 I grew up here in Bela Bela with my grandparents here who didn't go through the old system of residential school, so they spoke a lot of Heizutla, and I grew up learning it or hearing it. And then my other grandmother, my mother's mother, she was the language teacher in the school and took me under her wing to become a language teacher myself. Later on I went into digital archiving at our culture center, listening to the old people before my time doing interviews like this, and they talked about our territory, our traditions, our medicines and everything. I got to learn all that over that time. Even through all this I was learning to sing, dance, and our culture. I became a speaker at our potlatchist. Song composer was maybe ten years ago when I first actually started participating and organizing the whole potlatch on my own, and then I started teaching. I took on my first teaching job in 2009 here in Bela Bela, teaching Heizutla. It was alright. I taught the younger kids the nursery and kindergarten, five and six-year-olds. So they learned a lot, but after I finished teaching I only taught for the one year with them, and maybe one year after I was working on another project. I watched their progress and they weren't learning anything else. These teachers here, their curriculum limits them sometimes. They teach vocabulary rather than conversation. Most of our people already know a lot of words, but they can't talk to each other. Learning through the book and through the text would be an easier way to learn languages that way, but to the children should be just talking to them and telling them what these are, telling them stories in the language, how to do certain stuff. So that's why they have different programs like TPR and different kinds of methods of teaching, but overall they don't, if you only use one it's not gonna work totally. There's always gonna be gaps in each of them. So when I started teaching in Rivers Inlet week, that's what I tried to do was over a week long process. I do one little bit of each kind of method, also teaching them what would you call it? Other aspects of our culture, stories, history, law, art, potlatching, dances, and the kids they know everything that I taught them. They remember I saw one of them just last week and I was quizzing them, seeing them, and he remembered, he remembered everything. Right now I'm trying to learn our language. I don't speak it that fluently. I could carry out a conversation but I hear words that I don't know. So right now my main focus is in trying to catch up to myself. For most of my 20s I didn't do anything on the language. So now it's gonna try to catch up and learn again. I remember when we were 23, we had to sit down with one of the young bucks here in Bella Bella. I might have been 26 and we told them that we're getting old in our years. We're not old yet but you're still young. It might be easier for you to learn the language. So we're putting it on you, learning the language. And he did. Rory Housley, that's who we talked to. We had to sit down with him and he's worked hard. He blows me by when he says some words I didn't understand in the context of what he's talking about. But I don't know all the words that he's saying. There's a lot to learn and what you teach. Even myself don't know at all. I am still learning a lot of our old ways that have been lost. And they call us traditional knowledge keepers or something like that. To be a traditional knowledge keepers means that it was handed down to you by somebody. I read it from a textbook. Notebooks and anthropologists put together the gaps that our people did remember and did pass on. But the idea that it should be not on these knowledge keepers, that it should be general knowledge to even our own people, that they all need to know these ways. One of the ways that you would see it evident in today's when we have a potlatch. And the potlatch is that go until two or three in the morning. And you see elders that are there in their 80s because they were taught that if you leave it's disrespectful. There are things that our people don't know anymore. And they need to learn it too. As far as the it's the same that goes for those people that want to learn of our ways. There's details that our people don't know in general. And all our people have different values to our values. Aspects to our culture. There are some that are good hunters like my father and his family. Or my mother and her family were good with their language and culture and traditional medicines. And that's pretty much how everybody is around here. They have one or the other. I think it would be a full understanding of the ancient beliefs of our people that we need to recover and teach those values. I don't know if we can stitch it together is what it would have to be. I would hope that majority of our people have an understanding of their own people, their own families, cultural background. Or even a want to know you see some of the cultures that are around us. They're learning their culture so fast that they're forgetting the nuances that aren't that are important. Now they have the backtrack and they're causing ripple effects throughout their whole nations. So when our nations need to get to that stage that they should work together and or have a greater majority of the people to understand our ways, like people spit out their word, the Guialas. They can't even say it right. They don't have a full understanding of what the Guialas is. It literally just means to where you sit. And from my understanding of why they called it the Guialas, because it points out to our people and where we ranked and things and what our prognosis and priorities of our people are. So you didn't just, you weren't just high ranking. You had other things that you had to do for your family and your people and your land. You had to take care of them all. Same with the lower class. They had their own rights, their own names, but they had less land I guess to deal with. I guess the best idea is to do what the Gomeshwas did and do a book. Gather all our cultural leaders and get them together. Make a book of our ways, Guialas. Write it out. Share it like that. Share the history, share the stories. Share with all of us and know that we don't. We don't. We share it all the time with everybody, but do they recall? Remember it? At least it's written down. Because it's a lot that we do have in our heads. Because we were talking, we were joking that one time when we went to New York, you had all the cultural leaders in one plane. What if this plane went down? So that'd be my best guess. Write our own book. Write our own law book, I guess.