'm simply listening to her and reiterating what she's saying or re-saying what she's saying in the storytelling. So that rhythm gets passed on through the sound of the words and the gestures and the techniques of the storyteller and that is very evident in a long line of storytellers. You can hear the different ways the storytelling is done. Another group of people that are what we call the visionaries in our community, the creative people, the artists, the writers, the performers, whose responsibility is to bring in that perspective into the community that tells everyone that there are innovations, that there are creative approaches, that there are new ways we can look at things and that we should always make room for newness because we need to be creative whenever we come up against something that we can't resolve, that we haven't come up against before. And so those people are always brought forward to look for new ways to discuss and bring forward creative ideas. So all four of those components together then can participate in a decision-making process. When we include that perspective of land, we include the perspective of human relationship. One of the things that happens is that community changes. People in the community change. Something happens inside where the material things don't have a lot of meaning, where material wealth and securing that and being fearful and being frightened about not having those things to sustain you, they start to lose their power, they start to lose their impact when you start realizing that it's people and community that are there to sustain you and that that's the most secure thing in the world. When you feel that and you're immersed in that and the fear is gone, the fear starts to leave you when that happens and you're imbued with the hope with the hope that others that surround you in your community can provide that. That's the kind of work that I'm involved in at Analkan Center and in terms of the work with the community, I'm talking about all of the community. I'm talking about all of the people who live in the Okanagan and all of the people that we reach outside of that, not just the indigenous people, because at this time in our lives, what our elders have said is that unless we can Okanaganize those people in their thinking, we're all in danger in the Okanagan. In a community, in the extended family in which our people organize themselves in a very different way, I think, than I see happening outside of that. I'm a jingle dress dancer and I'm more of a traditional jingle dress dancer, so there's contemporary style and traditional style and what it means is I just keep my feet closer to the ground. One of the things that struck me very, when I was very young in grade school, when I first read some of her poetry, I didn't realize she was native, but I remember, and this I can recall, I had no one had said to me that she was native, but I remember going back to her poems and rereading them and I remember the sound and the rhythm and the images, the images that were tied directly to the sound and rhythm and spoke the images that spoke about the sounds and spoke about the rhythm rather than using rhythm to enhance the words. And I thought, wow, you know, at that age I was thinking that's how our people speak. It sounds like how we use language and it was about maybe in grade seven or eight and I realized that Pauline Johnson was a native person. Even closer to home, Harry Robinson's stories from Milk and Ogreban have appeared in book form. Did you know Harry Robinson? I was really deeply influenced by Harry and as a teacher I think probably he was one of my main teachers and his method of storytelling and his philosophy and his outlook on life had a profound effect on me. Education was identified as a priority by our elders, our chiefs and our leaders and the mandate was created to develop an Indian education center, an Okanagan Indian education center and to be able to resource all the bands for educational purposes right from ground zero up to 100 years old. So education in its broadest sense and so that's what this center is. It's registered as the Okanagan Indian Educational Resource Society and as a resource society a number of programs had to be developed in which that resourcing happens and it takes place. So the writing school became one of the ways that we resource the breaking the silence I guess in terms of our stories, our voice, our positions, our thinking and our perspective. Another part of the process requires people to look at relationships. There are people who stand up and say it's my responsibility to see how is this going to, how is this decision going to impact people? How is it going to impact the children? What are the children's needs? What are the elders' needs? What are the mother's needs? What are the working people's needs? And ask those questions and that's their responsibility. Part of our community stands up and says what are the things that need to be built? What are the things that need to be implemented? How much is it going to cost? And all of those things. Those people in that part who are speakers and doers in that part are given the responsibility of continuously reminding our people that there are actions that are going to cause a number of different things later on down the road if we overuse this or if we take too much of that. And so those people are continuously asked to stand up to provide that information. The ecosystem there is very, very fragile. At this time in the Okanagan, it's one of the most damaged areas and ecosystems in Canada because of its fragility. There are many conservationists and environmentalists really concerned about the species that are disappearing, the endangered species in the Okanagan. And that's been difficult because we grew up loving the land. We grew up loving each other on the land and loving each plant and each species is the way we love our brothers and sisters. And that's the point that I wanted to talk mostly about. That doesn't just happen as an intellectual process. That doesn't just happen as a process of needing to gather food and needing to sustain your bodies for its health. That happens as a result of how we interact with each other in our families and our family units and in our extended family units and in our communities, the networks that we make outward from that to other people who surround us on the land, that those networks are extremely important parts of what happens to the land and how we interact with the land. And so my thinking is, in terms of the work that I have to do is I have to try to find a way to interpret some of that and interpret some of that to bring reconciliation to members of my community on my land in order to bring health back to the land. That I cannot do that responsibly if I cannot create that kind of understanding that have given me life and given my grandmother's life and my great-great-grandmother's life for many, many generations, that our people have perfected a way of interacting with each other when they go out to the land that is respectful to the land and respectful to each other but also fulfills some needs that we have that are human in terms of interaction and relationship to each other. What our grandparents have said is that the land feeds you but we feed the land as well. And what she meant by that was saying to us that in our language we give our bodies back to the land in a really physical way but we also do other things to the land. We live on the land and we use the land and we can impact the land, we can destroy the land or we can love the land and it can love us back. One of the things I started to observe and understand was that how we make decisions and how we choose to look at each other as people, as equals, as human beings and how we approach each other is fundamental to how we interact with the land. In the most basic sense our use of the land relates to our need for food, for shelter, for clothing and beyond that when we look at society when we look at how society is constructed those are the things that we need those are the things that we need in order to live and breathe every day but besides that we need pleasure we need to be loved we need to have the support of our community and the love and the care that our people that surround us give us if those two ideas and ideals can work together then we can see how either you can impact the land in a negative way or in a positive way and I think if you look around at how the land has been impacted by what I call a western culture one of the things that I see is that there's an overuse of the resources and there's a lack of access for some of the people in other words there are some people with a right to have more and some people with no right and there are some people that cannot access the things that they need even for their basic lives and when you look at the idea of democracy there's something profoundly wrong with the idea of a hierarchical system in which some people can exist within the idea that it's okay to have people sitting next to you or next door to you and not have the access and not have the ability to do the same things that you have that seems to me a profoundly basic principle in our community that everyone in a community needs to have the same access to the basics and the same access to the enjoyment and pleasure of life so one of the things that I was looking at was the idea of the construct of how we make decisions I looked at the Okanagan decision making process in its traditional sense and from our point of view the minority voice is the most important voice to consider in terms of the things that are going wrong the things that we're not looking after the things that we're not doing and the things that we're not being responsible toward and the things that we're being aggressive about in terms of trying to overlook and shove them into the corner or sweep them under the carpet or shove them out the door one of the things our leaders said in the Four Societies process that we use is that if you do that one of the things that's going to happen is the conflict that that creates in your community is going to create a breakdown that's going to endanger all of us that's going to endanger how we use how we cooperate how we use the community as a process how we think of ourselves as a cooperative unit a harmonious unit a unit that knows how to work together and enjoys working together and enjoys being together and loves one another if that happens then the things that we need to do on an everyday basis for meeting all of our needs start to break apart and I can see that I can see how that's working today and I understand that if we think about looking at the minority if we use the process to think about well why is that why is that there is a minority is it about poverty is it about economics is it about societal access what are those minorities about and if we think about ourselves as human beings with minds the creativity that we have should be able to take into consideration how we meet the needs of those minorities how we find every possible mechanism that we can to bring that minority group into balance with the rest of the majority and so that process that we call Anouk and we ask us to do that and tells us that if we can't do that in our community that our humanity is at stake that our intelligence is at stake that we can't call ourselves Okanagan if we can't do that if we can't provide for the weak and the sick and the hungry and the old and the people who do not have the skills and in the same way when we approach the decision making process one component of it is reserved for the land we have one component in which we have the people who are called land speakers we call them Suhqaqalula in our language and I've been fortunate to be trained and brought up as a land speaker in my community different than other communities we have people who are trained as a part of a family system to be a speaker for the children to be a speaker for the mothers to be a speaker for the elders to be a speaker for the medicine people to be a speaker for the land to be a speaker for the water to be a speaker for all of these different components that make up our existence my part has been to to be trained by some elders to think about the land no matter what the decision is the smallest decision it's my responsibility to stand up and say how is it going to impact the land how is it going to impact our food how is it going to impact our water how is it going to impact my children my grandchildren my great-grandchildren what's the land going to look like at that time it sounds very simple and it seems to be an overwhelming task a huge task and some days it feels like that some days it seems to be something that one person has no power against but then when I think about in my own simple track my aunt was talking to me the other day and she was saying where are you headed off to now and I said oh I'm going to this Bioneers conference and she said oh what is that about so I did my best to explain it to her and she said that's a really good thing she said how did you manage to do that and I said I'm not really sure but I think I managed to do that by talking about some of the things that just seem every day and simple to us that seem to make sense to us each strangers loved ones of ours that we brought into our community that are now part of my family and part of my extended community for me inside of me they feel the same as my aunt to me and I think that's how we need to relate to each other I think that's how we need to be with each other in order for us to be the way we need to be on the land so that those things that are material that seem to overwhelm us in their demand in terms of saying I'm your security I'm your security blanket you need a new car you need lots of money you need to do this and do that in terms of the power that starts to dissipate when we understand that the power is us that we are our security on the land and that that's what's going to sustain us when I first started trying to find information about the Okanagan people and my culture, my language and realized that it just wasn't there it was absent even in the Okanagan curriculum I never found anything about the Okanagan people let alone the interior Salish people I knew my history orally from my parents but I had no way of knowing whether that was written anywhere but I did know that it was wrong and I did realize that there wasn't a lot of research first phase of that research was really related to information that could be turned into curriculum for in-school programs once that research is done we produce a K-12 curriculum the second phase of the research involved looking at how do we look at our own communities in terms of what they need to recover and how they need to apply their own values their own systems an organized way of doing things the third phase of our research really is concentrated around all of the revitalization of language, revitalization of culture which means how can they be applied in a contemporary sense and maintain the values of philosophy one of the values that have carried with me in the core of what inspires and fuels my inquisitiveness about the seal culture is that I realize that there's some real problems the kind of philosophy and value toward the land and the things that live on it is not the same as the seal people's values around all the living things which are as valuable as we are as valuable as the next person so how we interact with them is incredibly important and I think that there may be ways in which the seal mind and the seal philosophy can provide a knowledgeable and wise input into that ongoing social dialogue we've come to that time where we need to include as many pieces of knowledge from as many diverse corners of humanity in order to solve this problem that seems not solvable the book of poetry is dedicated to women who are relatives of mine, grandmothers one of them is Christine Joseph my paternal grandmother and the other one is Morning Dove Christine Quintascott who was one of my mother's great aunts and the other woman was my own aunt Margaret Stilkaya who was one of my teachers and confidant from the time I was a young girl until she left us and my mother's mother my maternal world renewal song nothing was good winds blew and grasses died I thought I was pitied so I longed for a whole time song I danced for it in dearskins I made thought with paint in red lines from little finger to the left shoulder I silent listening by dying grasses began hearing at dawn a new fire is lighted the finished world is here formed in mind patches it is come the song for rain and green and good I sit by talking grasses now with nothing more to make a good world of than thought paint and dance talk in lines but song colors pour over my world in my good time still goes on there was always that segregation we were allotted a place in the loft where no one else went except us children from the school maybe they had a reason for this but I always in my mind out there was that segregation right from the very beginning even in the church came out to the reserve so we all got to meet him and because I was hanging around George a lot and hanging around the people who were involved with the play because I was just so fascinated with it and he introduced me to Dan George at the time and of course I was starstruck I thought he was just great when I neither understood nor welcomed this new way of life I was called lazy when I tried to rule my people I was stripped of my authority my nation was ignored in your history technical we were less important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that raged the plains the last thing that I wanted to share with you is that one of the things that made a lot of sense to me was my father's words the words that he used were the word for insanity which for us has a meaning that says that too many people are talking about different things rather than people talking about the same thing and one of the things that I looked at in regards to that is that there does seem to be an insanity because of what's missing inside of us in terms of our humanity with each other and that when we start to take care of that that the land has an effect on us in that sense one of the things that I learned is that when we take our young people and we plant in the work that we do to gather seeds or to gather the indigenous foods and we started a program to replant habitat of indigenous foods for some of the endangered species we've got about 10,000 plants going now to replant indigenous plants both for ourselves and sustainment and for the endangered species what we find is that when we take the people out and all kinds of community members coming out from the non-native community from the multicultural societies from the senior people's communities and they just love going out there to gather the seeds and pot them and replant habitat and one of the things that we found is that our young people the young people who are having such a difficult time all young people are having such a difficult time that it heals them being with people out there on the land it's not just the work of collecting the seeds people who are in farming know this that it's not just the work of collecting but it's being with people that community and communing with each other and how the land communes its spirit to you heals people in an incredibly profound way we need to think about how we can do more of that concept of an auk in a literal translation would mean something like dropping maybe an idea through like a drop of water through the top of the head and absorbing it by osmosis so it's something like that that's the literal image that you could conjure in your mind and its meaning actually is referring to a process that we use so that we would be continuously guided by that principle in terms of making peace with others and seeking to be understood and to give understanding continuously and thereby changing the world through that and I believe in that principle I believe it is the strongest principle for acquiring knowledge and change in the world and I know that students and people who come here they go back and they will change their communities they will change this country I have no doubt of that it's a strong principle I wanted to thank you for listening to me and I hope my words can be a contribution in some way to all of the good works and all of the good thinking that you're all about and I love you all, thank you