 Hello, my name is Blair Stonechild, and I'm a long-time employee of First Nations University. I started here in 1976, so I've been around for a while. I'm a member of the Muscopetian Soto First Nation, but I spent a lot of my time growing up off reserve, but I did also attend the Capella Union Residential School from the time that I was in kindergarten up to grade nine. So I definitely know what the residential schools are about, and I know what the whole process of, I guess you might say indoctrination is, the whole idea of abuse and the idea that I kind of have started to look at closely, which is the phenomenon of spiritual abuse that has been identified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Well, I actually have five books so far, but I'll talk about the ones that have to do with spirituality. The first one is this one. It's called The Knowledge Seeker Embracing Indigenous Spirituality, which came out in 2016. And I can talk a bit more about it, but essentially it is a book which was done, obviously, with the support and the information from elders. Over a dozen elders that I contacted with using proper protocol, and they were actually quite happy to help me in terms of developing this book. As a matter of fact, a number of them told me that it really needed to be written, and they said it was important, so to me this was a very important contribution to an area which is not being adequately researched or written about. And so I feel that this is certainly a unique and an important contribution, because to me spirituality is really foundational to everything. It's foundational to education. Certainly in our traditional culture it was foundational. The idea of spirituality appreciating the notion of spirit and spirituality was really the cornerstone of all of the culture and knowledge systems, as far as I understand. This book is actually just coming out now in March of 2020, and it's called Lost of Indigenous Eden and the Fall of Spirituality. This book is a follow-up of sorts, The Knowledge Seeker. After I had written The Knowledge Seeker, many people, of course, appreciated what I had done. It said that it would help them to understand a lot about the nature of Indigenous spirituality and what it says and what it means. But there were others who questioned whether it was still relevant today, what was the relevance of Indigenous spirituality more, so that motivated me to write this book, which talks about, I guess you might say, sort of like the place of Indigenous spirituality in terms of history and the way that it's still relevant today. Now, it's something to me that has been neglected inadvertently, I'd say. I know when the First Nations first started at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, much of our emphasis was on things like history, for example, understanding the history of treaties and recovering the rights, and things like language, obviously, language recovery, cultural information. The part about spirituality was sort of not really focused on that much. Some of the elders back then, I think, maybe felt that it wasn't the right time. Maybe there was some fear that it maybe didn't fit into a university setting, or maybe there was some fear that it might be appropriated or something to that effect. But now we're 40 years into the history of First Nations University, and things are changing. The elders that I've worked with here have told me that the time is right, it's important now to be able to explain the ideas and what the practices mean in terms of Indigenous spirituality. A lot of it is because of the concern of off-reserve, especially the youth who are, you know, the elders say that they're losing the direction, and as a result they're becoming involved in things like drugs and gangs and so on and so forth. And so part of the thing, of course, is that spirituality traditionally was something which was a very personal thing, and it often involved a lot of protocol, a long time learning with elders to get the spiritual information and a lot of involvement in ceremonies. But times are changing, obviously, and our culture and our approach needs to change. That's what the elders are telling me. They're saying that it's okay to talk about these things in English, it's okay to write both of them in books. As a matter of fact, some elders have been very adamant that these books get done as quickly as possible. And so it is, in my mind, at least from our traditional point of view, it's foundational because we consider ourselves to be very spiritual beings. We really, as the elders explained it to me, we are actually spirit beings first, and we're spirit beings on a physical journey. And so we come from spirit, and we return to spirit. In our traditional indigenous lifestyles, in our education system, we were taught about our identity as spirit beings. We were taught that every created thing had its own spirit, and that there are spirit beings, spirit helpers, there's the ancestors, there's the creator. And that they are not only real forces but that they could be communicated with. And this was, to me, this was the source of our wisdom and our grounding in traditional culture whereas today we live in what's called a secular world, we live in what's called the age of reason. And because of this, people don't really take, I guess you might say, a very serious consideration of spirituality. In fact, the age of reason pretty well explicitly rules out things having to do with spirit or spirituality. It's all boils down to the so-called rational mind, right, that using our brains and our reason we can solve all the problems ourselves, which I think it's becoming more and more evident that that simply is not working. Well, it's been a long journey for me. I mean, I've been working here at First Nations University for over 40 years. I came out of the residential school system and like most students who, survivors who came out of that system, we're pretty well indoctrinated. We experienced intense, I don't know if you want to call it brainwashing, but certainly exposure to Christianity, all the prayers and rosaries and masses and confessions and you name it, that was an integral part of the residential school system. And I would say that back in the 50s and 60s when I was at residential school, indigenous spirituality was largely still an underground phenomenon. As a matter of fact, one time the Indian Act actually outlawed things like ceremonies. So it became a question of as I began working at the First Nations University and listening to the elders, I started to become aware that there's a much different attitude towards all these areas and aspects of spirituality and religion. And I began to question, I guess I had always sort of never been totally happy with what I'd heard in residential school. There always seemed to be something that was either missing or not quite meaningful to me as a person trying to understand what life was about and how you could apply these things in a meaningful way. And so I spent a lot of, had the wonderful opportunity to spend a lot of time listening to elders over the years and I can't actually say that I fully understood what they were saying right off the bat, it's kind of in little sort of little dribs and drabs that I started to appreciate fully what they were saying and to get a bigger picture of what it was all about. One of the first elders I met when I started working at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College was a gentleman by the name of Ernest Atousis and he used to tell me something that always stuck in the back of my mind, he said, you know, we First Nations people used to live in the Garden of Eden and he said, we never abuse the gifts of the Creator. For some reason, that always stuck in the back of my mind and then many other elders and here I, well, I guess I should mention that background 2005, maybe even a bit later I was sort of casting around for research as you know, we're supposed to do and you know I had sort of experience that always been interested in, you know, sort of trying to understand other parts of consciousness, you know, like the, you know, whether it's spirituality and dreams and all that type of thing. So I had an opportunity to begin a research project on spirituality and so I started asking the elders, I interviewed about a dozen elders and I'd ask them simple questions like, where do we come from? You know, what's our purpose for living? What, you know, what are the important things that, you know, we're supposed to be doing as, you know, as human beings? And so this produced a wonderful set of interviews and information and in particular I really appreciate in particular the contribution of Elder Danny Mosco who is, you know, very well-loved elder who worked here at First Nations University for 25 years and definitely very accomplished philosopher, I guess you might say, in terms of learning the, you know, the spiritual philosophy that he learned from a very young age and, you know, he's kept in the oral tradition and when I interviewed him he just laid out an entire body, a systematic body of knowledge which really helped me to understand what the whole thing was about and just the way he laid it out was so simple. And in the Knowledge Seeker I begin by talking about what I talk about the great principle which is, you know, sort of what's in some ways, you know, the most basic thing you have to know and he explained to me as a quote, a quote to it and I know not everybody kind of interprets a quote to him the same way but to me the way he explained it basically is that, you know, if you ever hope to understand it in spirituality you have to understand this principle about us being spirit beings on a physical journey and if you don't sort of grasp that part of it about taking the spiritual part of being seriously and treating it with respect and recognizing, you know, its existence and relevance you can't really, you ought to make much progress beyond that so that was the first thing I, you know, in terms of trying to interpret this teaching I call it the great principle. The second one is the question of, you know, what are we supposed to, why are we here, you know, what are we supposed to be achieving in life and so that I interpret as Mia Wachewan and it's the, it's also can be referred to as a great law or the great law and it's the essentially the great law of relationships. Essentially it says that when we come to physical, to experience the physical world essentially we're here to learn. We wanted to learn. Crater gave us permission to come into the earth and, you know, again, you know, these are kind of perhaps controversial concepts but, you know, I understand that from what the elders have told me that, you know, we are not beings who evolve from some sort of primordial soup or we're not sort of evolved intelligent apes but rather we're spirit beings and we, you know, we came to earth as spirit beings and, you know, we sort of came to, you know, to inhabit these hominid bodies which are here and this is what I guess you might say has become our vehicles for experiencing this physical life and so we essentially, you know, I guess we're not perfect spirits where, you know, we have, you know, we have to learn how to live within these bodies, we need to learn how to control them, we need to learn how to control the emotions that, you know, that are there and we need to learn how to live harmoniously with the natural life but we also need to learn how to obviously learn how to live harmoniously between ourselves as humans but also with the spirit world, you know, we need to respect the spirit beings that are there whether they're our ancestors or, you know, the guardian spirits of nature or whether it's, you know, other grandfather spirits that we need to, you know, we need to respect them and, you know, keep grounded by through ceremonies, for example, ceremonies which, you know, gave us that ability to, you know, to keep it connected with them and so this gives us, you know, from the indigenous point of view, this gives us a sense of being, it gives us a sense of purpose and, you know, it gives us a sense of spiritual integrity and there are many other things which are laid out in terms of our spiritual philosophy, things like, you know, the seven virtues which actually were laws, right, they weren't just virtues, they were actually laws that people were expected to live up to, things like the seven spiritual disciplines, you know, fasting and meditation and dreams and visions and teaching and learning and parenting and all of these types of things that, you know, are ways in which we, you know, learn how to live fulfilling lives. And so, yeah, these things I laid out in the Knowledge Seeker book. Well, the Knowledge Seeker book is, you know, from all I've heard is really been received well because, you know, as you mentioned, it's, you know, sort of another way, I guess, to articulate what the elders are saying and, you know, like the elders traditionally, you know, they were not trained to be classroom teachers, you know, they were, you know, trained to sort of, you know, to impart knowledge, as people sought it and to provide good examples and, you know, to instruct, you know, to, you know, to help instruct the young and all that type of thing. But, you know, in the type of world we live in, you know, people expect and demand that these things we kind of be given to them under two covers, right? And so that's more or less what I've done. And, you know, I've heard that, you know, it's well received. I know that social work is used in my book a lot. And I've heard that teachers have really appreciated it. And so, you know, it is, it's, I think, a very useful curriculum material. It certainly can be used at the university level. I think it's also appropriate for the high school level. And I think it would be a good resource for, for example, teachers who are, you know, like at the elementary level, let's say, and they want, you know, some sort of curriculum material. And of course, it's very accessible generally to the general public. You know, I've had, you know, people just almost have random sort of pick it up and, you know, tell me that, you know, they found it very, very useful. And I've gotten good ratings on Amazon, so what can you say, right? Well, I think, as I said, it feels very important what I would consider to be a gap in indigenous studies and in the study of indigenous knowledge generally. And I know even at universities, there is this gap. You know, and I know at some universities there is still hesitation to speak about indigenous spirituality fully because in some cases actually, you know, from what I understand, the elders aren't quite comfortable yet, you know, especially in the bigger universities that, you know, perhaps this knowledge will be received respectively or, you know, if it's received it might not be used properly. I don't know. But here, I guess we're, you know, we're lucky because it's a First Nations controlled institution and we have a lot of elders and that type of thing. So, and generally in terms of what you might call indigenous knowledge and philosophy, people still tend to interpret it in many ways. I know some people when they talk about indigenous knowledge, like they like to talk about things like traditional ecological knowledge, stuff like that, which has to do with, you know, for example, our relationship with the land, you know, how we use plants traditionally or, you know, medicines and nothing. But, you know, that's not the full picture, you know. That's not the full picture, the full picture. The, you know, the full picture, the basic picture is what I was talking about. It's this whole idea of spirit and spirituality. And, you know, it's, to me, as I've, for example, did my research for the loss of indigenous Eden, it becomes very evident what's happened over the last, particularly 200 years, this loss of appreciation for spirituality and it's not an accident. It's something which has been very intentional on the part of, you know, like the forces that have been at work colonizing the world and creating sort of like the, you know, the kind of economic and social system we have. And so, you know, as I look at this phenomenon and, you know, like in writing the loss of indigenous Eden book, I was asking myself the question, you know, where did this divergence, where did this difference originate? You know, where did it happen? Where did it happen that all of a sudden, you know, we had indigenous cultures that were very spiritual and then all of a sudden, you know, we have the persecution of indigenous people, right? We have the disrespect for indigenous spirituality, all of that. So, where did that happen? And that was, you know, that was a central question, actually, for me when I did the research. And so, in doing that, I found myself having to go further and further back. And I, of course, you know, looked at residential schools and, you know, it's obvious that, you know, that conflict existed. If you go back even further to contact with North America, it's very, very clear that there was this difference in ideology that existed between, you know, those who have so-called discovered North American indigenous peoples. And so, I ended up looking at the old world and going further and further back, looking at what was happening. And finally, I came to what was called the rise of civilization 6,000 years ago. And I was reading the, you know, the books. I had about a half a dozen books on it. And they all basically said the same thing. It's very clear. And, you know, the answer to my question actually was provided very simply by what was explained as the definition of civilization. And it is said that civilization arose when humanity decided to rise up and conquer nature. So I, right away, it was, that was my aha moment. You know, I said, that's not what indigenous people are at all and believe. This is, this would be heresy in indigenous circles, right? Because, you know, we viewed, you know, the creation as the gifts of the Creator, gifts of the Creator, it sustains us. You know, we were told, you know, that, you know, these, all of the creative beings are our spiritual altos. And, you know, when we pray, we talk about them as our relatives. And, you know, we're to live harmoniously with them. We're, we're to be stewards. You know, we have no right to dominate them because we're so dependent on them. You know, we should be approaching our existence here with humility and thankfulness. And, you know, nature should not be scary. It's not something that's out to get us. But that's the, that's the premise of civilization. And so, you know, civilization results in, you know, the domination of nature, the, you know, hoarding of plants and animals. And along with that, you get the phenomenon of basically empire-building, right? You find the, you know, the origins of, of wars, for example, occur in Sumeria and, and, you know, Middle East and other places. And as time goes on, you see this ideology of what I called human-centeredness and, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the grasping for increasing amounts of wealth and power and competition over resources. You see it happening with the so-called great civilization, right? Like the Greeks and Romans and, and, you know, it goes on and on. And so the, you know, it, it, it becomes, in my book, The Loss of Indigenous Eden, I basically talk about it as a conflict between what I, you know, what was an indigenous ideology, which existed from the dawn of humankind, which would be about 200,000 years ago. Then all of a sudden, 6,000 years ago, with the rise of civilization, all of a sudden, you have this break from indigenous, indigenous, you know, ways of seeing things. And I, I like to quote the Bible where, you know, God said, you know, you can eat of any, you can then eat of any tree of the, in the Garden of Eden, except for one, which is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And the next line is interesting. It says, for if you do so, you will surely die. And so I interpreted that as, you know, the civilization, basically, people putting themselves, deciding that they have this special permission of sorts to, you know, to make themselves the top of the heap, so to speak. And, you know, that's created a system in which civilization is seen as the pinnacle of human achievement. But, you know, what does it do to everything else in the world? What does it do to, you know, to the natural world, right? It simply treats them as objects to be, you know, to be exploited and controlled and, you know, reduced to, to wealth or whatever resources. And so that's, to me, is the picture of why, as, as I charted in my book, as time goes on, indigenous people all over the world are, are subjugated, their lands and territories are taken. And, you know, they're, you know, they're reduced to being, you know, almost irrelevant elements of the world population. But as I point out in my research, it's only really been since about the 1820s that non-indigenous people became the world, majority of world population. So it's not, you know, it's only, it's really, you know, a civil, so-called civilization normally started with very small numbers. And it took a lot of time to develop. But all of a sudden, you know, over the last 200 years, it's really just sort of exploded as, as a dominant ideology. But I mean, in terms of the vast sweep of humanity and time, it's, it's, it's really nothing, you know. And I point out as well that the average mammalian species that are closest to us should last for a million years. And we've been here 200,000 years so far. And, you know, we have another 800,000 ago, if we're gonna kind of, you know, be as successful in surviving as other mammalian species. And so, you know, you kind of, you know, when you look at that time frame, it really, you know, it really makes you question what course is best. And as I sometimes say, who has the better survival strategy? Is it the guy with leather and feathers, or is it the guy, you know, sitting in his, his Cadillac smoking a cigar? Well, I think that, you know, in Saskatchewan, we have a large indigenous population. We have, you know, we've had a lot of advancements in indigenous education, although it's still, you know, far from where it should be. We have, of course, First Nations University of Canada, which is a unique institution, post-secondary institution, one of the very few indigenous controlled, what you're called, universities, where, you know, we really can, you know, do research our own way in a, you know, in a way which respects spiritual protocols and which respects our values and, you know, like incorporates an appreciation of spirituality. And so, yeah, you know, we, we do have a lot of very, very good indigenous scholars in Saskatchewan. And I think it's, you know, the onus is upon us to, you know, really show that, you know, when we do this research and when we're right and when we produce knowledge, that it is respectful of our cultural and spiritual inheritance or heritage, and that, you know, when we express it, we do it in a way in which it really does show that we're not simply, you know, parroting, for example, the research methods and the, whatever you want to call the intellectual paradigms of Western universities. And, you know, the elders tell us that, you know, there's problems coming. And even non-indigenous scholars say that, you know, things are, you know, sort of evolving in a way in which we need to have a new paradigm, a new way of kind of approaching things. And so, you know, I think it's important for us to, you know, when we do this type of work to really bring the spirituality first and foremost as the foundation of our knowledge, because, you know, I do believe that it was foundational knowledge. I always, my understanding of the way we traditionally obtain knowledge is one of the first things we did is we prayed and we went into ceremonies when we were asking these questions. And, you know, we, you know, we had these, we carried out these interrogations or inquiries in a very spiritual way. And I sometimes point to chemistry as an example of how this can make a difference. So, you know, if you are a student going, wanting to have a chemistry degree, or you simply take the classes, you study the textbooks, memorize the formulas, pass your exams, and you got a chemistry degree and go and work and do different things. You can make, you know, new chemicals, right? You can make new pharmaceuticals and all kind of stuff. But that's not indigenous chemistry. To me, indigenous chemistry involves spiritual component. If you have spiritual, if you have indigenous chemistry, you know, what I basically say is you wouldn't have chemicals that would be destroying the environment. You know, you wouldn't have chemicals that, that, you know, are simply there, that nobody really knows what, what they do or that are simply there to make money. That's not indigenous chemistry. Indigenous chemistry is respectful and it's, it's, it's done with wisdom. And so that's, that's the missing element. You know, we need to find a way to, you know, incorporate the spirituality, which I like to refer to as a higher form of intelligence back into our research and our, our writing and our publication. Otherwise, we're basically just doing the same thing that, that all the other scholars are doing right. We're just producing information. You know, sure, we, you know, might get some more insight into history or whatever. But, you know, I think that, you know, we need to ask ourselves, you know, if we are, you know, spiritual beings on a physical journey, what's, what's the value of this knowledge? You know, is this knowledge really helping us on our, you know, like on our, you know, in terms of our human mission? You know, the, the other resources, the most valuable resources, I'd say are the others themselves. You know, they're the ones who really obviously carry the traditional information. As I say, I could not have written my books without their input and guidance and support and knowledge. And, you know, they are the ones who, you know, teach traditional knowledge with, you know, like with, with, with integrity. You know, they may not get up there like a classroom instructor and go over points A, B, C and E. But, you know, what they say and the way they say it, you know, I've always found that, you know, they have something, something meaningful and inspirational to say. Yeah, my books are really good. I think that, you know, people should buy them and read them. There's not all it's secret, which came out in 2016 and loss of indigenous even, which came out in 2020.