 Diolch i gwestr. Be gwsb i yw i sgwr gweld i'n siw fawr o'r ffrif. Stalen ti'n anodd allu. Sleach i'r anodd a'r tan. I gwsb i'r sgwrt o'r myf. Sgwrt o'r nid sef, be'ch mws. W need il you. Siesz dwkydd y cazesyn wanted tog anwau Sara, Catherρα O'r Llyfr report i'r sicr o'r gliu. Caerdydd Caerdydd Caerdydd, ac aedd nhw bysfiddio hyffordd ichi ti gyngor. A'n gwweithio'r niwn, It's called the Canadian map, this place is called Atomsleek. It's called Atomsleek. My old great-great-great-great-grandfathers name. I live here now. I live alone in this house. When you get interviewed and do my best for the people that don't understand our way of life. ac erddwch arnynt i gael y brnoioniau atlawn i frawd, fe yna cael eu cymdeithas yn gweithio'n... a bwyddo'r Gweithgell ac'r Gweithgell Catwm. Rydyn ni wedi'u meddwl ar'r archiologiaethü, ac i'r morynog. Mae'na ddim yn cherddol i gynghwil a chaelio a'r oedwch ac yn y bwrdd yn cyfnodd, So, the ones that are doing research can understand that they can help translate it into their language of speech they can. Because I'm not going to try to make it hard. I'm going to make it so that people can understand. We all understand each other. Well in business and Indians and First Nations and all new words and stuff like that. relying on the help of the people. For me shwopwch yn langa shwopwch'n nation, isle iswopwll wrthelch i. It's more or less the lack of education that people need to know about our culture and that's what's caused a lot of problems in the past, it's not knowing what we knew of our people living here for thousands of years and you know who who should know the land better than the spirits of this land but our own spiritual part will be hard to explain because it's exactly what it is the spirit of spiritual stuff. ac yn enw i twg ffraeg cyntra'r ysgrifedd yma i'r gael maen nhw a fydd yn ymddwl i'r ran iawn. Mae'r rhai ydych yn y gorfodd yn ymddog gyda'r gallu sigl dechrau, maen nhw'n gael, maen nhw'n hynny dyfwynt hynny? Nyngord ei wedi'r llwyddiad, dedwodd i'r wnaeth, While we learn about that, take the mysteries away how these things are passed on into our bodies. That we call life because it feeds our mind. It feeds our spirit, it feeds our bodies. ddim yn ymwneud yn ystod i. Ychydig... if you train in this way, and one of the ways is going into the mountains and trying to get in direct communication with the spirits by fasting and praying and making offerings to the tobacco. ac o amser. ac mae'n fysig ddim yn rhan o'r rhan oherwydd oherwydd mae'n meddwl o'r lleol o'r hanes a'r hollolau ac mae'n meddwl a'r hanes. So now, we're trying to recover that safe place where we did live with, because with it we learn like who needs who, you know, the feyledrons, they don't think they need us, four-legged they don't need us, ones in the water don't need us, medicines and plants and foods really don't need us. It's actually the other way around. We're the ones that need them, because without them we won't last too long, but without us they will flourish and become a paradise again. That's kind of thinking about our mother, which we call our mother, the earth, that nourishes us and gives us all these to continue our future generations. I mentioned once that this person wrote a book and he, I forgot what he called it, a summit wrote when he got rights to a book. He said he had a copyright on it, and it was knowledge from our people. And there was somebody up at Canham Lake that wanted to use some of that, and that guy said, no, I can't, because he had a copyright. So they argued, and there's a lucky uncle, Bill was still alive yet, and I went to him and I had a tea and a coffee, and he finally knew I was there for something. I told him about these two people, and he just said, I don't own the knowledge as an elder or adult anymore. He said that knowledge belongs to the children in the future generations, that's what he told me. So that's what I believe, because if we don't, we stray away from that, we can't even drink the water in the rivers anymore. The springs are drying up in the mountains, things like that, but that's because we strayed away from being the caretakers of our mother, the earth. And that's where a lot of our ceremonies and our songs are around. It's our mother earth that has taken on that responsibility from the Creator to do that for us. Therefore, we have ceremonies about her and songs, and try to remember every day, but when we have something to eat and drink water or breath of air or greet the sun, it's all in the stories of how we did things, not a religion or anything like that. It's just the way it's been done. It's the way it has been. So I try to keep on carrying on some of those things, but with the invasion of 500 last 500 years, they tried to attack that knowledge because they wanted the gold and they wanted the trees and they wanted the land. So they attacked that way of life that we had that protected our home. I say our home to the mother earth because that's the only home we have. Everything that she provides needs the protection because they're being attacked now too, or they have been. They're attacking other places in the world now where there's oil and other places calling them terrorists. Here they call that savages when they wanted our gold. So their history is coming and indigenous people not only here, but I think around the world think that way. There are minorities getting attacked by the ones that want all the resources, make all the donations, make all the donations, start education and stuff like that. Man, it's good to control it. So it's been a struggle for our people. All across the whole, like the burning of all the corn, the beans and the squashes from the Urquhal, Abednachys and all the eastern coast and then they came west and went in prairies and killed all the buffaloes. And then here that salmon are disappearing and those are all our livelihood. It was a plan to scorch the earth where our livelihood was because we resisted so much. People would deny that, but we're the ones on the other end that know all about this. I think all through education would say this aloud like they never meant to educate us in the western schools like residential schools. They were really meant to educate us and put us to work in fields and keep us in grade one, two and three for a long time. And it took the struggles of our people to make that better. George Manuel and a few other sum of our relatives to struggle to include us in trying to make these things better. Not only for us but for everyone because everyone drinks the water, breathes the air, makes homes of the trees. I've seen a poster one time and said, what are you going to do if you cut the last tree down and cut the last fish? It's kind of put something in the mind of people, you know, that's what's happening. All the pollution, all through our people through the lake, the Shoeswap lakes and the Adams lake. We can't drink the water directly out of the lakes in the river city morning on what more evidence they need than something terribly wrong. And our knowledge and the knowledge that we have are to save those things. You know, why did they want to not hear us? That's a question. If they don't hear their stories about Mother Earth, they may be forced to, you know, by nature itself, like the volcanoes and tsunamis and big, huge fires. Some of the old people say, let them leave them alone. He said, when the volcano was in the earthquakes and that, stop. That's when you should really start worrying because that's how the earth helps itself, you know, with these. That's how the oxygen and the other gases are made or through these things, you know. If you stop those things, you'll probably end up looking like Mars and no volcanoes or anything. So it's kind of a common sense thing, you know, it's not real. We put really Latin words or Greek words to explain those things. Our way of life was, when we all spoke our own language, was one-on-one, you know. We spoke directly to the children. It was a way of life that when we named the mountain, you know, we expected to go up there to see what that mountain was. Or we named the lake and we expected to go up there and visit that lake. Or we named the moose and expected them to know it. Directly what a moose was, or a deer, or a trout, or a salmon, or medicine, you know. Because when you come up with a gene, a lot of those things are a way of life. That's how we're supposed to live. It's not something that we store in a cabinet or something like that. This is where you're supposed to get stored here and here and in the spirit, you know, those three things. Because those are the things that keep your body alive. The spirit, the mind, and the heart. And they all need food. And this knowledge shows you where to get the food to feed those things, whether it's in the mind, in the heart, in the spirit, you know, from Mother Earth. Take it back to the creation stories. I could some of our stories go back. How could anybody imagine nowadays in this modern world if you tell them there was nothing at one time? They can't have even hardly imagined that, you know, because we're living on Earth that's physical now, and the sun, the stars, other humans, animals. But our stories go back to that when we called them the Old One. He was by himself, you know. And one story I heard was when he started creating things, he had an helper and he was a coyote. He started creating and he did it with a song. He found that the Earth one time was just a hot rock. Not a round one. It was like those meteors you see up now. We got pictures of it all, like that, before they had water on it. It was just a hot rock, a creator put water on it and things started to happen. It started to grow and things started adjusting itself. Including us, we weren't the first. The plants and the birds and four-legged fish. Then us, that's why when we say prayers we call them grandmothers or grandfathers. Because they're the ones that taught them how to treat them. Because if we didn't know how, we wouldn't have survived. Most they went through the hang on to it, you know. It wasn't easy. Many, many ones I really honour in the last 500 years were the ones that died trying to keep on to this knowledge, you know. Those are my heroes. In my lifetime the ones that are hanging on are very few. By people that want to resource us and want to continue to pollute in a huge way, can get a permit from somewhere more than the ones that are trying to protect the earth, you know, and protect the future generations. And that I want my grandchildren to great grandchildren, great, great, great. Everybody's to hang on to some of the things that knowledge has been passed on about our mother to the earth and our ancestors' spirits, especially the ones that gave their lives for us. Because if they didn't, I don't think we would be here if they didn't, you know, if they didn't jump in a pond. But that's a big, big question because I have a great relative that passed away and that's what he was worried about, what his own children he was worried about. Did I teach him enough? Did I do enough for them? Now he's gone. And I wonder about it too because some of the things I went through, I'm still rebuilding my own life among my own children, you know, but the battle I have for Mother Earth that goes on, but there's a lot of other things that I haven't finished yet with my own immediate family and make it one again, you know, one mind, one heart, one spirit. Because it's real. There's all kinds of thinking just on our reserve alone, you know. There's Presbyterians, there's Catholics, there's intellects, there's spiritual, there's different groups of people that haven't one mind, one heart and spirit, you know, and it causes them not to be united for the water, you know, because the semi-politics gets involved and the trees, the very things we live on, you know, that I see becoming extinct, like up here on the plateau where they clear cut, all the spring water I said, oh, aren't drying up. The place on the plateau up here used to be about 300 dearies to come down the creek in Nicol Chwya, and winter down here in the valley down towards Squilax. But now there's probably about 50 or 40 deer that come down, might be even less. So those are the things in that creek down here, that Nicol Chwya creek that runs into the river. From the clear cutting up on the plateau is a snow builds up, seven or eight or nine feet, and then when the sun comes out and starts getting warm, it all melts at once, and then the creek fills up, Nicol Chwya creek fills up and floods, and the trout that used to spawn there in the salmon, can't spawn now in a pile of rocks in that creek because when it floods, all the sand in the gravel gets washed away and just leaves a pile of rocks. Those things, that's just one area, there's hundreds of them up on there on this lake. Maybe that's why I'm the last one living here. People write stories about people who are the last one, you know? And here I'm one, you know? This used to be a big village where chiefs were born, medicine people. Makes me pretty sad sometimes, you know? And I think about like what my relatives said, you know, everybody's gone from here, and moved them down to the little shoe shop to chase Skolgane, because they said it was convenient, not for us, but for the government, to cluster us and take us off the land. Well, one thing, because I live here, and this is one of the largest salmon spawning grounds in the world, I want to know, they call a salmon caravan to try and save the salmon and spread knowledge of the salmon, you know, how we lived with them for centuries. Actually, just the story about the salmon alone is almost the whole way of life. Like even before you go, when it's time for them to come back up here and spawn, it's time for us to catch them and fish. And before you do that, you've got to prepare yourself. It's not only about the salmon, it's about a way of life that they teach us. You prepare yourself spiritually, the mind and the heart to purify yourself before you go and catch them. You know, because they are something pure, and they've been feeding all of our body for centuries, so we purify ourselves and have a huge ceremony to prepare ourselves, make ourselves pure before we catch them. I'm making it short, and then when we do catch the first one, we hold them up and be very, very thankful to the Creator for doing that for us, and we actually communicate with that salmon while we're holding them and thanking Him or her for doing that. And before she loses life, we put her back into the water and explain that to go tell your relatives that we are still trying to do what we have been instructed, long, long time ago, so that we can live together in their cycle, help our cycle. And then while doing our prior part, we help the cycle. So when we catch that salmon, it teaches us a great deal of things again. It teaches us to be thankful, it teaches us about sharing, it teaches us about bringing the family together and doing things together when you start cutting it up to eat, and to share, and to pray, and to have your good mind. So when we say, and it's not only us, it's the bears, it's the trees in the bush that the salmon share themselves with for fertilizer, for food for the bears and the eagles, a whole other number of things, the thankfulness. So that part teaches us spiritually, teaches us physically how we share in our families and how to work together and know the knowledge of its travels up the rivers, know the knowledge of how there's thousands of creeks and rivers that pour into one river, a big river down the way down to the ocean. How does that salmon know how to come up here? So that's knowledge that may be a mystery until you start doing the ceremonies and preparing ourselves to deal with some things that... The creator makes things that are pure. Now they're not as pure as they were at one time. There's pollution, you know, and there's some big giant companies that can catch those salmon by the thousands of tons, not just thousands of salmon, but thousands of tons, and they have no... they don't pray, you know, and they don't offer anything for them, you know. And there are very few that can reach out of it. The people that catch salmon still traditionally along the river get accused of overfishing. You know, silly in us, there are cultures upside down that the ones that say that, because us that carry on fishing, we do the sharing, but the ones that catch thousands of tons, I don't think they do much sharing. So their culture is kind of upside down. You know, like our culture at one time, the chief was on the bottom, and he held up everything up above, you know, the people, laws and stuff like that. But the salmon are all the way around their chiefs on top and everything is on the bottom. So it's totally almost opposite from our culture. Like people really need things in their culture. They have prices go up and they have to pay more. In our culture, when people started really need things, we try and help each other. Culturally anyway, I think some of our people have got caught up in the other. That's one of the reasons I keep trying to keep up what the elders have taught us, because living that way with sharing and making offerings and praying to the Creator is a very beautiful life that brings happiness and gives, takes away the doubts and stuff like that about where we're going to end up. So some of those things with me and a few of us hang on to them because we don't do things because we hate somebody or hate something. We do things because we love our people. We love this Mother Earth. We love what it provides for us, you know. Just to wake up in the sun shining and reaching up and saying, it doesn't help to be a long prayer and to recognize that we're in a creation that we've got to live with, you know. A human being is not the center of creation. It's just a very small part of it. Probably the weakest because we depend on every other thing. The rest don't, I don't depend on us much. It's us that depend on them, you know. That's the way we've got to think now, I think, because some of the places where things, 40% of the creatures are extinct now and it's not getting better. For people that may want to argue with me or people like me, let's sit down with them, you know, and talk about things. They probably know just as much, but a lot of them, it's hard to do because they've got jobs. That system has got a way of burning you at the stake. They've literally burned people at the stake one time, but now they've got another way. They either call you crazy or, you know, tree hunkers or, you know, they know how to cut you off now. Troublemaker, some of us know their language. Oh, they can do that. At least I am going to stick to my guns and try and do my best. I went through a lot of pain sometimes thinking a few years ago that we're all alone trying to do this, but now more people are starting to listen a bit to our elders, because things are becoming more visible about the damage to our mother, the earth, you know. One of the greatest ones you can notice, like even when you leave here and go down the river, you know, you'll find that you can't drink out of it. Then you go through a camel, it stinks down there. It's not hard to see what elders are saying. It's not far away, you know. It's here. There's cancer. There's diabetes, you know. There's people with something wrong on how they think nowadays. There's all kinds of sicknesses that are, you know. Scientists aren't really lying. They're not just telling the whole story. It's a lot of them. It's for jobs, you know. They end up snapping things for people. If they were doing what they learned, it would be a good place. That's a hard one, because somewhere people are getting swallowed up by jobs and pipelines and mining, because that's only livelihood they can pay for their food and houses now. And that's all they know, you know, through education, like the school that I work in, the camel system. It's just built a whole bigger, big building that can change people for a big machinery and stuff like that. So it's going to... There are some indigenisation programs going on in universities now. Not only in our territory, but in New Zealand and Australia and maybe the United States and Canada. I think that's where some of the knowledge need to incorporate. Incorporate it, not just only as intelligence, but to go out and look at these places that have been mined already, you know. It's just a pile of rocks. You've got to go out to, like in Pittsburgh, I went there one time in a big steel mill, shut down now, an old man smoking a cigarette there, sitting there, and I said, where did all the workers go? This place was hustling and bustling about 50, 60 years ago. He was sitting out on a stoop, a house, a skinny dog walking by with his tail wagging. Nobody around, all the Europeans that came to work in that big mill had gone. He asked me where I was from. I said, well, I'm out from out west in British Columbia. He said, he just kind of chuckled. He said, that's probably where the people work, and then this mill went where the resources are. So they're right on the edge of the continent now, you know. The resources are getting less and less. So education's going to start turning about saving our planet, I think. We can talk about saving the eagles and saving the grizzly bears and saving salmon, but in the end, the one we're really saving is us. Because without those others, I think we'll last too long. You know, nobody's really taking the real pictures of the ocean and the rivers. Like some of the greatest rivers on the earth are on this continent, and they're undrinkable right from start to finish some of them. You know, is there any words that need to be said about that? I don't know why there's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people living along those rivers, and they're not saying anything. I can't hear them anyway, maybe a few are. Everybody, you know, I think it's got to make a stand sometime because the things I've been told by people that are passed away and they died when they were in their late 90s and hundreds, hundreds years old. They told me stuff like, there's not much time, not much time the way things are. All the stuff is speeding up and at one time inventions took a long time, you know, from one invention or other, but nowadays this thing here, you're going to have to buy a new one next year, and this one will stop working. It's the same with aspirants, you know, pain pills, they only work for seven or eight hours, you know, and they take the healing power out of it so you keep on buying it. And that's a whole plan with people that become rich. They said, there's a way that when they scrambled around a few years ago, all the billionaires, trillionaires, everybody will call them that, making everything, scramming around trying to save themselves, there's one guy I don't know what his name was. He looked down. He looked at these things, all these things, the cars, lights, all the things that... He said, those are the people that keep us rich. The ones that buy stuff. So what he did, I think what he did, was when he didn't hurt them to invest a few trillion is to get the engines going again. But for how long? Economists didn't know how they saved themselves. So some of the old people did. I don't know. How long is that? How long is that going to last? I'm not really a doomsday speaker or anything like that, but I think everybody's got to take a look at it. This mill over here, Adams Lake Lumber, a non-native said to you're working there. He used to make fun of us. Oh, he didn't forget a job. Darn lazy, staying home, the unwell fare. One time that mill shut down in three or four years. All the people that had their big toys or boats and trailers and quads, big four by four in their houses, they started selling them because they couldn't make any money for one. We didn't say anything to them. We didn't say, told you so. I thought they don't know what was going on. The reason it shut down is that mill was made to saw big logs. They ran out of those big logs and they had to change that mill so it cut little ones. Make chips. Now there's people working there that only work three days a week. I'm not a fortune teller or anything like that, but what does that say? I worked in a place called Rock Creek. The logs were as high as that doorway there. One or two logs on a log and truck them. Like a deer-deer and stuff like that, like a fish down a creek, all disappear. People here even, this was a big community one time and I'm only one left, you know. What does that say? I'm not trying to say poor and being or anything. That's the way I'm saying it, that's the way it is. What's going to happen when I'm gone? Nobody, I don't think. I hope, I hope to be people anyway. But they got all leased out to non-natives now. One of the best pieces of land right by the water, you know. We moved the Indians out of here and moved them down in Chasen. That's a plan for us I guess was. Anyway, Westman disappeared a few years ago. That was their plan. We survived. People don't like to believe that, but look it up. One thing about the non-native, they document a lot of stuff. All the plans the government has had for us, you know, taking the Indian out of the body or whatever it is. All that stuff they had planned for us. Not working. In fact, they got to start doing something about their own. That's not going down since 1969 when the famous words of the eagle that's landed, something that's happening. The reason our old people knew a lot of these prophecies or whatever you want to call it. A lot of the things that's happening today have been done before. It's been empire after empire. A lot of them have collapsed. I think this one is because they're doing exactly as Julius did. As they're using the same laws, the same colonial laws. You know Julius? Yes. Those were colonial laws he had on this big empire. You know, habeas corpus, jurisdiction. They're here in the courts. Sounds intelligent. I guess when you use Roman or Greek words to us, it's more intelligent because it belongs to this land. Yes. That's what we got to share, to start sharing with each other. My final thoughts is, I guess, one time a couple of uncles and grandies when we started speaking publicly a little bit. One of the uncles said he didn't speak English, but he said, oh, you guys speak eloquently. You say good words and you know a lot of things, all the pains and things went through. In the end, what are we going to do? I think we've talked enough about all the pains and the hurts and therapies and whatnot. It's time to flip things over and start healing those things and joining together because all the stuff that are coming to our people, trying to, I don't know, they think they're trying to help us on reconciliation stuff. Someday, when we come in time, we won't be able to rely on anybody, anybody else, except ourselves. Because who knows what we went through, except us, you know. Not too many people in the world have gone through the things we have, and we're coming out of it. You know that picture where there's a good native guy on a horse and he's hanging down, hanging his vanishing native or whatever it's called. I told the one artist, we're healing strong now, folks. We're starting to learn some of our culture. The next artist that makes that painting is famous is the one that's going to be standing up and sitting up straight because we're healing and we're coming back strong. You know, our knowledge is coming and we're going to realize that we're the only ones that we can depend on. It's near. Maybe it is here and we just can't see it yet because we've been too dependent on it. We've been disillusioned by a better way too long now. You know, we're coming out of that. I look to you even, you know. I'd rather get help from you than somebody had to give me a pillow.