 Okay, I want to greet you. I want you to greet you the Mitsusagi territory, which is Mississauga to you, which is an Ishtaba nation. And we welcome you here today. We're going to talk about the Maple Bush and what is done with the SAP that we gather. I work with students that do this. And so I'd like to just say offhand that I welcome you here. My name is Gidegao Megazi in the language and my English name is Doug Williams. I'm from Kerbalake First Nation and that and my clan is a pike clan. From the early times we knew how to do SAP through a couple of stories that we've we've retained over time. The earliest one that I can find and I heard from the old ones was that it was through dreaming of one person that it came to them of how to work the maple tree who would be giving SAP every year at springtime. This man was dreaming about what we call the little people, Nishinaab Inesuk, who are beings and spirit beings that live here with us at the same time as we live here but on a different plane and come to us from another reality. In the modern context this is kind of hard to understand but we still pay homage to our ability to be able to do this kind of thing, to be able to retrieve from them. They're helpers, they don't harm us and they helped us in this instance through telling us about how to do maple and so on. This Nishinaab who dreamt this then told others and from there they were able to work it out and we see now what we are able to do with it today. Now the other stories which talk about how this work came to us is through the stories that we hear of this spirit human we call Nanabozho. Nanabozho was this mainly spirit who helped creation take place and made sure that what we know today was happening in a smooth way because apparently in the old days when creation was happening it was a difficult time. It wasn't easy but anyway down the road after creation took place Nanabozho who would help us with these things saw Nishinaabeg laying on the ground under a tree and they were drinking directly from a drip from the tree and he thought what are they doing so he kind of nudged them a little bit so what are you doing this is well we were drinking this sweet water that is coming down off the tree and the stories told that in the early days the sap that came out of the tree was nearly uh is already made into syrup right so what happened was that the our people got lazy because they didn't need to they felt they didn't need to go out and hunt and forage and and and get food so they got lazy so that was a big worry for for Nanabozho because he said that cannot be that cannot happen so what he did he thought of a way of getting the Nishinaabe off this lazy mold that they were into they're getting fat from the syrup they didn't felt they it's a near complete food by the way it can make you survive for a long period of time now so Nanabozh thought of a way of see if he can change the habit of laying on the ground and drinking this sap so what he did he went down to the creek and got a pail of water and he climbed the tree with a pail of water and his thinking was if I pour back down the tree and it's going to thin out the sap or syrup so he did that he was able to do that he figured out the way to get it into the tree from the top of the tree and he poured it in so the sap thin and uh so he was able to come down and so on but he's able to thin it to the point where then Nishinaabe found it really too thin to kind of do something with it so they said well we're gonna have to make it into syrup or sugar in order for us to be able to enjoy it so out of that through trial and error they're able to boil it and they knew that it this boiling takes a steam away from the sap and breaks it down to a consistency of syrup again and uh so and and Nanabozh helped them to do that that's the other thing is that he uh he was able to uh instead of having it happen all year he was only able we're now only able to get sap a certain time year in the springtime we call seguin spring is seguin seguinum now seguin remember is a spirit herself and we uh we depend on her to be able to every year make the sap flow from the maple tree so that's one of the stories that uh that we tell in terms of there are others there are other stories but for today we'll just leave it at those two stories of how uh this came to Nishinaabe the older ones my elders uh did this they spent a lot of time at it in the spring and they would have a camp where all the family would go uh the men would trap muskrats in my day and the women would run these these uh maple bushes along with the kids uh it's a time year of celebration it's after a winter of near starvation this this was a welcome activity along with this syrup and sugar coupled with uh food like the muskrat things started to look up in the springtime right and so thus we credit the spirit of seguin for this for bringing us to us right so we're in we're in the stage of seguin at the moment which is roughly seguin corresponds with the maple season right and right after that uh is what we call minokimi which is when this finishes the buds want to come out the snow is gone on the ground so we call that minokimi which is another spirit that's going to bring on growth all right so we have two seasons we always see with spring seguin or seguinom which is a time of or minokimi and again we we have uh much ceremony and celebration at that time year especially thank you ceremonies which we have a less of by the way nowadays like when I was a kid that was a that was something that we did and enjoyed it there's always a message you have to do it but there's also the reward of it right it's a it's a beautiful time so but what we would get from this is that it it's been with us a long time I mean not a bojo we cannot really say in terms of actual time how long not a bojo was here and it could have been just after glaciation which is 8 000 years ago who knows but we we talk about it in terms of being we back we're back with