Nuanced. - 41. Sonny McHalsie: Stó:lō Researcher, Historian, Author & Educator

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Sonny McHalsie, also known as Naxaxalhts'i is a father, grandfather, historical researcher, cultural researcher, author, editor, tour guide, educator and member of Shxw’ow’hamel First Nation.Sonny was an editor of Towards a New Ethnohistory: Community-Engaged Scholarship among the People of the River. He was a co-author of the book Towards a New Ethnohistory: Community Engaged Scholarship among the People of the River. I Am Stó:lō: Katherine Explores Her Heritage (1997) – focusing on his family and his daughter. He contributed to and served on the editorial board of the award-winning publication A Stó:lō Coast Salish Historical Atlas (2001). He was also the author of We Have To Take Care OF Everything That Belongs To Us in Bruce Miller’s Be OF Good Mind (2007). He also wrote the foreword in Keith Thor Carlson’s The Power Of Place, The Problem Of Time (2010).Sonny McHalsie has expertise in Halq’eméylem Place Names, Fishing, and Stó:lō Oral History. He has been featured in documentaries for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), CBC & Omni. CBC, APTN and Omni. Subscribe on YouTubeSend us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Sonny McKelsey. This is an absolute pleasure. We've already gotten to talking, and so let's just get right back into it. You have worked for a very long time to build up our understanding of indigenous culture, our traditions, what the environment means, and these original stories. And I think that from my perspective, I'm working every day to learn more about this. And so can you give listeners a brief introduction of yourself? And then we can get more into the history that we were just talking about. Okay, my real name or ancestral name is Nakhahatsi, but I'm also known as Albert Sonny McElsey, or most people know me as Sunny. I'm the historian and cultural advisor at the Stala Research and Resources Management Center.

I've been working for the Stala now for 36 years. Actually, in May 20th, it'll be 37 years. I just turned 65 last October, so retirement is just on the horizon, could kind of see it ahead. I don't have an exact date yet. But over the course of the years of working with the Stala, I started off as an archaeology assistant, and then I started focusing on different aspects of Stolo culture and history. And so eventually that archaeology assistant name was changed to cultural researcher. and then eventually as the years progressed, I was actually providing advice about Stala culture and history,

so they became the culture advisor and the historian. I come from Shohamel. Shohamel means where the river levels and widens. The English name of the place is actually Laidlock, 10 kilometers west of Hope. I actually transferred there in the early 90s, actually from the Boston Bar, First Nation, up in Boston Bar.

That's where my dad is from, but my mother was from Chowethel. I always felt that if ever transferred down this way, I would transfer to Chalwesel. But my ex-wife, they're separated, still not divorced, but were separated. Comes from Shohamel, and as such, my children are being registered at Shohamel. And so I thought, well, if I transfer down, I should probably just register at the same place where my children are being registered. So that's why I transferred to Shohama. I think it was 93 or 94 when I transferred down from there.

So over the course of the years, interviewing the elders. And at first the, so I started working for the Stahlville Tribal Council. Back then, there were two different travel councils and plus the independent bands. But the leadership at Tribal Council, they basically wanted me to focus on interviewing fluent Helcmalem-speaking elders, which I have done. And mainly, because of the, with Aboriginal rights and title, what they wanted to capture was the perspective that our elders had, especially look at the world through the language,

the lens of the language, through the lens of stola culture and history. So that's what they're hoping to capture. So over the years, I think I've captured some of that or most of it. I'm not sure. I mean, I'm still working, still looking at different things, studying different aspects. It's all culture and history and trying to make things fit. So I have seven boys, two girls, 13 grandchildren. I continue to fish, although these last few years

I haven't made it up because of the restrictions. But I fish at a place called Eslau, where my great-great-grandfather is buried in a cemetery, who's also your great-great-great-grandfather. great-great-grandfather, Sakhilthal, and I returned there fishing in the early 90s. I ended up when I transferred from Boston Bar down to Shohamel, but I realized up there in Boston Bar, my children, because they were registered in Shohamel and registered as part of the Stalo, I knew they wouldn't be allowed to fish up there in my fishing ground up in Boston Bar. So that was part of the reason I made the shift as well. I wanted to ensure that my children had a good, had a fishing ground that they could

lie on or go to. And so I talked with my elders, the late Ralph George from Shammel, the late Bill Pat Charlie from Chowethel, the late South Amethic, or Grand Chief Peter Dennis Peters from Chawasel. And they gave me four different places that I could fish. Three of the places are already being used, one by a different family from Chilawak, another one used by my cousin from Seabird Island, the other one used by my auntie, your grandmother. And then the fourth one, no one was fishing there. And so I went there and they gave me the blessing and said, yeah, use the place. Yeah.

Yeah, so that's where I started fishing was up there at the Eslalau. So I continued to fish there. There is a lot to take in there. I'd like to give listeners a lay of the land in terms of where we're at because I just learned in a Stolo Signal podcast, which I know you help kind of give the background information for, that Helclimelamilam is considered. an endangered language. Yes, it is. Indigenous people rely on an oral tradition,

which means our legal traditions come from, I think, the moral stories of our understanding of the land, of the mountains, of the environment. And so if we lose the language, if we lose the stories, we lose a lot of the laws. And it doesn't feel like a great state of affairs right now. I had Elder Eddie Gardner on, and he talked about how he's working to keep the sweat lodges going. but he doesn't have a replacement. He doesn't have somebody to kind of take on what he's built up over the years.

And as a native co-worker, I know the work that he did acted as very meaningful counseling for many of my clients. It wasn't going to a registered clinical counselor, but it was impactful in that it helped clients connect with their culture. It gave them a space to debrief, to let out that negative energy. Even for those listeners who are like perhaps challenging the idea of like, well, what can a sweat lodge do? we know that it saunas and being in the heat releases heavy metals we know that it does good for your body to be in those environments and share what you're going through and so from my perspective I'm very worried about losing these traditions and someone like yourself working so hard you've been involved in the authorship of a lot of books and you are constantly willing to go out

and let people know about the culture you do tours can you tell us how this all came about like what did you see during your time because have you seen things improve Are you optimistic about working? Oh, I've seen a lot of improvement over the years and very, you know, in one sense, you can look and say that the language is endangered because we have one fluent health meal speaker, but we also have adult students who have come out of the scholarship language program, and, you know, not all of them, but quite a few of them are, you know, really, you can really see the interest that they have in preserving the language.

And, you know, they may not be considered fluent. as they would at the last fluent speaker. But at the same time, I think we're learning more. And the really encouraging thing for me is young people that are getting the interest in the language and picking it up as well. And so when I look at the language, it's really important to our people

because that's a perspective that we need to look at is how we relate to our land, how we relate to our heritage. and all those different things. It's through the language that creates that. And if we lose the language, and then we may as well be assimilated because we'll lose everything that has to do with our culture and our history. So how did you get started in this?

At what point in time did you say this is a dire state of affairs? Somebody needs to hit the ground running and start getting involved. How did you get it started with the archaeology work? Yeah, it wasn't really a decision that I made. It was basically, well, I guess I did make a decision. The decision was because I was actually finished a course up in Terrace. I did a pre-apprentice Automotive Mechanics course, which I finished. And so I was looking for work as an apprentice automotive mechanic.

But the thing is that prior to going up to Terrace for the two summers, before that, I had worked on the Hope Archaeology Project. And so I really developed a really interest in archaeology. But I never really thought back then about becoming like an archaeologist, but it was an interesting, interesting work. And the day I finished my class up in Terrace, just prior two weeks before that, my sister called me and asked if I was interested in applying for an archaeology job. So I said, sure. So she helped me do the work to put my application in, and I got hired. But the work was actually starting on the Monday of the last week that I was spending up there in terror.

But they decided to wait for me. And so I started, so I actually left Terrace on Friday, got home on Sunday, and Monday morning I had a report to work with the archaeology date, which I spent the whole summer. It's called the Hope Archaeology Project, and this is back in 178. And I think that had a lot to do with shifting my change away from pursuing an automotive as being an automotive mechanic. But I think the bigger thing was when I was hired at Chalotel for a job as a, as a, as a change away from pursuing an automotive mechanic. as the economic development research assistant along with two of my cousins that worked with me there. Lolly Peters and Ida John and then working for Ron and Pat John, Chief Ron John, or Grand Chief Ron John at the time. And Patricia John was a band manager.

And I worked there and that's when we came up with the childhood co-op. co-op and we came up with the fish farm and the agriculture part. But then I decided that I wanted to go into business administration. And so I tried to go back to college. Of course, they did the assessments and I had to go through a different program. I can't remember what the program was called. Oh, college cap college achievement program. So I'd spend one year in the college achievement program to kind of bring up my marks.

And what happened was 1985. I actually went to Chawothel and actually did what do you call it? Did some volunteer work with them and I actually did an application for 17 summer student jobs and of course Patricia told me to make sure

there's one there for me as well. And so I did the proposal and was approved with 11, I think it is 11, 11 or 13, jobs were approved, including my own. And so I was looking for work, well, I thought I was going to end up working there, but I also put my application at the employment office here in Chilliwack with Judy Douglas. And so what happened was when we got the approval, I was actually at the child's old band office and letting everyone know this is approved.

We're going to get all these summer students, you know, including a job for myself. It just so happened, though, I won't say who, but there's a band member who was in the office. And when she had heard about this, because everybody's kind of all happy and celebrating, they're going to have all these summer students working. And she's, well, it better be just for band members only. And I wasn't a band member of child. And I wasn't sure if she was saying it for me to hear. But anyways, I thought, oh, maybe I shouldn't be taking this job.

But later that weekend, Judy Douglas called me. the employment worker here in Chilliwack, and she said that Stalwell Travel Council is interested in hiring me. And she said, because of my archaeology background, they don't even need to interview me. They said, show up to work on Tuesday morning at 8 o'clock, you're hired. And I should have been hired on Monday, but the problem was when I got the telephone call from her, it was on a Saturday. But my niece didn't tell me that she just received the call. she answered the phone and then later on she told me Judy Douglas phone so I thought she meant

well she works at the employment office maybe call her on Monday not on Saturday so I called her on Monday and then that's when she said report for work right yeah so I actually was um I was drinking like and so when I started the job like I quit drinking I was actually hung over my first day of work and when I realized what an important job it was and how interesting this work was going to be I said, that's it, I'm not losing his job, so I quit drinking. So actually, my celebration for sobriety and my first day of work is the same day. Wow. Yeah, so, yeah, I started the job, and it was being an archaeology assistant,

basically working with Gordon Woos, who was the archaeologist there at the Estalo Travel Council and also working for the Alliance of Tribal Councils, which is the three... three nations together, the Sequatma and the Nakamach and the Stala, all working against the proposed CNR twin tracking program. So it was that court case. I ended up working with elders from all three, three areas, which is really interesting. But once that work with the twin tracking kind of slowed down, then I started getting other jobs. And actually for the first two and a half years of working for the Stala Travel Council,

I never had any holidays. It was kind of funny because they were given my two weeks notice, right? And I knew it was coming. Well, actually, when they hired me after that summer was over, I was planning on going back to college. And Grand Chief Clarence Penner, Kat Penner, and now Chief Mark Point, who were both at the head of the East All Travel Council at that time,

called me into their office and asked me if I was interested in continuing work for them. They said, we know that you're going back to college, but can you take a year off and come and work for us and we'll double your wage because I was making minimum wage at that time. And I said, sure, I'll do that. And yeah, that's 36 years ago. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, so, but then what ended up happening was whenever they ran out of funding, they would give me, you know, give me my notice, two weeks notice. And on Friday, I'd pick up my last paycheck. And then they called me at the office and say, oh, we've received some more funding. And would you be interested in taking this job on and start on Monday?

Oh, okay, sure, I'll do that. And it wasn't until two and a half years later, we were having a staff retreat. And by then, I think our staff numbers had jumped up to around 22, 25 people. And they're doing a circle. You know, staff are getting to speak about whatever they wanted, anything about work, things that were bothering, things that they're happy about, that sort of thing. And quite a few of the staff were talking about their holidays. And so it came to my time.

I was going, wow, do you guys get holidays? I don't get holidays. And I said, I've been here two and a half years and they haven't had a holiday yet. And then I remember Chief Mark Point and Grand Chief Clarence Pryan, you're kind of looking at each other, chuckling. And then he said, oh, we'll take care of that, so then I was put on full time and then started getting holidays. That's amazing.

What are your thoughts on just going back a little bit about that kind of approach of band members only. I worry about that because it feels like we all need to be working together. Like so many indigenous communities have this separated kind of perspective. And you kind of see that when the tribal council is different than the Chiefs Council. And you see this politicalization of like our own people that we all need to be on the same page in so many challenging moments. And it sounds like it sort of hurt you to be like, oh, well, I'm not a member. So I don't get to, you were so happy and you were you were working with the band you were trying to build that community up so just because you're not a member shouldn't shouldn't reflect whether or not you have the opportunity to

build up another community do you have any thoughts on that because i know that that still sometimes happens but i know that was pervasive in the past totally a big problem when you look at all the things that the colonizers had imposed on us it was a way of separating us right and when you look at being whether a band member or not, people could travel wherever they wanted. The elders talked about that. They're able to do that, right? And same with when you got married. You could either go to the groom's home, the bride could go to the groom's place,

or the groom could actually go to the bride's home, all depended on what the family situation was. So when the Department of Indian Affairs came in and created these reserves, created these ban lists, you know, that's sort of. where they created a lot of separation. And then, of course, when they imposed their surnames on us, right, whereas we long, for thousands of years, had ancestral names. And that's why still today, if you ever attend one of our gatherings, you'll notice that the focus is always on ancestral names.

The protocol is when you call a witness, you call them by their ancestral names. So when I walk in a longhouse, I'm no longer Albert Sonny McKelsey. I become Nakhachatsi. and the family ensures that their speaker that they hired ensures that when they call a witness, they call a witness by their ancestral name because that was so important. And when you look at it today, because we're actually just my own community of Shohamel, just talking about this with my Siam, Ken Jones, and surnames, they've even created division within our own communities, right? So when you look at the surnames of the different people in reserve, on reserves, and then you think,

you know that's the Peters or you know that's Charlie's or that's the George's right and it seems to create these divisions but when you actually look at the the genealogy of those families they're all related they all go back to a common common ancestor right and then within our society the two most important ways of relating to each other and there's the there's the plate on this in the Estolocosius historical Atlas that Keith Carlson had done but the two main ways of viewing each other is by bloodline, which is really heavy in our whole protocols. Like you can't have an ancestor name unless you can show the bloodline that you have to that person, that ancestor who's named that you're about to receive. Right. So there's that. And then of course, then there's in-laws. In-laws is a very strong, strong connection in the past as well. I think it's still there today. There's a lot stronger in the past because of the providing access. That's why we also had arranged marriages.

When you look at our territory, which we call it's aftumach, and you look from all the way from Yale, all the way down to the mouth of the river, and you look at the geography of the land creates all these different places where there are different types of resources that come from, right?

So you can't get clams and you can't get crabs from Yale, right? And in Muscoon, you can't get dried salmon because you can only dry salmon up in Yale and so forth. There's many other, many other examples as well. And so in order to access those resources, you had arranged marriages, right? And so we had the different classes, too. We had the upper class, the Smilath, which were the worthy people.

The Satechum, the not-so-worthy people. And, of course, the third class was what we call that Squeath, the slave class. So basically the slave class didn't have any connection to the land. The Smilath were the ones that had the elders and had the knowledge and of all who their relatives are up and down a river. and they're the ones that made arrangements to range marriages, so they have access to a different resource, right? And then the Satechum might have been people that didn't have as many elders as it's Malath,

and so didn't have elders to teach them the importance of sharing, the importance of being hardworking, and that sort of thing. So that's why the Satechum had lazy people. Sadly, I know a lot of people put a big emphasis on warriors as well today, which is, you know, that's something from across the Rocky Mountains. But in our area, the warriors are actually viewed as the middle class as Setechen, not really as part of that, Smalath. And of course, there's the chapter that talks about that. And when Keith Carlson, one of the things he did was interview the stall of veterans.

And that's one of the things that he found was that stigma was still there. But when they came back from the, some of our veterans came back from the war, that's what they said, well, now you're a lower class because you went out and fought, you know. also questions about why did you even go fight for this country? This country doesn't accept you, that sort of thing. Yeah, I interviewed Scott Sheffield, who's a military historian at the University of the Fraser Valley, who's focused on indigenous people in World War II. And I think that all of these are so complicated.

Can you tell us a little bit more about those classes? Because it sounds like upper class, middle class, lower class, which we sometimes hear about in Canadian society. But this sounds like it's more based on values, like the ability to understand, your role, like if you were to compare it to like Christianity or something, you would say the upper class has a really deep understanding of their Christian beliefs. In comparison, it sounds like the upper class are well connected to their elders. They understand the stories. They understand the values. And the lower class doesn't. Could you elaborate on that a little

bit more? Sure. One of the things you'll notice is that the Smilath families are really interested in ensuring that their families have ancestral names. Okay, because ancestral names is what connects you to the land, what connects you to your place. Back when I was interviewing the late Agnes Kelly, she sadly passed away in 1988 and only had like four days working with her. And I probably just got a drop in the bucket compared to what she had. But anyway, she talks about ancestral names and she says that your ancestral name comes from one place and you can't take that name and move it anywhere.

And she knew that that was happening back, and even in 1988, and it still happens today, where you have someone that has one name, and then all of a sudden you have number two, and number three, number four, and sometimes even number five. So you have five people sharing that one name. But she said that never used to happen in the past. Everyone had their one name, and it is a unique name. No one else had that name. And she said, attached to that name at the place that you lived was all your,

Everybody knew where you could fish, where you could hunt, where you could gather berries, stories you could tell, songs you could sing, and what's part of a long house you could live in, okay, because we used to live in big, big, long, one kilometer longhouses, right? And so that's the most important part, I think, is our ancestral name, and that's why you'll see a lot of people, you know, especially it seems like all our political leaders should all have ancestors, that's my perspective. You know, if they have enough respect, which is important in our society, to get elected, they should also carry an ancestral name to the place that they come from. Right. Right. So that's one of the big parts of it. We also have what we call Siam.

Siam are part of the Smilath, more of a traditional leader. And I have to say, not necessarily when you get elected, it doesn't necessarily make you Siam, right? although it is a high, you still have to view them as a CAMs, so we still refer to them as CAMs, but in the traditional sense, CAMs still remain CEM, whether they're elected or not. So they could even still be out there in a community and people will still be going to see them,

you know, for their leadership, for their, you know, their advice and that sort of thing. And so they could still be a traditional Siam, but they didn't necessarily belong, or don't necessarily become part of the chief council. So I still believe that that's still out there. There's still Siam out there. And of course, there are a lot of, today I see young people who are, who I consider Siam, who are in leadership roles, especially when you see that the grandson of an important,

important leader who played a big role in Stala culture and history and Stolo politics, right? So there's still some of those people that are there. So Smalath, then, so talking about the access, two resources, right? So that was the main thing. So understanding Sa'ath-Tumach, okay? So-Aft-Mach, meaning our land. That's what we refer to it as. We don't call it Stala-Tumach. I mean, an outsider, a non-Stala person could refer to it as Stala-Tamach, so acknowledging that Stala mean people of the river's land, right? But you and I and all our relatives, we need to refer to it as Sa'ath-T-Mach. Because when we refer to it as Sa'-T-Mach, because when we refer to it as Ashtamuk, we're referring to it as our land. So off means our, to mch is our land.

And as soon as you take ownership of something, and then that's where the stewardship comes in. And that's where that term, that's a big part of our leadership. It's a responsibility that our leadership carries. And I know there are leaders out there that fully accept that responsibility. And all you need to do is look at the different web pages of the different First Nations throughout the Fraser Valley or the different travel councils and different political organizations, and you'll see this important statement in there.

And this statement actually came from the late Tilly Guterres from Chautil. As a young girl, she remembers at her fishing camp up in Eam, which means lucky or strong. She remembers right behind between her and Alan Guterres' fishing camp, there was this place where the chiefs used to get together and meet. And back then, the main topic was to talk about the land question. Right now, today we talk about it in terms of Aboriginal rights and title, but back then there was all the land question. But before they carried on after meeting,

the first thing that someone did was got up and made the statement, and the statement in our language, and this is an important statement to everyone. Anyone that used to follow, you have to remember this statement. So ahtmach to Iqqqqqqqqqqat. So that means this is our language. land, we have to take care of everything that belongs to us. Right. So that's a responsibility that we all have as Stalo. And so when you look at the first part of the statement, that is a statement

of our Aboriginal rights and title. That's where we are saying, this is our land. It's awesome to equal law. And the second part of it is, of course, the stewardship. Now, the important thing that that struck with me back in hearing that in 1988, I've only been working for three years at that point. And Tilly Gattaris was the one that shared it with us. And I remember thinking at that time, because I was just on a learning curve, and I remember thinking, wow, what are the chiefs talking about? So I know this is our land. So ahthmut-e-e-k-la-this-is-a-l-l-t. But Khahmit-Kulat, take care of everything that belongs to us. Well, what belongs to us? Right. And so that was always at the back of my mind, all those years that I, and

And it's still at the back of my mind. I'm still learning. You never quit learning, right? I'm still learning more. And so that was always at the back of my mind when I was studying the different things and trying to understand that. And so that pretty well is the theme of the tours that I do as well, Bad Rock Tours, is that I try to share with everyone different aspects of stahl of culture and history that's important to us, and it's still out there and that we need to take care of it. We have an obligation to take care of that thing, right? So that's a really reflection of how the small ath are as well, right? When you look at all the places, because another important thing is,

if you don't use a place, you're not taking care of it. The really important element of owning a place is taken care of it, right? And so you have to take care of that thing. You have to take care of your hunting ground. You have to take care of your berry picking ground. If you're not going up there, you're not using it. Because as you use it, you actually take care of it, right? And that's what the late Elizabeth Hurling was really emphasized the importance of that

because, again, what it comes back to is two things. There's what we call in our language, Shwokwiyam and Squalquo, the two main aspects of our oral history. There's the third one that's got to do with schooling that Tilligotaurus talks about. But the two main ones are Shwokoyam and Squelquil. And the Squalquo is all about your family history, right? And that's where that whole thing of where did your parents, where were they born, your grandparents, where were they born, where did they live, where did they go to school, where did they fish, where did they hunt, where did they gather berries. All those things are your squalquil.

And Elizabeth Herling said that full-blooded brothers and sisters share the same squelquil. And she said where it becomes important is that once you learn through your squalquil, where your ancestors fished or hunted or gathered berries, you have an obligation to go out. there and do that. And that's why today many of us do that. Many of us fish where our ancestors fished or hunt where they hunted, you know, because we end up going out with their grandmother or going out with their grandfather or an uncle or an aunt to these places. And so we continue to use them. And she said the obligation is that once you get out there and start using them, you have to start taking care of them as well. And just by using them, that means you're taking care of it as well. Right. One of the things that I want to get your perspective on is

this challenge that we face right now because pipelines are always in the news. And there's this tough dichotomy I feel like indigenous people are in where we bring in a pipeline, we feel like we're destroying our land. We don't bring in the pipeline. We live in severe amounts of poverty in many communities. And then crime comes from that poverty. And so the conversation feels so unfair because to me it feels like we have to develop so that we can start to think longer term because I look at some of the decisions chief and council make across BC and it seems so short-sighted. It seems so limited in their ability to say, look, seven generations forward. And it's because they're facing poverty.

They're struggling. They don't have all the resources they need to be able to think long-term and plan and protect their lands the way they want to. But there is this dichotomy. What are your thoughts on how do we kind of move about this tough terrain? Well, I think now the way things are looking, now they're recognizing Aboriginal rights and title. And when you look at the way in the first pipeline went through, they weren't. Right.

You look in the first BC hydro power lines went through. They weren't, right? And back then, there was just all about Indian reserves. And, you know, some of the elders, some of the chiefs have a perspective where they say when they were planning that power line or planning that pipeline, probably looked at the map and looked at where all the Indian reserves were and made sure that their pipeline or power line went through all the Indian reserves because they knew it is easy for them to get that land whereas everywhere else they had to pay they had to pay for that land right and you know we need to take care of our take care of our land and it almost seems like you know

that pipeline is going through is what I can see anyways it's going through right in my own community you know I voted no I voted against it but we ended up going with and now we have this thing where in a lot of our lot of our community members are are employed you know working working on working on the pipeline yeah you know so and it seems all the communities that are within that line there's a lot of benefits they actually sign a benefit agreement where they're actually getting you know work work that's being done and also getting funding that provides them with other work that's important to the community as well.

But yeah, the important part is they are recognizing, you know, our Aboriginal rights and title, accommodating us, you know, to give us jobs and that sort of thing as well. So it's a – and we have to take care of it. And by being involved in it, we have our own rules in place about preservation of our land, preservation of our culture, conservation of our fish, conservation of our animals, all, you know, all those things.

are there. And so by involving us, we ensure that that is done as well. You know, the same, same as the different biologists and other archaeologists who do that. But it's important that we be right there because it is our land and we need to take care of it. Right. And so I think if we get involved with it, we can actually, we actually take care of it and ensure that that it is taking care of. Yeah, it makes me think of when you talk about the land acknowledgement and having that idea of sustainability and taking care of the environment of what Carrie Lynn Victor did with Sham First Nation of removing all of the blackberries because they're an invasive species, putting back in the native species. And instead of putting in more rock, returning and trying to help it

grow back so that there's ecosystems for the salmon and the chum to be able to stay and get out of the fast-moving river. And her willingness to do that and take on the Aboriginal rights and title work that she did, it was all out of her own willingness to do and belief that this was good work that needed to be done. And that gives me a lot of hope when I see indigenous people just doing it. She wasn't looking for recognition. She was just doing good work that I think makes such a difference. Yeah. Yeah. We need more people like Carrie Lynn and others. There's a lot of other people out there that I can see younger people, younger than myself, that are doing a lot of really good work out there. And I really, you know, my hands go up to quite a few of those people

that do that, such as Carolyn. And I believe she's related to me as well. Yeah. I'm supposed to be related to the Victor family from Chiang, but I'm not sure how. I've been trying to find out how. And I'm even trying to find my connection to Chiang because actually my great grandmother, so my grandfather, Antoine, who is a member of the Boston Bar Band, his mother was actually from Chiom. So I'm still looking further that connection. Not sure which family I'm related to. Could be Carolyn's family. Could be a different family through that line. But through my grandmother's line on my mother's side, it's supposed to be related to the victors. We fished side by side. Our families fished side by side up at that place called Cala Licto, where Carolyn has her

dry rack right now. Just upriver of that is for my great grandfather had a dry rock. They're supposed to be closely related, the fist shied beside you. Can you tell us more about that? Why does it matter so much? Because you see this in someone who grew up disconnected from my culture in many ways. When people ask, what's your last name? What's your mother's name? What's your grandmother's name?

They go up the lineage to figure out who I am. For individuals who might not have that background or have that relationship, can you explain why that's so important to indigenous people? Mainly because it's a way of making a connection to you. And so the elders need to know, like, but what's your name? Who's your parents and who's your grandparents? And sometimes even who's your great-grandparents, right? And so it's a protocol that we have.

So if you ever introduced yourself, especially to an elder, you should always say who your parents are. Say my parents are so-and-so, I'll say who your grandparents are because that creates that connection because then they'll know who you are and then they'll probably know that you're relative, right? I know in our language they say that CAIA means friend, but CIA also means friend and relative. I interviewed the late Harry Stewart from Squaw.

And when I told him who my grandfather was, and I remember he was laying down having a nap on his sofa and was kind of talking to me like that, you know. And then I mentioned who my grandparents were, and he turned and looks at me and goes, you're my CIA and I would yeah and I thought at that time it just meant friend and he said CIA doesn't just mean friend he says CIA means relative yeah my relative so he knew that I was related to him which I which I am you know the Stewart family genealogy goes back to to childhood and goes back up to Yale that's why the stewards fish up there in Yale as well right

because you think of like when we talk in modern times it's like what do you do it has nothing to do with your connection with anybody else. And it seems like there are certain areas where Canadian culture or Western culture can learn a lot from indigenous culture. One of the areas that I always like to talk about is the value we place on elders, because that does not seem to exist in Canadian or Western culture. You look at how the COVID-19 pandemic played out. Well, the hardest hit were seniors' homes, and it seemed like they were not getting the care that they deserved particularly in Ontario. And so I think of that. And I think of the elders lodge we have here in the Fraser Valley and the value I saw even clients as a native court worker when an elder would come in, the humility of putting down their head, closing their mouth and opening their ears and being willing to listen.

These are such valuable things, I think, that others can learn from indigenous culture. And I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Yeah. Well, the other thing, too, is I think just the losing sight of the younger people. and it's because that's what I do now. That's how I am today. I mean, I'm 65 years old now, right? But I remember interviewing the late South Amethaker, Peter Dennis Peterson, actually my uncle, because his father and my grandfather were brothers.

But anyways, one day he was saying, yeah, I don't know any of the young ones anymore. You know, we were at a gathering, and there's all these people, kids running around and younger people there. And he says, yeah, I don't know any of them. And he said, I have to ask them who their parents are or who their grandparents are in order to know them. And that's what I've noticed today. That's how I am. I'll see these young kids. I might even remember them as being little people.

Then I was sitting in their full-grown adults, you know, getting married, having children, and that sort of thing. I'm always shocked when I meet people and realize that, you know, they're in their 40s or 50s now, whereas in my mind, they're always forever young to me, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, same thing. I have to, you know, ask them, you know, who's your parents? Who's your grandparents? And to me, it's the coolest thing, actually, to make connection to someone when you find out that they're related to you, you know,

and especially you want to share with them what their family history is all about because there's a lot of things, a lot of things to be proud of once you find out who your family history is, who your leaders were in the past, that sort of thing, right, with family connections. Okay, well, let's give that a try then. Can you perhaps do that for me? Can you tell me a little bit about, you said that you are potentially from Chihuahua. I am a member of Chihuahua First Nation. I am not as well connected as I'd like to be.

I don't know, I know a few Hulmaelamem words, but I don't know them well. Can you tell me about my own family lineage? Sure. First of all, it's Chawathal, not Chihuahawthal. I mean, there are some people that still say Chihuahawthal. And I remember the Grand Chief Peter Dennis Peters, Tilly Gatarras. Alan Guterres, a number of others saying, yeah, we actually had a meeting to determine what it is,

what is the proper pronunciation. And he said, we told him it's chawal, but they still say chihuahawthal. And I still hear, you know, there's a person that works for them that still says chihuahal. And she also talks about that meeting, but somehow they got it wrong, right? And so it's supposed to be chawahel. But anyways, and the other thing is, I think it also goes back to how, the Bering Strait theory, right, which I call the BS theory, right? And they say that we came across the Bering Strait.

And so a lot of people, and I think one of my cousins, she passed away, she said, well, the reason I don't like to say chaw-thel is because it sounds like the Chinese word, chow, you know, so that was one of the reasons that she had given me. And it's so it's, it's, it's chaw-o-thel, not chaw-o-thel. Okay, so let's go back to you, to your family then. So our family, you have a huge family, and you only look at one part of it. And in order to understand your full family connections throughout the territory, you need to do what is called the pedigree chart.

So the pedigree chart will show where you are. It will show your parents, show your parents' parents, parents, parents, so your great-grandparents, and also your great-great-grandparents. And in order to do a full tree, you need a full tree that will go to probably the width of the hall at Chalithel, you'll have eight of them, and that'll show your connection in all those families, right? And I think a lot of people don't realize, they think that you can put your genealogy on one sheet, and that's it. But no, you've got to do a whole bunch of sheets. You might be able to do one sheet just for your mother and father and their kids and

grandkids. Maybe you could get that on one sheet. But once you start going above that, then you can't it becomes three-dimensional right okay so our connection is through your mother who is my second cousin right so her mother um or no your mother's my third cousin her mother is second cousins so your grandmother second cousins with uh with my mother so when you go back you go back to uh captain charlie's family so captain charlie's a huge huge family family. Okay, so tell you a little bit about Captain Charlie. First, Captain Charlie was from Eslau. Eslau, now known as IR21, and also referred to as the Millican site by archaeologists. That's where Captain Charlie was from. He was born there, but he moved down. Okay, and his father was Sechilthal. And so Captain Charlie's name is Sechiel. His father was Sechilthal. And back in 1986 or 87 somewhere back then we were doing an archaeology tour. We walked from Spusum on our tracks all the way down to Hope took us. We camped two nights, so three days. And we actually

found the cemetery there at our 21 at Eslau. And I remember taking photographs and writing down in my notes, the name that was on that cross. And at that time, I didn't know anything about my connection to that place. And so later on, I found out, yeah, that was actually my great, great, great-grandfather's name was Sakhil. So he came from there, and that's where he's buried. But Captain Charlie moved from there, who was also, well, Sakil, moved from there and moved down river, and had a big family. So his first wife was actually from Skokale, and that's why if you talk to people, I have a number of elders, the late Siem Chester, Frank Malloway, come up to me, because I told him about my family tree, and then he goes, oh, that's short jack, little

Jack is your relative. I said, yeah. And he said, oh, same with Jeff Point. He said, like, came up to me and said the same thing. He said, yeah, we often wondered who that guy was. We all knew him, a short Jack or little Jack Charlie. And it was my great-great-grandfather, Captain Charlie, who married a woman from Skel, and had that one son, right? And then his wife died. so then Captain Charlie got with the second wife was from Iwawas and then he ended up living in hope at the campsite so if you ever go to the Teltit campsite campsite well wasn't the campsite back then it was turned into a campsite in 76 or something like that but it was it's an old

village site old village site of T'alls right and if you go to a campsite number 12 because they have numbers on the campsites and you see the pitt house there that is your great, great, great-grandfather's pit house. That's where Captain Charlie lived. So that was his second wife. And she had died. And actually, if you ever read Bishop Hill's journal, Bishop Hill was the Anglican missionary who was heading up to Lytton

to establish the Anglican church up there in Lytton. And they actually stopped at calls or in hope to camp before he carried on. And in his journal, or his diary, if you read it, you'll see he actually met Sakhil, my great-great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather. And he talks about him, he's a grizzly bear hunter. And he was up the silver-scadget area hunting grizzly bear, got caught by grizzly bear, and got chewed and bit up and cut in that, and took him 12 to 14 days to crawl out of there,

back to his home there at the Healthy Campsite. And I guess when he got there, he was hoping that his wife was going to nurse him back to health. Actually, when he got there, his wife and his son from that wife were both on their deathbeds. Not sure what they had, but they both died. And so that's how he married our great-great, well, my great-great-grandmother, so she'd be your great-great-grandmother, Marianne from Yale. And if you go up to Yale, you go down Toll Road, there's a creek there, there's Yale Creek, and then just upstream a little bit, there's another creek, and that's actually called Marianne Creek, and that's named after our ancestor, Marianne, who married Captain Charlie. Yeah, so that's where that connection comes in.

And then he started having children, right from Jimmy Charlie, Susan, who was my great-grandmother, and then Baptist. Pat Charlie, who's your great-great-grandfather, and then a whole bunch of others, all the way down to Pat Charlie, who's the youngest son from Yale. And so if you look at that genealogy, then we have relatives all the way down to North Vancouver, even over to the Cowchin area, and all the way up the interior up in Boston Bar, even up into the Okanagan. We have relatives up there as well, that huge, huge family tree. But the cool thing about Captain Charlie and his father, they were grizzly bear hunters. And this is something that would appear on our house posts, okay,

because in the past we had long houses. And remember I talked about how there's smilath, Satechum, and Squeath. So in the past, we had these huge long houses. You read Simon Fraser's journal he talks about coming across a one-kilometer long long house at Mattsby or mathically it's the proper pronunciation of it and if you ever go to Fort Langley National Historic Site they have a painting in there that was done by James Alden James Alden did incredible numbers of paintings but he did a painting of Fort Langley in 1864 the focus was the fort so nice and clear painting of the fort but in the background he couldn't help but paint the

Quantland Village on the other side of the river. And if you look closely at it, you can see it's a great big longhouse. And we had what's called the shed roof longhouse with the high front and the low back, right? One kilometer long. We never had the gabled roof like the present longhouses.

Okay. Right. So then Captain Charlie then was a grizzly bear hunter. And his father was as well. And how they hunted grizzly bear was they had these bones made out of the front legs of a deer so one inch in diameter and on the bottom it had a little notch and the top went to a point and it had a handle on it and or a buckskin handle right piece of buckskin

strap lap round there and that's what they used as a handle one of my cousins laura just from Chehalis that actually lives up in suwali now but she shared with me just not too long ago we're talking about that and she said that her mother had talked about that and said that they actually used to use woven cherry bark as handles on those bones as well. So that's pretty cool to find that out. But how do you kill a grizzly bear with one of those bones? Okay, because Sahiel's supposed to have had three of them, according to Patrick Charlie. You can actually read about this in a book called the Upper Stala by Wilson Duff. And if you go to his field notes, there's a whole bunch more information in the field notes about it.

So we had three of them. One was about eight inches long, approximately. Another one about nine inches long. Another one about 10 inches long. Okay, so his name, Sahil, means shuffling his feet. Right. So what he would do is approach a grizzly bear and start dancing around the bear, shuffling his feet.

And what he wanted a grizzly bear to do is to stand up on his hind legs. And he wanted a grizzly bear to drop down in his front paws and attack with his mouth. because as you know, the grizzly bear claws as long as your finger and one swipe, they can rip your guts out, right? So he didn't want the grizzly bear to attack with the claws. So once he got the grizzly bear to stand up, and then he pretend to quit moving, right?

Fain movement or fain to stop, and then the grizzly bear would drop down on his front paws and attack with his mouth open. Then depending on the size of the grizzly bear, he take one of those bones, shove the bone into the grizzly bear's mouth, and the notch on the bottom, in the back of the tongue, then he tipped a point back like that.

When the Grizzsbury closed his mouth, the point went right into his brain and killed it instantly. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I remember when I was first telling that story after the elders had shared with me, like the Grand Chief Peter Dennis Peters, Ralph George, Bill Pat Charler, they all knew about that history. And it took different aspects from each of them about that. And one of them talked about how the Grizzly Bear, or the hunter would actually carry a club as well to hit the bear on the head

to make sure that the point penetrated into the brain. But I was telling these stories at the schools too, and I remember I was in a grade six or grade seven class, and I told the story, and I remember one of the students, young boy came up to me, and he thought he was going to get me to confide in him that I made the story up, right?

Because I guess he thought it was a made-up story. It's hard to believe, right? So he came up to me and said, he made that story up, didn't you? I said, no, no, I didn't. I said, my great-great-grandfather killed grizzly bear that way, right? And so I was mentioning this to Vincent Harper. Vincent Harper is now they, I think he's head of DFO in Saskatchewan,

but he was a biologist and a archaeologist, and he was involved with the, what do you call it, the skeleton collection in mammal skeleton collection in the University of Saskatchewan. and he knew that EBC also had skeleton. So he said, well, let's go down and take a look at a grizzly bear skull, see where the brain cavity is, and see, is it possible to kill a grizzly bear with one of those bones?

So we went down there, and sure enough, looking at a grizzly bear's skull, at the back of the throat is where the brain cavity is. The only thing that separates the throat from the brain is a thin bone about the thickness of a credit card, and it's kind of shaped like a star like that. points up here, points here. And there's actually gaps in the four corners.

So when you shoved that bone in, it had a lock in the back of the tongue. You had to tip it back so that it goes into the brain. Right. And so we said, well, what happens if you don't tip it back? Like the elders really emphasize tipping it back. And so we looked and said, okay, if you don't tip it back,

shove it on the front of the tongue, goes into the nostril area. Well, if it just goes into the nostril area, you have an angry bear, not a dead bear. So you got to make sure that it's tipped back. and make sure that it goes into the brain and kills it. So I think it was Ralph that was saying that some of them carried a club and would club them on the head to make sure that the bone penetrated

because you have to go through that little thin bone right and get into the brain. And so some of them carried, some of them, some of them didn't. South Almathook, Grand Chief Peter, Dennis Peters. He didn't give a name as to who it was, but he said there's a story about one of those grizzly bear hunters who had an enemy. And the enemy got a hold of his bones and took the bar. didn't strap off and used the saw, cut it, and then put the strap back on. And so I guess when he went hunting, you never came back, because when he shoved the bone in it broke,

and then the bear, he goes the bear killed him. Yeah, I imagine that you'd lose quite a few hunters to learn that track. Yeah. And actually, if you go down to the Museum of Anthropology, there's a housepost down there that captures the same sort of thing, although they don't know why they don't talk about that on that, on that display. but it's an actual house post from Musquium. And I believe that grizzly bear hunter from there. So there's a family in Muscoom whose ancestry has, you know,

and has carved that on their housepost to show which part of the longhouse that they live in when they have their longhouse, right? So all the descendants of that hunter would live in that section of the longhouse. But if you go down there, you'll notice it's a man standing with his leg spreading his arms up like this. you look in one hand you can see those hammerstones right so like a club so he's got a hammerstone that goes up to you know the point and wide on the bottom some people call him grinders he has one of those in his hand and then in his other hand you see what looks like a knife but it's not a knife because when you look close at it you go well why does it have a point coming out and there's still something else sticking out there because it's one of those grizzly bear bones right it's not a knife it's not a knife it has a handle in a long blade that's kind of knives we used today. We never even had those kind of knives in the past, right? We have different types of knives. And anyways, so that's what that portrays, because you look on top of it, there's a bear coming out of a cave, right? So he's waiting for this bear to come

out of hibernation, and then he's going to use that method to kill that bear. So that's what that's about, you know, so that would be something that, you know, a chawthel. We had a longhouse, we should have a carving of that man, you know, of Captain Charlie, this is bear hunter. Right. That is so interesting. And I think valuable for us to be able to go through these stories and learn about that kind of leadership and the knowledge that you get passed on from elders to better understand how these systems functioned because I think that one of the huge errors you see Western culture make is they seem to like that kid underestimate the culture underestimate the culture underestimate the sophistication of what was

taking place it's so easy if you're thinking of indigenous people as like the term they used was like savage. It's easy to kind of underestimate and think that we were out there with no tools or understanding. And I think the challenge is that we come from an oral tradition. And so you can't go read a book on our strategies because we didn't really have that book. We had communication. I'm hoping you can tell us about the environment because I don't know if you know who John Burroughs is, but he's a researcher at the University of Victoria, a law professor. And he's working to kind of give oral traditions the respect I think they deserve. And he talks about how indigenous laws are literally written on the land because you have a story about, you have a story particularly and

perhaps you can share it now of the medicine man and the idea that the medicine man was a selfish individual and acted for himself and his family and then he was turned to stone. And I think of that story and I think of like what the morals of that story is. And it's if you act selfishly, if you live selfishly, you're not going to move forward in your life. You're not going to build better connections with your community, with your family, with other stakeholders in society. And then I think of like the application of that as Carrie Lynn Victor, because she talked about how she's been working on creating these murals and this artwork.

And she basically says that, okay, so when I'm doing it for business purposes, when I'm doing it for schools in the district, I charge for that. But when it comes to my community, when it comes to sharing, this with my family. If it's for a funeral, if it's for a wedding, I don't charge for that. That is that my gift needs to serve the community. And so I can't charge for that. It's my role to give back in that way. I see that as like the application of that story in action. And so perhaps you can tell the story far better than I can and go through some of these moral stories. Okay. This all comes back to what we call Shwokiyam. So remember, I talked a little bit

about Squalquil, so the story about Sakhil and Sakhil Tell, that's part of your squelquell. Now, Shokoyam is also important part of our oral history. So Shokoyam, when you look at that word in our language, Shokoyam has two meanings. First of all, Shokoyam is a time period, a time period where the elders say the world is mixed up. They said animals and people go talk to each other, animals and people to transform from one another. There are a lot of bad Indian doctors, a lot of bad warriors, a lot of resources that we didn't have, a lot of resources that were in unusable forms, those sort of things. that was in that mixed-up world.

The second meaning of Shohyam is the stories from that time period and the stories of Chachal's, the Transformers. So Chachal's are the three bear brothers and the bear sisters. So the four children of Black Bear and Red-Headed Woodpecker, they lived up with the head of Harrison Lake. This is the story that George Chehalis shares through Franz Boas, one of the early anthropologists. and he says that

Red-headed Whitpecker lived in the mountains above what's now Port Douglas. Port Douglas is part of our traditional territory. Lived up in the mountains there. And he had two wives. One was Black Bear, one was Grizzly Bear. Four children was Black Bear, no children,

with Grizzly Bear. Grizzly Bear got jealous of that they got him to quarrel about something and she ended up killing her husband, Red-headed Whitpecker. And I know it's kind of gory and people don't like that part of the story but I can't change it.

That's what happened. And when grizzly bear was killing her husband, somehow, she herself was killed as well. So left Black Bear as a widow, left the four children as orphans. So those four children then were given special powers and given responsibility to travel through the land to make the world right. Okay, so they started there at the head of Harrison Lake, made their way down to the Fraser River, traveled up to the sunrise, traveled to the sky, to the sunset, then traveled back up river again, to the sunrise and we're never, never seen again. And that's why today, if you ever read Simon Fraser's journal,

our ancestors, many of our ancestors actually thought that Simon Fraser was Chachal's returning because he looked so different. And he was coming from the sunrise. And so if you read his journal, he talks about our ancestors, bringing him to the scratch marks, from the story that I'm gonna tell you,

bringing him to the scratch marks and asking him if he did those scratch marks because they were thinking, is he Chachals, you know, returning and is the one that made those scratch marks And he's the one that named that rock, he'll call him a bad rock, right? So that's the first reference to get to that rock.

He calls it the bad rock. And then of course later on, A.C. Anderson, Hudson Bay Company employee was actually looking for a trail, trying to establish a trail from Fort Kamloops to Fort Langley so that they could bring the firs from Fort Kamloops down to Fort Langley. And so he kept the journal and actually calls the village of Chathlas, it's opposite Lady Franklin Rock up there.

or opposite to Kelchalamus, he called that village of the Bad Rock. So that's where that term comes from. So there's many different stories in throughout the travels of all these transformations. So this story about Heil Chalemis is one of those stories. So Hale Chalemis then was an Indian doctor from the village of Chath. Chathlath, meaning injured people. And it's called that because first of all, the elders first told us, had had to do with a lot of people being transformed to stone in that area.

Because when I do my band-orock tours, it takes me an hour and ten minutes just to talk about that whole area. I just stand in one spot, hour and ten minutes to talk about everything that I can think of in that one location. So, Kael Chalamus then came from Chathlath, and he was an Indian doctor. But one of the things is that, and I think that comes from this story as well, was that as an Indian doctor, he used his power to heal people, right?

But then one of the things he started doing was he started charging people. So he's actually getting rich, getting rich from his special powers that he had. And you're not allowed to do that. And that's why today, if you ever hire a shalam or haecals or anybody for spiritual work like that,

you're not allowed to use the word hire. You go and ask them for help. You don't use that word higher. And when you thank them, you're not allowed to use the word pay. You've got to say, this is how we thank you. When you take advantage of another protocol that we have is that you can't turn things down, right? And money is a really bad thing to actually give to someone, the spiritual person. It's better.

And that's why you'll see those that know that will actually wrap the money inside a kerchief. And they'll hand it to the person. And then they'll say, this is how we thank you, right? And as a way to ensure that they don't turn it back and give it back to you, right? Yeah. Because I've seen it happen where someone's given some Heikl's money, and they just turn it right back. Oh, here I take this money and give it to your local youth group or something because they're not allowed to take it, right? So, so He'll Chalamas was using his power to get rich. So when Chachal said traveled up there and he got there, just before he got there, he got to that turn, and he had his kawa, his walking stick, and he shoved it into the ground and transformed it into stone.

I'm not sure why he did that. And he continued, and he got to this place there. And he heard about Helchelmiss, so he started calling for Helchelmus. He wanted to make an example of him, you know, let all you need doctors know, you're not supposed to get rich off of your power, right? And so, but Heel Chalmers is actually visiting. So this story comes from the late Agnes Kellyan, the version I'm telling you. First story, the first time I heard many different versions of it.

But anyways, he called for Heel Chalmmer, Chil Chalmers is actually up visiting his brother, Skalau, Beaver, up there in Spasm, and there's stories of beaver up there in Spasm as well. But he called for him to come down and do battle, but Heel Chalmas refused. He wouldn't come down. And so Hechalz transformed Heelchelma's sister, Sitch a eel into stone. And so if you ever there at that rock, at Tachlis, where the scratch marks are, and you look downstream, you'll see the CNR,

tunnel and you see the island. So in the summertime, when the island is there, the big gravel bar, in between the gravel bar and the other side of the river, you'll see the water kind of boiling over something. Well, that's, that's such eel. So once Calhalamus found out that a sister was transformed into the stone, he came down through a tunnel. And that's another thing, important part of tunnels. It's something that's mentioned in the book that Keith Carlson did. But anyways, he came down through this tunnel and then he crossed over the river, walked down, sat on this rock. It's called the Steletzel, that means the seat. That's where he's, the seat that he took.

He sat there and Hechal sat on the other side, on the right side of the river, right where the end of the toll road is there. He sat there and they started doing battle with each other. And at one point, and oh, every time Hechal's used his power, he put a scratch in the rock. So if you go there, you can see the name of that place is Tachlis, means gritting his teeth, because that's where he sat. When he sat there, his teeth was gritting like this because he was using his power against Hale Chalmers. So you can see where he sat, the depression, where his rump was,

and you can see the depression on the side where his legs are dangling over the edge. And every time he used his power, he put a scratch in the rocks. You can see scratches from his right hand, scratches from his left hand. At one point, he cast a thunderbolt across to Hale Helmus, and the thunderboat went right into the rock. It missed Calhalamus and went into the rock. And so if you ever go up there, you look across the river, you can see this bane of quartz rock.

It's almost a meter wide, a little bit less than a meter, probably, I don't know, about 25 meters, 30 meters long. And that's the thunderbolt that went into the rock. Eventually, Hechal won the battle and transformed Hale Chalemus into that stone. And that's what we call Lady Franklin Rock today. So we still call it Calhlemus. And Gilchalmus had a third eye. He had three eyes.

Some elders say he had it on his forehead. Some elders said he had it on his neck. But either way, he's supposed to have had three eyes. And so when he was transformed into that rock, his third eye was also transformed into stone as well. And we are not, as to all the people, we are not allowed to look at that eye. If we do, we can suffer from what in our language is called Jaliz.

Jaliz means twist up and die. And so I've never looked for that eye. I've been on that side of the rock because it's on the opposite side of where the highway is. It's on the opposite side. It's supposed to be on the back there. I've never looked for it. Never, never will. But in the ways, it's supposed to be there. His third eye was transformed into stone. So we still call that. Of course, it's now called Lady Franklin Rock. And of course, it was the local priest that what a respect for Lady Franklin who was looking for her late husband who was lost in the Arctic. And she actually came up on a steamboat from the U.S. Minster up to Yale and, oh, I can't remember the priest's name now, but he had that 12 stala people in the canoe with her, brought her up there and actually had a banner.

And a professor from UFB, oh, your naked name's not coming up. But she actually did a report on it, so I got a lot of information from her. But they actually had a banner across there, and it was actually called Lady Franklin Pass. So actually the Pass was Lady Franklin. But then with her research, she found that seven years after the name that Lady Franklin passed, people started calling it Lady Franklin Rock. So it actually supposed to be the pass. It was Lady Franklin.

Okay. I'm very interested in your thoughts on this. I think that one of the errors that some Christians make is that they work too hard to try and make the stories that they have. Because I found it interesting that you said people don't like the story of the woodpecker being killed by the grizzly bear over that. People don't like that. Yet we're okay with the fact that Jesus Christ, in their story, was put up, starved for long periods of time, given like vinegar rather than regular food, and tried to be tortured in one of the most heinous ways that they could during that period of time. And there's a moral story of that that this person lived, like the ultimate role model being sacrificed, the ultimate person who sets an example in a positive way being put up to diet. And I find it's valuable to try and like, it's not that you can't take it literally.

It's that there's value in just looking at the morality of the story. And tied in with these stories, the detail that you gave in terms of like the scratch marks and the dent in that, that's excellent geography. If you're without maps. And I think that many people listening to this might go, well, did that really happen? How would we know that that happened? Like they get lost in the, can we prove this happen? And it's like, don't look there. first look at how valuable this would be for people who are communing all throughout the land from

muskwium all the way to yale all the way back and forth through all these communities it would be so valuable to be able to if you don't have google maps how do you figure out where you are well you can look for these scratch marks you can look for this scratch in this mountain you can look at all of these different details that you've outlined in this to understand where you are in your geography and you can retell this story while you're walking to learn a moral story like you would if you were reading the Bible, while also figuring out your geography, and this is where Jonathan Burroughs argues that this is, our laws literally being written on the land, is that you understand where you are and how to act through the story. And I'm just interested in your

thought. Yeah, there's, well, I think we also have to accept that there's two different paradigms that we live in. And we can't use our own paradigms to measure other people's beliefs or their perspectives on or their worldview to take things out of our paradigm to try to measure whether or not this really happened. Right. So Western society will never be able to prove that. They can never, you know, they might be able to say, oh, no, that never happened. Right. But according to us, it happened. It's real, right? Because I remember when I started this job, because I was raised in Western society, I only knew English. You know, my dad spoke Lekatmaxen, my mother spoke Helkmalem, but because they're two different languages, I learned

just the English, right? So these two different paradigms, but we also have to recognize that in our view, these stories really happened. And I remember the first time that really struck me was, again, with, you know, South Almifak, Grand Chief Peter, and his Peters from Chawahawah. And we just finished, I asked him, I was interviewing him and asked him, can you tell the Shokiyam in Helcmalem? Like completely in Helcmalem, I want to record it. And then after you finished, translate it, give us it in English. So he told this story, and he always liked to laugh.

He always put his head back when he laughed, right? And really funny, funny to listen to his story. So anyways, he told a story about beaver and frog. It's a love story that happened up in Spasm. And so he totally didn't help me. He's laughing and laughing as he's telling. And, of course, I didn't understand it, so I didn't know what was funny. I had to wait until he told the English part.

Then we told the English part of the story. Yeah, then I started laughing as well. But I'll never forget, because we were both laughing so hard, and all of a sudden, he just quit laughing, and he got really serious. Right? He got totally serious, and I'm going, oh, what's going on here? Why is he all of a sudden not laughing? So I thought, oh, I better quit laughing, too.

So I did. I quit laughing. And then he goes, you know what, Sonny? I said, what's that? He said these stories may seem like they're funny, but they're real. They really happened. That's what he said. And I never forgot that because of the way he did that, the way he stopped laughing.

And yeah, that all was stuck in my mind. And later on, when I was talking about these stories again with Yamalot, the late Rosalie and George, she almost said the exact same words. She used that same thing. She said that these stories are real. They really happened. So now when I look at the stories, I have to believe in them. You know, they really happen.

I take ownership of them. They're ours. We have to take responsibility. We have to believe in those stories. We can't cast them apart. You know, because like you said, like Burroughs said, it's, you know, there's a connection to our land. It's written on the land.

It's also what Hulikwil said as well. When we were actually looking for our constitution, we were actually trying to write a constitution and actually borrowing Western society's way of writing down a constitution, right? And I remember, Hulikato, Grand Chief Stephen Point, his first one that came up with this idea. And, you know, I never thought of it all those years

studying the Shokiam, and then all of a sudden he comes and says it, right? And I'm just like, whoa, what a powerful statement. And that powerful statement is he said, and I can't remember word for word, but he doesn't. And we have it written down somewhere, but he actually said that our constitution is written on the land. And the stories of Hechalz, that was him writing on the land,

writing our constitution. So when you look at those stories then, and even if you look at the word chachal, it comes from the word chel. Chel is our word for writing. And they're chachal's. So every time they did a story, a transformation,

it was written on the land. So that story, so that Kiel Chalamus, that was written on the land. The scratch marks from Techlis, that's written on the land, where he sat, where his legs dangled over, the thunderbolt that he had. sent across there, you know, such a eel, the sister that was transformed into stone.

And when he was grating his teeth, he was blowing. And so when you look at the water below there, and you can see the little tiny waves that the wind makes as it blows across, that's supposed to be Chechal's breath. Yeah. Because he's breathing like that, blowing and creating that wind and that wind. But as it do, it's wind dries our salmon. The wind is important to our salmon. So even when we're drying our salmon, it's Kechalza's breath.

breath that's drying our salmon. Right. Yeah. Can you tell us about, let's go through some of the traditions, because some people may have like a surface-level understanding of topics like, what is the Chiam Mountain? Because we just get used to seeing it. It's a beautiful mountain.

But what does that mean to indigenous people? And what is the story behind its name? Okay, so it's actually pronounced Chiam, but Chiam means wild strawberry. The name of the village, though, and it comes from the, and again, many names come from the natural geography or the natural resources in that area. And they're supposed to be a strawberry patch. They're still there because I've had people on my tour, and they pointed out the area. And I've never gone to it, but they pointed out the area saying, yeah, the big wild strawberry patch is still there. So the name is actually Lach Chiam, okay?

And it's pronounced Chiam, like that. Chiam, so Lach Chiam, so that's the proper name. But the elders like the late Amelia Douglas, Tilly Gattaris, Agnes Kelly, they all talk about how during the course of, you know, the new colonizers coming in here and, you know, taking our way, our language, and there's this laziness that came in to being, and then people started knocking the L off of that name. So it's supposed to be Lch Chiam, they took the L off, and then. just started saying chiam so using just the xw right because luch means always chiam means wild strawberries

so always wild strawberries right okay so then they took the l off and it became chiam and then eventually they took the xw off and just started saying chiam so when the indian agents came that's what they wrote chiam is like wild strawberry place but it's supposed to be always wild strawberry place right um so that's the proper name but it's the name but it's the name of the strawberry patch, and it's the name of the village. It's not the name of the mountain, right? So cartographers that came in, sometimes, not all the time, they try to incorporate our names

or try to incorporate our review into things, right? And a lot of times they tried, but they'd sometimes get it wrong, right? And so you actually look at Mount Chiam then, and they have the mountain behind there. called Lady Peak. You know, Dave Sheffey talks about how it almost seems like they knew the name of the village and they kind of mixed it up and kind of move things over because that Lady Peak is actually,

so there's the Wild Starry Patch and then there's the Lady. Right? So if you look at it in and out of order, so looking that way, there's Starry Patches down here, the lady here, Chitlake. But then they took it and shifted it over. And so they called this, the wild strawberry patch, and the dog is called Lady Peak, right? So it seems like that's how they got mixed things up. It could be one explanation, right?

Right. But anyway, so Thletake then, and this is a story from Amy Cooper. I'm glad I remembered her name this time. I was just talking to somebody other day, and I couldn't remember her name. But late Amy Cooper from Tawali. People say Suwali, but it's properly pronounced Tuali. she tells this story and she says a long time ago

there was a woman who came from that area from Pupquam or Chiam both Pupcum and both Chiam claim that story which is fine but anyway she came from there she married a man down south

so she moved down there to be with her husband and she had six children with her husband, three sons and three daughters and she decided to go back home So she left her husband down there and he was transformed into Mount Baker

She left her three sons down there And there's different mountains But the ones I'm familiar with Mount Shasta, Mount Hood And Mount Shooksan Those were her three sons transformed into those mountains She took her three daughters and her dog And she went back home When she got back home up there

That's when she was transformed into that mountain Okay, she was transformed into that mountain And given responsibility to watch over the river watch over the people, as a stall of people, and watch over the salmon. And so that's why she's often referred to as the Mother Mountain. And that's what Mrs. Amy Cooper and others that share the story. I'll say that she's the mother mountain. Because Dan Milo shares the same story as well, the late Dan Milo from Scout Hill.

And so she was transformed into that mountain. Her dog was transformed into the mountain behind her. So that's why from here you look up there, you can see the nose, bridge of the nose, eyebrow, forehead, had two little ears in the back of the neck. You can see the head of the dog. And if you look in the front, so the north side of the mountain, you can see two of her daughter, Seawat and Iowat. So she had three daughters, Seawat, Iowat, and Chumostia.

So the front peak that you see is a sharp peak like that, that's Seawat. And right behind is a little bit up and kind of behind her to the south is more rounded peak. That's Ayawat. So Seawat, Ayawat, Ayawat, And then way back, Squamayee, the dog. Well, first, the youngest daughter, Hamathia. So in our language, the word for cry is chahm.

See, it almost sounds like crying, right? Chahm. Well, her name comes from crying because she's considered to be the crying daughter or the crying one. And why is she crying? Well, she was transformed into a little mountain down below. And sometimes you hear some of the younger stowa people thinking that it's Brattle Falls because it's a Falls, right? And most people think, oh, it's a false. It's Brattle Falls.

And I thought that as well when I was first told this. story than Agus Kelly. He said, no, no, it's not vital falls. It's just next falls over here. And so if you ever go up there to, so you can't see it from here, you have to go up close. So if you go where the Popcomb overpass is, and you'll see Anderson Creek, that creek right there, and you follow that creek up, and you'll see that little peak. And you also see the waterfalls coming. The waterfalls is really cut right in. So if you're driving by, you'll only see it for a split second, and then it disappears. You actually have to stop to actually see that waterfalls. But that waterfalls is the tears of the youngest daughter.

So that little mountain that the waterfalls comes off, that's Kamathya, that's the crying daughter. The best perspective of it is to actually go to the old village, the old Popkin village, or Pepkwam, it means the little, what do you call it's little puffballs, little mushrooms. That's what Pepquem has to do with. Because Chief James Murphy brought me out there and showed me the work that they had done to the cemetery and all the whole, the archaeological site of the old Pepkum village is all the next. where that cemetery is. And I was really cool because I went back there. Because when I do these tours, when you're actually on the highway, you can't see everything. I've got to talk about it way back from Prestro, we talk about Sayawat and Ayawat and Tleke and the dog. Then I'll soon disappears. You can't see it anymore. But it actually go right out to the Popkin village. The old

village site, look back to the mountain. You can see it all. You can see Sayawat. You can see Ayawat. You can see Thleke. Well, you can't see the dog. But then you can see the youngest daughter. You can actually You see that little mountain with the waterfalls coming off of it. But even from the highway, it's hard to appreciate that, right? So you can actually make it out. But the best viewpoint is right from the old village. Right. And why is she crying?

Oh, she's crying because she wanted to be up high with their oldest sisters. So her oldest sisters are way up high. They have a good view that can see everything. They can see the whole valley. They can see the river, right, the same view, almost the same view as their mother. But she's crying. She wanted to be up there. So that's why that waterfalls is her tears.

Interesting. And can you, Andrew Victor, described the Fraser River as like the connection between our land, like it's like the lifeline for our communities. It brings us all together. It would have been how indigenous people would have communed back and forth. It's like a highway, but it's also like a lifeline. Like it's like the heart and soul of all the communities because we've relied on the fish and that brought us all together. And so can you tell us about the Fraser River and perhaps some of how you decide. whose fishing areas are whose?

The Fraser River is actually our word for it is Stalo. And Stalo means river. And that's our name for it. Like Fraser comes from Simon Fraser, right? The first European that travel down there. But our name for it is Stalo.

And we also call herself Stala, but we also call ourselves Qualmach. This just came out not too long before Roslene passed away. And there was some, I don't know, some people are kind of against it, But then the most part seems like everybody is accepting it now. Because what had happened was Rosalind was at a teaching the language at a community gathering.

And a young fellow, she said, because she told me about what had happened, right? She said, this young guy got up and said, I am Stalo. And then she reminded him. She said, well, you're not just Stala. You're also Huelmach. You know, so there's two words. So we got to call us out Stala, but we also have to remember we are Huelmach as well. So they go hand in hand, right?

And anyways, she went on to say that the young guy says, no, I'm just Stalo. And she says, no, you're Huelmach as well. And she said, what does the river run on top of? It runs on top of the land, right? And she said, the reason we have to go by both is because it provides a connection to both. If we just call ourselves Stalo, then we're restricted to the river. Then we are just people of the river, and that's it, right? She said when we call ourselves Huelmach, then that attaches us to land.

So you have to look at that word, and Hwamach, what is our word for land? So remember? So ahtimuk to equalah, tamach, quamuch. You see that? So that little part in there, mch is in there. It's kind of has to do with life or like, that's what makes us people, right? And you only have to look at our neighbors. Okay, the Thompson people are Nakap-Mach. See that? Yeah. Nakap-Mach. Okay, people of the land. What about the Shushwap? Shushwap actually comes from the word, Seqwap-Mach. Muck again, that attaches them to the land. What about the people from Lillowet up the other end of Harrison Lake? They call themselves Slat Imch. They go Imch rather than Mch. But it's the same thing. They're part of the land. They're connected to that land. And so when we look at, well, what are our connections to the land?

Well, as Huelmach people, we come from that land, we go back to land, right? So it is our belief that everything that comes from land comes from our ancestors. Because our ancestors, that's where they went. When they died, their physical remains, go back and become part of the earth. And it's really strong in our communities now. You can actually see people aren't using fiberglass coffins or aren't using tin coffins anymore. everybody understands that we are going back to the earth to be with our ancestors when we pass away. And so now you see everybody doing cedar coffins, right, which is more traditional.

I mean, there are many other traditional methods that we had of taking care of our loved ones while they're putting them in trees or putting them in grave houses, but now we go back, we go back to that land. That's an important part of it. So that's why we call ourselves Welmach and we call ourselves Stalop at the same. same time. Right. Can you tell us about the idea of seven generations just because you kind of just touched on it? Seven generations comes in the word Tomiuk. Make sure I got that right. Because there's Tom Temuk and Tomiuk. Tomahuk is the name of Rock Bluffet, Shoham. But Tomiuk means

it's actually the word for, so place you. Now, when you say Tomiuk, you are talking about your Great, great, great, great, great, great, so seven generations back, you know, to your, so great, four great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents. You are also talking about your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. Same word. So why is that word, the word for your ancestors and the word for your future generations, unborn ones? Why is that? Why? Because you have a responsibility.

It doesn't come out and say it. If you read the word, it doesn't say, oh, that's your responsibility. You have to think about that and say, well, why? Why is it the same word? Well, when you think about it, you have responsibilities to your ancestors seven generations back. What are your responsibilities to those ancestors? You have to remember their names. You have to carry on with their ancestral names.

You're making sure that everybody's getting their ancestral names. You have to take care of their fishing spots. Remember, you've got to go back to their fishing spot, back to the berry picking site, all those different things. You have responsibility to have the responsibility to take care of their perspective, their view of the world. You have to take responsibility for the Shwohyam and for the Squalquil and our belief in Shuli, our belief in the Slalakam, our belief in, you know, the little people,

the Amishti, all those different things. We have to take care of that, right? And why do we have to take care of it? Because we also have responsibility to our seven generations in their future. or tell me it from the future. We have the same responsibilities that we have to our ancestors, those are also important to our future generations, seven generations in the future.

So when you look at that word and just see what it means, it's like, oh, my great, great, great, great, great grandfather. Oh, my great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. But then you have to think, why is it the same word? So that's where it comes out, is the responsibility that you have to your past and the same responsibility you have to your future generations. Call me A. Stachlis is there future generations? I feel like that is one thing that so many people need to start thinking about outside of indigenous culture because that seems to be what's

lacking is the sense of responsibility to those past generations. And for myself, Andrew Victor was the first person to bring up the idea of seven generations for me. And that's where I first learned it. And you both told it brilliantly. And I think of the individuals who survived residential schools, the individuals who survived colonization, the individuals who, like Andrew talked about, like, what were their prayers, what were their dreams for what their children would see? And how can you contribute to that? And I think it, we're in a time where the words depression, the words anxiety, the commonplace. And people don't feel like they have a role to play. They don't know who they are. They don't know what they

should be doing and they don't know why they're going to this job that they hate and why they're paying for cars they don't care about and what is the point of all of this and when you describe it when you talk about the idea that you have a relationship with your ancestors and you have an obligation to your your grandchildren your family it gives you meaning and like life isn't always going to be easy life can life's going to be tough there's going to be certain times where you're overwhelmed but understanding that you are carrying on the hopes and dreams of your descent of your ancestors and building a better future for your children and your grandchildren, that's a meaningful life. That's going to sustain you when things aren't going so well. And that's

what I feel like is so just missing from all the self-help books we see, all the ideas that, oh, do whatever makes you happy. Like, that's not, that's not going to sustain you when things aren't going your way, when life is tough. And I feel like that story, the idea of seven generations is so, like, if I could put that at the top of the list of things that we need to educate people about, it's one of them because it feels like people are so directionless in their career, people don't have good relationships with their family, like things aren't going well for so many people, and they don't know what to do. And so they take a trip to Mexico and they come back and that doesn't make anything better. And there's just this feeling of

emptiness that I feel like people carry around all day. And the idea that, like, for others, maybe your family fought in World War II against people who would have taken away your rights and freedoms. There were people who have worked for your benefit that aren't here today to speak for you. And so you need to go learn their story. I feel like that's just so important

and something that I don't hear said enough outside of indigenous culture, outside of yourself and Andrew Victor who've been the two people to really bring that up and being able to share that and make it like you have a responsibility and that's a good thing.

So I'm just interested in what you think. Yeah, and it's also can be viewed as, and I can't remember which elders. Agnes Kelly or Rosalie and George, one of them talked about, explained this whole thing as a big hole in our heart. They said that we have a big hole in our heart, and that hole is created by all the different things that were taken away from us, right? The residential school, the Indian Act, all these fisheries act, all these things took place, the antipa, latch law,

all those things took things away from us and created this big hole in our hearts. They're saying that what we need to do is refill that hole. Relearn our culture, take our culture back, right? And take, you know, through the language and two things. And once we start taking those things back, it fills our, fills that hole in our heart up again because that's who we are, because everything was lost. And so the more we take back, the better it will be, right?

And we can only take back a little bit at a time, right? Because I remember in 1985 when I first started this job, and that was part of the things of looking at. It was about first of all the culture and history. and I was talking with AEA, Stan Green. And we were talking about that, you know, where's our culture, you know? And he says, he shared his story about an experience he had. And his experience, he said that he was asking the same question when he's younger.

And he went to one of his elders. And he asked, where's our culture and where's our history? You know, and then the elder just waved his hand like this. Your culture and history is all around you. He says, it's just that you have to take it back. You only take back a little bit at a time. But each time you take a little bit back, it's going to make you stronger so that you can take more back.

Right. And that's what I've seen over the course of the years. It's all these different things coming back, coming back to our people, making us stronger. I feel like my heart is whole. That's what I feel today is that I understand enough about our culture, about our history. You know, I know what's going to happen to me when I die.

And so I'm not worried about that, right? Could be tomorrow, could be any time, right? But I'm not worried about that because I know where I'm going to be. I know where I'm going to continue. Yeah, that is absolutely beautiful. There's something that's been interesting to me. It's to see the development of an understanding of like psychedelics and that deeper relationship that so many cultures have with mushrooms,

with certain foods, with breathing habits. And I'm interested to hear any of your thoughts on that with indigenous people. Did we have any connection with mushrooms? Like I know that Lions Main is incredibly good for your mind. You have Chaga that's like an antiviral. Did we have any connection particularly, like I've heard of elderberry and salmonberry. Did we have certain things that helped sustain us? Like Carrie Lynn Victor talked about being like a practicing with medicines and certain foods

and certain things that you can eat to help nourish you. Do you have any stories to share on that? Well, I'm not sure of any hallucinic things, although I wondered about a plant. And actually, Gerald Charlie, when I was talking with him about it, he suspected that that plant was hallucinic. But it is the late Edna Douglas that talked about this plant that used to be collected. And it looks like a bean plant. So I'm not sure what it is. I've never looked into it, but it looks like it has little beans on it and it has little purple flowers.

And she said it used to grow across the river from Chiom. And when people took up smoking tobacco, because we never smoked tobacco here in the past, but they would go over there and they'd gather that plant and dry it and mix it in with their tobacco to extend their tobacco. Right. Yeah, but I don't know. She never talked about it as being hallucinogenic, so I don't know. Interesting. Do you have any other, because I know that Carrie Lynn was so interested in, I think it's devil's club. Do you have any stories about the plants and the fauna that exist around here?

Well, it seems like every one of them, it comes back to a Shwo'i'am story, right? So like Cedar, that's one of the most important to us. And this story comes from the late Bertha Peters, Ne George, from Seward Island, because there's lots of Bertha Peters is from Seward Island. because there's lots of birth of Peters is from Seabird, right? So you have to know the one that was George before she married at Peters. And she told this story about, said that a long time ago there's a very generous man. He was always helping and always giving to his people. And she said that when he died where he was buried, a tree grew out of his grave.

And it happened to be the cedar tree. And that is why the cedar tree is so generous to us, because that man was so generous and so helpful to his people. And so his name was Chappay, and that's why the name was. the seed of tree is hapeist, right? His name is part of that, part of that word. And so if you look at the tree itself, so the trunk of the tree then was used to build our pit houses, build our long houses, we carved our canoes out of it.

The large old-growth trees that are probably bigger than this room, we split living, planks off the living trees to cover our long houses, right? Then if you look at the bark of the tree, the bark was peeled, and we had our own protocols of conserving the tree. We never peeled all the bark off. It was only one part, so the tree would continue to live the same way that we didn't have to knock the trees down to build our houses. We could take a plank off, and the tree would continue living, right? Of course, all those old trees are logged out once the Western Society came in. And so then the bark of the tree then was also used to make clothing, to make

twine. My understanding is the strongest twine is if you take fibers of cedar, fibers of stinging nettle and fibers from a plant that's called dog bean. You mix those three together. It makes a super strong twine, and that's the twine that we used to use for our dip nets. And then the inner part of, and then of course the bark was made into clothing. And then the inner bark was actually scraped. So when you take the, peel the bark off the tree on the bark, you can take a sharp object, like a knife or something sharp, and just scrape the inside and all these fine fiber come out and you let that dry it's very soft very absorb it and that's what our people use for diapers because we didn't have pamper's right so we had that fine cedar bark

and that was used for diapers and then of course the root itself was used as well so when you and again protocols you only take one root because you don't want to kill the tree because if you go to a cedar tree you usually see four sometimes you see more than four but usually just four roots that come out you can see the trunk of the tree like that comes out right and if you follow about a meter away from the tree you dig down and the late many peters from from peter's road top top totic system you dig down and then you find that root and it's anywhere from the width of your little finger to and width of your thumb and it's long it's about a meter and a half long and as you get to the end of it then it breaks off into these small

little roots and it looks really small roots that you can't do anything with it so so tiny and And it's just hundreds of them that just go out. But it's that one piece that you're after. You take that out. You peel it, peel the bark off of it, and then the inside you split it. And those split cedar roots is what we use to make our cedar root basket. You have to be really good at it as well.

Like I said, the late Manny Peters was teaching us how to do it. And I was trying it. I thought it was doing pretty good. But you have to take the knife. And when you do it, you're kind of vibrating the knife like this as you're going down, right? and it kind of peels it and you go right from one end all the way to the other

and you have one nice long strip but every once in a while somehow I'd slip and I'd cut the root off right so then I just have a short piece when you actually want a long piece right but when Minnie was doing it she just go all the way to the end

and she showed us demonstrated with one then but we had this one because we dug a bunch of roots and we had this one that's about this thick really thick and she grabs it and she pulls it and she pulls it towards she's

I'm going to take this home and do this one at home. Oh, okay, she didn't want me to root it because it is a nice root, nice and straight, right? So she did. She took it home, and then she gave me the dried roots. I still have it hanging. I have it hanging in my living room, the roots that she picked from that one root. But, yeah, she was an expert, and you have to be an expert.

You have to do it for years and years, I guess, in order to be able to do that. But, yeah, I couldn't do that. So then that's the cedar root that we call our cedar root baskets. then even the cedar boughs themselves are used as well as a smudge, right? So when you think you go back, you know, 15, 200 years, we didn't have sweetgrass, we didn't have sage in this area. This is the climate isn't, that we don't, doesn't grow around here. And so when you look at the use of sage and sweetgrass in the interior, it's like a smudge,

and it's like a cleanser, it cleanses and, you know, chases bad spirits, and that's why they use it as smudge and, you know, throw the smoke around them. But with our cedar, it's used as a smudge, but it's actually the crackle of the burning cedar

that chases away the bad spirits. Right. Right. Nowadays, you see people using just cedar boughs, but in old days, they would have been using it as a smudge. It would actually be burning it. Right.

And the first I heard about this, I didn't see it happen. My younger sister, Sue Harris, from Cibbert Island. She was there and she actually saw little Mrs. Mrs. Anna Chapman from American Creek, a little lady. And after my mama died, she was good friends with my dad, and she moved up there and just living there.

And all the years that we were growing up, we had all these, because our house was on an old slide that buried part of the village up there, because on both sides where the slide came down to the river, on both sides, this side you could see pit houses, the site you could see pit houses. So that slide buried part of the village. And I think that's probably why we had so many problems at our home. We're all seeing things like the phone getting lifted off and put back down. And visitors bumping somebody in the kitchen, there's nobody in there.

One lady talking about the bread box opened and closed and heard a baby crying out the back. Just as it was getting dark. And our dad let us go out there and see. We wanted to go so bad because we thought it was a baby crying in our car. But he said, nope, stay out of there. And I think one of the things that used to happen, that we got so used of was actually hearing someone walk up our stairs. So walk up our basement stairs from the basement, walk through our little kitchen,

then walk into our big living room. We had the living room from one side of the house to the other side, and then two bedrooms, and then, so the kitchen bathroom and a bedroom, so three bedrooms. But the steps would walk into the open area of living room, and we'd be sitting on a couch watching TV, and we were so used to it, we would just sit and just listen to where the steps went, because whoever it was would walk through our living room and walk to one of the bedrooms

either to our dads or to one of the other two bedrooms and it would stop, it never went back, it would just stop. So we'd always be interested in, well, where's the steps going to go? Which bedroom is it going to go? So we'd kind of listen and wait for the steps to go. Oh, okay, went to that bedroom. Okay, continue watching TV, right?

So those sort of things were happening. I remember when the telephone lifted off the receiver, I just got home, and in the old days had the wall telephones, right? and it was right behind the front door kind of in front so you could actually be talking on the phone and look out the front window. And I walked in, I closed the doors,

taking my shoes off, and then all of a sudden my late cousin Margie, my late aunt, her mother, Liz, and then I was my late dad. The three of them were all sitting there. And they're looking towards me, and then they're pointing towards me. And then they're both going,

did you see that? Did you see that? You know, they're all excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what did you see? And then they start telling each other what they saw. The way they're pointing at me, I thought they're pointing at me, but they're actually pointing at the phone behind me. And I didn't see it. But while I was standing there, I guess someone lifted the receiver off and then put it back down, and that's what they saw.

And so, yeah, so they're just all excited about it and trying to, you know, confirm with each other that that's what they saw. You know, we're not crazy. All three of us saw the phone lift up and back down, right? So we had all these things like that happening. So Anna Chapman moved in there, and the same things were happening. She was experiencing the same things. One day I wasn't home. I'm not sure where I was, but my sister Sue, she thought.

And she told me later on what had happened. And she said, what Annie Chapman did was took one of our cast iron frying pans and put it on a stove, went out and collected some cedar boughs. The cedar ends of the boughs, not the whole bough, but there's the tips. Put them in the frying pan and turned it on on a stove. And once the cedar started cracking and smoking and burning, and then she took that cast iron frying pan and went down to all the four rooms, downstairs, upstairs, went to the four corners of each room, smudging it and go back and put it on

the stove and then go back and carry on. And she did that to the whole house. And yeah, as far as I know, nothing happened after that. It was a way of cleansing. But that stuck in my mind when I first heard in, I was on, what is she doing? What's that all about? And it's later on when Grand Chief Peter Dennis Peters talked about the importance of not having cedar in the fire. Because I remember we started doing burning. So actually I saw the first burning, when my mom passed away, the late Agnes Kelly came up and did a burning for us, right? And I remember that's the first time I ever saw burning, never, you know, I just remember her saying, telling us what it was, that she's burning food to feed our ancestors spirits and feed our mother who just recently passed

away. And we weren't allowed to look at the fire. She said, you can see the pretty colors when the food is burning. She said, that's the ancestors eating. So don't stare at those pretty colors. She said, you can look at the fire, but don't stare at that, at those colors, which was, you know, you'd want to stare at that colors, but you're not supposed to, right? And so, anyways, that's how I learned about burnings. But then we started doing burnings, my family, my cousins there at Chowethel, and we did it for a couple of years. And we invited our elder at that time, Grand Chief Peter Dennis Peters, South Amethuk, invited him to come and participate with us and provide us with some guidance, but he didn't come. Two years. He didn't come.

Finally, we had a meeting at his daughter, my cousin's Thalma's place, and he just lived across the street, and he came over. And again, this is, you know, when you look at how he did this, it just kind of strikes your mind and makes you, you know, not want to forget that, right? Because he comes over and he says, well, I knew that you guys are doing these burnings, but I thought it was just a fad. I thought it was just something that you guys are going to do and you're going to quit doing it. He said, but it looks like you guys are pretty serious about it, so I thought I better. come over and let you know what I know about it. He said, well, first thing is you have to have it in the morning, right? And I've been finding these important things about that,

about what he was talking about, right? Because you continuously learning, like you learn things, right? And so he says, just when the sun is, when the light is coming over the top of the mountains, but before the sun starts shining, that's when you do the burnings, right? And so that's one thing. So the second thing, if you're having a fire to feed your ancestors, no cedar.

You can't have cedar in your fire. He said, the crackling of the cedar chases away your ancestor spirits. If you want your ancestors' spirits to come, you can't have cedar in there. He said, but if you need to use kingling to start your fire, cedar kingling to start your fire, then start your fire two hours ahead of time before the burning so that all the cedering, all the cedar kingling is burnt out and just use maple or alder hardwoods that don't crackle because it's the crackle of that cedar right so that's what we do with upriver anyways that's my understanding show hamel ralph george talked about the importance of that so we've always done

our burnings early in the morning except recently i heard it was changed and it to me it seems like we shouldn't be we shouldn't be adjusting our teachings to fit the schedule of our heicals or heheicles should come when we want them to come, right? But it seemed like that last burning that we had was because of their schedule. Sorry, whose schedule? The heiakles, the people that do the burnings. So the word for people that do burnings, they're called heheikals, right? And then you can see the word for fires, and there's words for fire is yuk.

So heheyuk goals, yeah. They're the ones that do the burns. They're like our hands and our feet, right? they only do that work and we're actually the ones that do the work and that's why you'll hear the older ones I don't know if the younger ones say it anymore but the older ones that's what they used to say

we're just your hands and feet you guys are the ones that are doing the work right so we're just here and we're putting the food in they're the ones that can communicate with the spirits and get any messages from the spirits but they're the ones that are doing that for us but they said the real work is done by us and that's why I don't know if you saw the book

Being of Good Mind that being of good mind is, comes from the late Buster Joe. And it's cool because I remember when I first heard the title of the book, I was going, wow, what a cool name. And I didn't realize it came from my chapter. So I did a chapter inside that book. And I talked about what Buster Joe said,

because Buster Joe was actually teaching a number of us, Tim Peters, Willie Charlie, myself. I can't remember who they had about six of us that he's teaching for us to oversee funerals and that sort of thing. But anyways, when we talked about when we were at a burning, that's what we had L.S.A. asked everybody to be of good mind, be of good mind. And I wasn't sure what that meant, you know, but I used to say it. And it wasn't until actually I became good friends with Keith Carlson.

And Keith Carlson actually took me to a Roman Catholic ceremony, Easter, Easter ceremony. I can't remember. He talks about Lent. and I don't know, I hope I'm not getting it wrong. Anyways, he's very devout Roman Catholic. Goes to church every Sunday, right? I'm a baptized Roman Catholic, but I'm definitely not Christian. I don't believe in God.

I don't believe in the devil. I don't believe in hell. Don't believe in heaven. So I'm not worried about those places. They're not worried about any of that. Because I know I filled my whole in my heart, and I know what I believe in, who I'm afraid of, what I'm scared of, that sort of things.

And I'm scared of things, right? So there's things out there that need to be scared of with things out there that you have to pay respect to and things that you have to understand. But anyways, Keith invited me because over the course of the years after he started working for us and we established his friendship, and I started taking what places took him to winter dance, took him to Shwaivey mass dance, took the burnings, first salmon ceremony, all these different things. So I was sharing our culture with him so he could better understand it, so he could do the good work that he does as a historian.

And so there's one day, he says, he's going to Easter Mass, I think he called it. And he said, I just want to invite you. And he knew that I had no interest in becoming a Christian. He said, I'm not trying to convert you, you know, but I just want to share with you a bit of my culture. He said, you've been so generous with me sharing your culture. So I want to share my culture with you. I want you to come attend this ceremony. And if you have any questions about it, you know, let me know.

And ask me the questions. I'll let you know what it's all about. So we went to this mass, and it's interesting because they talk about it, and I hope I don't get it wrong, and I don't want to offend any Christians. But it's talking about the bread and the wine, and he said that their belief system is that when they eat the bread, they're actually eating the body of Christ, and when they drink the wine, it's like the blood of Christ. They said that in their belief system, they have the faith that that is what is happening. You know, so we talked about it later, and he says, well, it's like your guys' faith.

You guys have faith in the belief that when you burn food in the fire, you're actually feeding your ancestor spirits. He said, when you go to see the bread and wine at a Christian ceremony, you can't see it happening. But everybody, they believe that it's happening. They have the faith that it's happening. So the same thing, when we're burning food, we can't see our ancestor spirits there. We can't see them, but we know we have the faith and the belief that that's what they're doing. So that's what I realized, when we talked about that, is that be of good mind means have the faith in the work. Because that's what Buster Joe says, be of good mind, he said when you're here.

So basically he's saying, believe in the work, have faith in the work, have faith in it, that it's going to happen. If you're not in that good mind, then you shouldn't be here. right and so we always make sure that people that come if you're going to witness our ceremony you better respect it you know don't be laughing or joking or anything about you got to be quiet like it's really important that you're quiet at the ceremony so that's what being of or be of good mind means to me have faith in the work because like the burner said the heacles we're just your hands we're the ones that are putting the food and the fire we're the ones that have the prayers to call your ancestors spirits to come to the fire which there are already there because our belief is as soon as we get the fire going, our ancestors spirits are there. And that's why we have protocols where we're not allowed to leave the fire alone. Otherwise, you're leaving your ancestor spirits alone. So we always have to, as soon as the fire is going, somebody has to stay there for those two hours until the burning, somebody's got to be there. I do that a lot for Shohamel. And same thing, we're not allowed to throw garbage

in the fire. We're not allowed to drink or eat because we're going to feed our ancestor's spirits. So if we're going to be sitting by the fire, eating and drinking coffee or smoking or whatever, we're doing things before we even took care of our ancestors, right? So that's why we're not allowed to do those things. And that's why that fire is considered to be a sacred fire. And so you don't do anything with that fire. You always have to be beside that fire. So that's what that whole thing is, a be of good mind, is to have faith in the work that's happening.

We have to have faith. You know, it's hard for us today. You know, somebody came walking in that door right now and said, I was just down the river, I saw these three bears, four bears in a canoe, and they pulled over and they transformed this thing down there into rock. There's a rock that are, I mean, we're going, yeah, right, you know, for us being raised in Western society, it's hard for us now to think of that. But when you think back, and the elders tell us that these stories really happen, that they're real, we have to believe, because we have to take ownership of it. Because how can we take care of it if we don't take ownership of it? And that's one of the things that have these young people that we're training in our office.

And that's one of the biggest messages that I have to them is you have to believe in these stories. You have to believe that they're true, that they really happen. Because if you're going to be standing apart there and not a part of it, don't believe in it. How can you take care of it? You know, how can you have the heart to take care of it if you don't believe in it? Right. So you have to believe that these stories happened. You know, like Peter Dennis said, it may be hard to believe, but it's true.

It's really happened. Yeah. Right. So you've got to think that they really happened. You know, until the terrorist talks about the house, how he pointed the thing, like God, extended his finger out. And that's how we transformed people into stone or into whatever that he was transforming them into. And that's why today we are not allowed to point at each other, right? Because we have our own power.

We don't have our own spirit power. And if you point at someone, you could actually be hurting them by extending your finger out and pointing at them. So we are not allowed to point each other. And that's why you go to the winter guns, you see people going like this, always got their finger bent like that when they point or nod or nod or, or, or, or, you're not allowed to. whatever people joke about pointing with their lips right but it's more like nodding or going like that right so i think i think that that's so valuable because i do think that you need to believe in something and you need that belief system whatever it is whether it's christianity whether it's um indigenous beliefs whether it's other belief systems you need something to ground

you that feeds you because when you talk about these stories it's it's you're being fed as much is you're feeding perhaps the spirit you're renewing because like there's there's overlap between the idea of being at that fire and not eating and not doing other things to the idea of meditation or yoga there's that idea of you're here and you're not going to be anywhere else you're not going to play music you're not going to be reading a book you're not going to be doing anything you're going to be focused and that's that idea of being like mindful and that word is continuing to grow and there's different forms of it and I think that it's so valuable to see I don't for me growing up because my grandmother took me to Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church,

to like, and I always felt separated between the two, but I love those moments where you see the overlap between the two, the faith between the two, because for me, that makes me go, okay, there's parallels and there's beauty in these stories and there's knowledge you can gain from both and you can grow an appreciation for both cultures simultaneously through learning more about both of them and being able to see those overlaps. because the other one that I love, and Eddie Gardner talked about it, is the idea of salmon ceremonies. There is overlap between the idea of a salmon ceremony and the idea of grace, the idea of praying before you eat and giving thanks for your food before you eat, and the idea of us all coming together as a community, having that first salmon, sharing that amongst the leaders of the community,

and then putting the bones back into the water and showing that appreciation to the idea of sitting at home and praying and thanking, God or Jesus or whoever your religious person is for the food that you're eating. And when I see, and I don't know if you've seen this, people who care about the environment conservationists, when they start saying, I'm going to go vegan because I don't want something else to have to die for me to live. To me, I think of, well, indigenous people, we found a way to live with having to kill the bear or the salmon. We found a way to find our role within this ecosystem, this responsibility.

And when you kill that animal, that fish, that life, you have now a responsibility that you've taken on now that you've done that. You have to utilize all of it. You have to give thanks for it. You have to understand your relationship with the natural environment and your role within this ecosystem. And I hope that that makes people go forward in a better direction, that after you say your grace or you give your thanks, that you are now a more humble, responsible person. And I just, I'm always grateful to learn about these things from individuals like yourself. because you get that deeper understanding. Yeah.

So moving forward, I'm interested to know about your thoughts on salmon ceremonies. Can you tell us from your perspective what you've experienced through those? Okay, the first salmon ceremony, the very first one, or the place that it used to take place was actually up in, yeah, like Wilson Duff collected this. And he said that at the place that's known as IAM, he said that's the very first, Harry Joseph was his in. and said that's where the very first salmon is caught. It's actually right where there's a fishing rock there at Eam, in between where Tilly Guterres of the Jackson's fishing ground is and Alan Guterres' fishing ground from Uwahas, their fishing rock.

And there was kind of like archway. And Tilly said they used to lower them down to that archway. Somebody by rope to catch the first salmon. And, of course, when they caught this first salmon, and then you had to cook it and share it with everyone. Not just your own family, not just your own community. You had to spend word out for everyone. So you have to share that with as much people as possible.

So that's a really important part of it, is sharing it with as much people as possible. And you think about the largest ceremony, first salmon ceremony we had at Kolitza was about 350 people. So you think about 350 people eating one salmon, right? We'd have a bunch of other salmon for the feast later, but that one salmon has to be shared. Right, so we're actually using those little ketchup cups and putting little pieces of salmon in there and sharing it.

So that's the first part of it. The second part of what was taking care of the bones. Okay, so you ask everyone there, if they come across bones to bring them back, we put a basket in the middle of the gathering place there, and then they come and return the bones back to that basket. The next important thing is, is what do you do with those bones? Well, the bones are returned back to the river. And we're taught that you need to have a leader, spiritual person, a youth, and an elder, those four. Just those four, you can have many other people as you want.

Those four are the important ones to go down to the river. So usually after the feast is done, and then that's when those four go down to the river and do that work. And then while, and the youth is usually one that's asked to return the bones. And the youth meaning, I was told by the elders anywhere from five to seven years old at age. Can you tell us about the other people that you said a spiritual person and you differentiated that from an elder? Could you, could you elaborate on that? Well, some elders aren't spiritual, right? Some, like a spiritual person that actually knows how to do spiritual work like the vehicles or Shulam or somebody that does that kind of work, right?

And so, and even with elders, you have elders who are old people. You also have respected elders. There's a difference there. Right. So you respected elders are the ones that have a lot of knowledge and are continuously sharing with you that knowledge, right? And so they're respected elders. Then you also have old people who don't necessarily have things that they can teach them other than their lifelong history. I mean, they'll always have history that they can talk about.

But when you look at aspects of the total culture and history, that's what you're looking for, for elders that are able to share that, right? So you also have to have one of the leaders, elders, built a person, on the youth, those of the fore. So as the bones are being returned back to the river, a prayer is said. It doesn't have to be out loud. You just say it in your head. A lot of things that we do is just in their head. We don't say it out loud.

Okay, and you say a prayer in your head, and a prayer is said, and that's usually what I was doing. I'd be beside the youth and the elders, they're putting it into the water. And saying a prayer is, they have to say a prayer for the river, thanking the river for bringing the salmon, And being that river that the salmon can come up, prayer to the salmon, thanking them for coming back every year. So they're actually paying disrespect to them so that they come back every year. That's what you're hoping. This ceremony is ensure that they come back. And then the last one, of course, is Chichel Siam, the creator, saying a prayer to the creator for thanking him for creating the salmon and, you know, allowing the salmon to come up every year.

So once you've done that, then that's pretty well for salmon ceremony. Right. Okay, let's get into some of your books because I think that that is a really valuable area because you've built up so much knowledge that people can go back to. They can learn more about, they can educate themselves if they're interested in what you've talked about today to continue to development. I know you brought them. Do you want to walk through each book and let us know?

Okay. Let me just move them up here. And this isn't all of them. This is a few of them. The ones that I've been directly involved in, I guess, is probably going. I should say. Well, this is the first one that we did. You're asked to witness.

I'm going to do this like this. Perfect. Yeah. So this is you're asked to witness. It was 1997, I believe, we produced that one. Basically what it was is different aspects of Stalo history, right? And what was happening at that time is we were being asked to go visit students because There's no other publication out there in the different areas of the provincial curriculum.

And so we worked along with Gwen Point. Gwen Point is involved with the education, really involved at that time, meeting with all the different groups up and down the valley as a teacher. And then, of course, Keith Carlson was our historian. And so he has one that kind of edited this book. And so we think we had like, I can't remember 17 different chapters. And I think in the end, we only published 13 of these chapters. And so this was done to provide a reference material for the schools.

And so we actually have a teacher's guide and we actually have a teacher's kit. And we wanted to ensure that it was being used as well. So that's why we also, Gwen also made arrangements to meet with teachers, talk with them about how to ensure that they felt comfortable teaching this in the schools. right and then so so that was pretty important important to us so that's the first the first one so it has different things in there about veterans about the land question uh all kinds of 13 different subjects i believe right um the second one was this one so this is called um i am stalo and so this is about my daughter katherine actually so that's your your cousin okay because her mom and your mom were your first cousins.

So she's your second cousin. Right. So anyways, we realized, after we did this, oh, this one was for grade 10, 11, and 12s. Okay, so that was the target audience. And we realized that, again, meeting with Gwen, realizing that grade four was the provincial curriculum required that there was, you know, to talk about culture and history in that grade. thing was that we realized is that they were teaching about the Haida and the Inuit in grade four. And we felt that if you're here in Stala territory, you should learn about the Stala.

And so we actually look at this book. It actually follows the format of the provincial curriculum book that they have. And so we follow the same format. And that's why you read through it and you see it talks about all across Canada and they kind of focus in and they start talking about the Stalo. Now, the thing is, at the beginning, we were doing like a fiction, fiction book. But we were totally going against the grains of Stala culture,

Stala oral history by creating fiction. Because you don't make things up. We are not allowed to make things up. You know, when we do oral footnoting, we have to say it the way the elder told us. You know, that Frank Malway actually talks about that in the first chapter of this, the importance of maintaining the importance of maintaining the

integrity of the oral history, telling it the way you're told, right? And so we started making, I think we worked for about two weeks, and we just kept running into the wall by trying to make up a story, trying to make up a name of a village, try to make up names of people, and finally we said, we can't do this. We've got to do something else. We've got to actually pick somebody that's in grade four and do a book on that person. So my daughter at that time happened to be in grade four. I was part of the part of the team working. and she's actually related to Gwen Point as well

and so we picked my daughter and then so we did all these interviews and things and recorded important parts of her history and so it's all about her looking into culture that's the fiction part of it is that's the only fiction part is the homework that she was given

to look into it but everything else in there is all that's all is this when you met Keith Carlson because you guys have been working together for a very long time. I think we met in 93 or 94. Right. And this is like four years after. Wow. And so what has your relationship, just to take a brief pause, what has your relationship been like with Keith? How did you guys meet? And you've been on this journey together, written different books. He's done speaking engagements here in the Valley. What has that relationship been like? Well, he's my best friend, for sure,

very close to my children, because we're best friends. And he spent a lot of time coming to my place from the salmon barbecues, coming to birthday dinners, that sort of thing. And my children actually call him and she's an uncle and auntie, because we're so close. And it's not really their uncle and auntie by blood, but by respect. It's a good way to show respect. So they call them uncle and auntie. And Keith and I, it's what we call. I think we refer to that in this book, or place book, What Sustained Conversations is what he calls it, refers to it as.

And it's important, I think, that people that come and do these different studies with us, that they maintain a very close relationship, sustain conversations. You can't just come in, do something, and then you're out, right? You've got to maintain a friendship. And that's what this is all about, like these people that are in this book. Oh, that's towards the new ethnic history. If you look at these people that are the authors in these book, and you'll notice, you'll see that they're still maintained friendships here within the stall.

some of them are the teachers way off some other place, but they still maintain their friendship, right? And so that's what we talk about, sustained things. You can't just, you can't think that you're going to go visit an elder and talk to them, you know, for one or two hours, then all of a sudden you have all the answers to everything in the universe. You can't do that, right? You have to develop a relationship with them.

And I understood that right at the beginning. And so when Randall Paul, I used to work with Randall Paul, when him and I first started working together, that's the thing that we came up with. We said, okay, when we're going to go interview an elder, we're going first without a tape recorder. It's just get to know them. And how are we going to get to know them?

Well, we're going to talk to them. First of all, we're going to talk about ourselves. Like, who are we so they can relate to us? Because we knew at that time that you needed to talk about your family so that they get to know you. Then we talked about them. Where were they born? Where did they go to school?

Where did they live? Where did they fish? Things like that. Because we're trying to get an understanding as to what they can offer to us, right? And then once we kind of know that, then it kind of provides us with a foundation to, when we return back to them, to ask them other questions, because we know, okay, you lived over here. When you fished over here, where did you fish then? Or when you lived over , where did you pick berries and, you know, that sort of thing, right? And then, but you got to

establish these long-lasting relationships. So we always go back, like I went back to Tilly Gatoris, I don't know how many times, 30 times, maybe more, Dallingereris, same thing, Peter Dennis Peters, Bill Pat Charlie, Ralph George, constantly meeting with Rosaline, constantly meeting with Elizabeth Hurling and others, right? So you can't get everything all at once. You have to have to have the sustained conversation. Because the other thing is, too, is we realize that some of these subjects that when you go talk to an elder, sometimes these are subjects that they've never thought about for a long time, or it might be something that they don't do anymore right and then so when you go and question them about it they might not be able to share

everything with you at the first meeting right because they're because you're just asking questions and they thought about that for you know 30 years or something and and and then when you leave what happens is they'll remember something and they're oh I should have told them this or something that so we knew that was happening so that's why we'd always go back again and we use that as we say oh this we just want to review what you shared with is just the transcript here's copy the transcript news on the talk make sure that we got everything right but also at the same time they're going to go oh right after you left the thought of this and this and this so you always learn more right and so you're always constantly like you're always constantly learning you can't

you know you can't just learn everything from the elders once you know because they had a lifetime of learning and so what they carry is a lifetime of learning and even though I look at these elders that I've interviewed over the course of the years I've never gotten everything off of them Yeah. Never. I probably just got a drop in the bucket. I mean, I think the most I've learned from was probably late Rosalie and George. I am a lot. I learned a lot off her, but I don't think I got everything off of her. She just had so much knowledge, and she had such a commitment to teaching. Like she shared a story with me once where she said that some of these other elders were approaching her and told her, why are you telling them everything? You shouldn't be telling them everything. You should hold some of the information back. Right. And I think it is because those elders that were telling her that probably didn't have a lot. to share anyways, right? And so Rose Lean was getting a lot because she was sharing so much with us. And it was interesting.

Really a lot of respect for her response to that. She goes, how am I going to or how are my grandchildren going to learn if I don't tell them everything? She said, I'm going to tell everything, right? So she didn't listen to that L or she's going to tell everything. And that's how she treated. That's how she was. When I interviewed her, no matter what you asked her about,

she always was trying to help. That's the big fear, right, is that we're protective to a certain extent of the cultures and traditions because there's certain things you want to hold what's considered sacred, but we're at a time, we're at a point where when we start losing people, we start losing those ties, that connection, that understanding. And there's a balance to be found, and it's tough to find. Yeah, but there is private knowledge, too. You do, families do have private knowledge. Families have certain recipes to smoke salmon or certain ways of doing

different things, right? And that's the private knowledge that they retain, right? But then, you know, they'll share that with their children to make sure that their children have that. And, you know, you have your favorite people that you have for dried salmon. Like I have my favorite, you know, where I go get my dried salmon or who I get my smoke salmon off. You know, like who's the best butcher and that sort of thing, right? And you look at that. It's, yeah, that's the private knowledge that they have or the private expertise that they retain. Yeah.

Like Kirkie Douglas, his butchering of winddried salmon. It is, like, totally the best. Like, I've never seen anyone cut salmon like he cuts it. And when you get salmon off him, he doesn't thin it. A lot of other people will thin it. They take that strip off. It doesn't look like he does that. He just cuts it.

And then when you shake it, all the strips kind of fall over without touching each other. And it has to dry like that. And you get salmon, like, when you buy salmon from Lillowet or Litton, it's like, even though they have the better weather up there, and they should be able to dry salmon the way corkey does. They don't, they cut a thin strip off, and then you have really thin dried salmon like that thin. You get corkies and it's like that long.

So that's what you call expertise. You recognize expertise like that when you start seeing it. You start looking at all your different sources. Right. Right, yeah. Awesome. And so let's continue with the books. Okay.

Which one's next? So we finished with this. Yeah, finish with that one. Talked a little bit about towards a new ethnic history. So back in 1998, again, this is under the guidance. Oh, just pulled the microphone up. Back in 1998, along with the guidance of Grand Chief Clarence Pannier, I think this is actually, I think dedicated to Grand Chief Clarence Plarence Prenner,

because of his recognition of the experts that we need to involve. Okay, not only recognizing our elders as experts, but he also knew that in Western society, they're also experts. It's our expert archaeologists, expert historians, expert genealogist, that sort of thing. And recognizing the need for those experts, we have to go to court about Aboriginal rights and title. Right. So we recognized early on that we needed an archaeologist, so we hired an archaeologist. Then later on, we hired a historian.

And then that's how this all started with the ethno history. When you look at our history, that's what this talks about, it talks about how anthropologists were doing all this different work than historians come in, but historians were mainly focused on looking at written records, right? And they realized, historians then realized a bunch of them, Keith talks about that in this book, about all these other historians that realized the importance of actually talking to the people themselves involving them. And so that's why the ethnicity. So when they come out here, yes, of course they do history in the archives, do an archival research. But also, they also go out and interview people today to talk about, you know, this thing that they were looking at 200 years ago in these documents, how does that fit in with people today, that sort of thing, right?

So that's what the whole ethnic history is about. And so when they come out, they actually spend one week living in the home of a host family, like Diane, Kevin Gardner is probably the, I think they're acknowledged in here as well, because they've opened their home. up to many of these students over the course of the years. And more than one, they'd have like two, three, maybe three, maybe more. I don't know, at least three people that they would host in their home. So they lived there for a week. And then they would go live in the longhouse for three weeks. And then every morning they had these different classes in session.

And then the afternoons, they would carry on with the research. Right. And then the other important thing is that this is research that's important to us as well. So we play a role over the course of the year. So Dave Shepi, myself, back then as Tia Halstead, she's now retired. But we were in David Smith before her, we would look at the different subjects that we were interested in. And, of course, Grand Chief Clarence Pinner, with his connection with the leadership, he knew what sort of questions the chiefs had about certain things, right?

So we wanted to look at research that could be helpful to us. But at the same time, we wanted to make sure the students did a good job of it. So we wanted to make sure that it fit in their interests as well. So we have this big list of possible research topics. And then we'd have a meeting with the students. Well, John Lutz from University of Victoria, Keith Carlson, who was then at the University of Saskatchewan, they would meet with their students and talk about their interests, and that's how they would come up with a topic.

And so the topic was always something that we always had. And usually the topics ranged from biographies of certain people or a history of a place like E. is one of them history of Swali different things like that right so that's what this is that's what this is all about so we took I believe

12 12 or 13 of those essays and put them in this book so this is the latest book that is the newest book right yeah yes and then this one power of place problem of time Keith Carlson mainly well is the main author

but it's really cool because what he's done in here is looking at the different parts of our culture and our history. And again, this is something that I think he actually dedicates us to myself because of the sustained conversations again. So it's really clear to me that he thought very deeply, which is what we need. people think deeply. You can't just think shallow. You know, and he thought very deeply of these things that we were researching. And he'd look into everything. Like, that's another thing, is looking into all the different materials that are out there. And that's what I learned when I first met, I'm like the research that he did on the lynching of Louis Sam. Right. He talks

about that in here as well. And so all these different things he talks about in here, and it's the conversations that him and I would have. And I remember, sometimes he would ask questions that was really clearly thought about, because there'd be questions that I didn't have an answer for, you know, because I'm not, well, I don't know, getting close to being an elder, but I don't consider myself an elder yet. But in anyways, he'd ask questions, and I'm just like, oh, Keith, like, you got to give me some time to think about that, and I'll get back to you tomorrow, right?

So I'd have to think about the question that he asked, but just based on his question, you know that he looked into it and thought a lot about it, And that's why his question is so in-depth, right? And so that's what we need is people like that that can do that kind of work, really think about it, right? And I know right now there's people out there that really think that non-native people shouldn't be doing our research, right? And there's, it should be First Nations.

Well, I don't think so. You know, I mean, we have our own private knowledge that we retain and that sort of thing, but, you know, we have to recognize the expertise as well. And then when you look at the biases that you could have as an individual, Right. And then we end up going to court and you have an expert that's acknowledged by Western Society, an expert that's carried on with sustained conversations and developed relationships. Like Keith doesn't just have a friendship with me. He's got friendships in Siebert Island, friendships in Chehalis, friendships in Suwali. So there's all these different families that he's maintained, you know, either met with their elders and their elders have passed away. And now he maintains a friendly relationship with the family of those people, those elders, right?

Right. So same sort of thing. So that's what this is all about. So different topics that he covers in their power of place problem of times. It's basically all about our different parts of our history as the colonizers come in. You know, she talks about pre-contact. And he talks about the reserves, talks about the flood, talks about the flood, talks about the flood, talks about the flogiam, talks about the lynching of Louis Sam. So all these different things that are in there. Sorry about the flood. The flood? The great flood. The great flood. We have our own stories about the flood. Could you tell us about that? I've heard the Kwokwaka Walk story that they tied all their canoes together and the water rose, but can you tell us the flood story from here? Far as I know, there's seven places, seven mountains that were sticking up when the flood happened. And so the flood happened, very similar to the Christian Bible flood, I guess, but different. There's no Noah's Ark. So anyways, my understanding of there's seven mountains that were sticking up, I don't have them committed to my memory, but I know there is seven of them.

written down somewhere. But one of them is Sumaz Mountain. Well, the English name is Sumaz Mountain, but our name for it is Kwakweyak, which means sticking up. Well, why is it called sticking up? Right. So that's the other thing. When you look at place names, you look at what is the place name? What does it mean? But quite often, you need to know the significance. That's why when you look in this book here, the Atlas, place names that I talk about in here. We talk about the significance of it because you have to know what the significance of it because sometimes if we give you the name and the meaning it's still like well why did they call it that right an example i always use is that calls okay that's an important part of your history is the

name of the village in hope that was called calls it means bear or bald so if i tell you that there you go now you know tecalls bear or bald okay well you're probably one well why to call it that. Right? So right away, well, why? Because that's the significance of it. And so there's a big picture there from that. Right. And so every place name, there's always an opportunity to learn bigger things, more things about that name or the activities, things that happened there. And that's what my place name tourists are all about. I don't just talk about the place. I don't just go to this is a call. It's Maribald. Okay, let's go. You know, it's not that. It's there's lots of things that you can talk about. So when you look at the calls, why is it called? It's a calls. And so

What I found out is that there's a strong wind that blows there that doesn't allow the branches to grow on one side of the trees. Well, how does a strong wind come in? Well, it's the, I think Brent Galway talks, the elders told him this. It's the mountains as you move from Chilawak up to Hope, the mountains close in. And it creates a funnel effect. And also at Hope is where the river runs north to south, and it gets the hope, it turns and runs. east to west. So it's also the turning point. And so when the mountains close in, you have the strong breeze that blows from downriver, blows upriver, and it's constantly blowing right there

in hope. And so that wind is always blowing, and it never gives the branches on the west side of the tree a time to grow. So anytime you go there, take a look at the tops of the trees, and you'll see that it's bare or bald. Yeah, so that's what calls us about. I find the flood story. That's where things get like you have to start to get on board. You can't just think it's a story because the likelihood that there were floods

like archaeologists have all kind of concluded that there was this flood. And so when there's that interweaving between the stories of the environment around us and this flood, it's where like we know this happened and we know

there's a story that goes with it. It's where that cross pass where how far can you go? How much of this information should you get on board with? And that's where I think that that door is open to believing more in these ideas and getting more invested in being like, okay, well, the fact of the matter, what we know scientifically is starting to overlap with the stories that people have. How much of those stories can you now, do you now have to grapple with are true?

Because there's information in there that is scientifically true. How far does that go? we don't know we don't have the exact answer to that um your response would likely be uh i believe it full with my whole heart um and i i agree with that but for those skeptical people it's like now this door is open and you can't close it because there's scientific facts here that you can't brush away as silly superstition anymore yeah um and so this is the uh the one about place names correct yeah so this part of it it's an atlas stalocale's historical atlas so This book, how it all started off was we were trying to come up with something that we needed to return back to the community.

So that was what we're talking about. Because one of the things we realized with these first two books, what was happening was we're constantly going out to our elders, interviewing our elders, and, you know, certain questions to come up with these different chapters, right, in these book, or else even things that don't appear in a book. It's research that we're doing for court case or whatever, right? And what we found was that the elders are treating us or putting us in the same category as early anthropologists and early linguists who would come into the whom interview people and leave and not come back. I think linguist Jim Harris from University of Western Washington was a good example of that. I heard of him a lot about him going there, setting.

up his tent and interviewing Dan Milo, collecting the language and packing his stuff up and leaving, made a career out of being a linguist using the Helkmalem language. And when he retired, he came back and donated it all to us. But I think that's one of the examples the elders are talking about because you have us linguists, comes in camps, and gets all this information, the elder, leaves and doesn't come back, doesn't say anything more. Right. And so the elders are kind of feeling the same way with us because they're going, yeah, what are you guys doing with this information? come here and you interview us? You know, like I said, I've interviewed Tilly Guterre many, many times, and Keith has interviewed other elders many, many times as well, right? And so it's

like, we're getting this feeling that they're putting us in that same category. And then so Clarence Padena said, well, we need something. We need to give something back to our community. You know, we're taking all this information. We need to give it back. So that's what we're looking at. I think we looked at three different books. I can't remember what they were, but there's three of them books that we were looking at. We were looking at a coffee table book. I don't know if you ever seen the Nishka book. It's a big coffee. It's a book same size as Atlas, maybe bigger, but it has all these big colored pictures of different things. One of the things that addresses that whole stereotypical image of how there were Indians, then there's white

people, and there were no more Indians, you know, no more First Nations, right? So, and that's how you see how books are lined up. Books, they still do that. They still do the put the native part at the front, and then all of a sudden, oh, the native part's over now. Let's talk about the the colonist period, right, with no interaction between natives that, you know, fitting in there. And so that coffee table book, that's the Venetka coffee table book, was in color, color pictures to show that their culture is alive. So we're not talking about something 200 years ago that's not there anymore. It's alive and wow, and here's people, you know, in doing that.

So that's what we thought of. The other one that we were looking at was the Stein, the Stein Valley book. And the cool thing about the Stein book is that you can, open it anywhere to any one of the pages and you can read something. There's little things in the corner about something else. So you don't have to read it cover to cover. You don't even have to read that chapter, the whole chapter. You can just flip it open and there's something there that you're going to learn something.

You have a minute or so read this thing. You learn something, right? And so we thought about that as well. And then they also realized Clarence, Grand Chief Penner was dealing with through the chiefs with the whole consultation and accommodation things. different developments when they came in, they had to consult with us, and they had to accommodate, you know, our Aboriginal rights and title. And so that was right at the beginning, all that stuff was happening. And also, we were working on these different things with different

university students, all this over the years, you know, with some of the stuff that came out in this. Yeah. But also before that, so we were having all this reports and things that were piling up in our archives. And so we thought, well, we need to do something with. that and give that back to the back to the community. So that's how this atlas came about and recovered. So we wanted a big book like the Nishka one. We wanted the layout very similar to the Stein Valley one. And so that's why we have this one. And then of course we come up with all these different things. So different people involved in it like John Lutz involved in, you know, in the labor and Keith Carlson, a bunch of different things. I was involved in the place

names, Deschepi was involved in the archaeology, you know, so many different things in there. There are 725 Helcmalem place names, and that's where my expertise comes in. Also talks about the origin of the Shwaipe, also talks about Stalakum, supernatural creatures. And the sclalicum, that's an interesting chapter, how that came about, was I was interviewing Rosaline and Elizabeth Hurling because we had a deadline, right? And we needed to get these place names into this Atlas. And I remember the day came where, you know, the editorial board just said, okay, that's it, Sonny, you've got to stop. And I just said, I keep finding out more stuff.

And I'm still learning. Right? This is 20 years ago, and I'm still learning about place names. Right. So we had to cut it off at that one point. But anyways, I was interviewing Rosalene and Elizabeth. And whenever we could talk about a place, they'd start talking about a sclalicum, which is in our language, which means like a supernatural creature.

They talk about a slalikin with these places. This one time, we were talking about this place, and they were talking about Stlalak. Again, Elizabeth Theron kind of looks at me, and she goes, Are you going to put that in your book? I put one in my book. She said, the Slalakum. You young people, you go out into the mountains, go out under rivers and the creeks, and you see something or hear something, makes the hair rising on the back of your neck,

and then you come ask us, what is that? Well, that's the Stalakum. You young people need to know where those slalikam are. So you should have that in your book. So I brought it up to the editorial board and everybody got a little excited, yes, let's do it. So yes, I went back and interviewed Rosalene and Elizabeth and from their memories.

It's not a comprehensive study of Stalachem, and we've never updated it. But there are other Stalakum that are out there that aren't in this Atlas because we just have little time and we just took what they had as Stalakum and put a map in there and talked about what Stelalakum is all about. That is brilliant. Have you ever thought about doing like a lecture series on this?

because we're just two and a half hours in, and we're not even in the depths of it. You have had to cut short some of your thoughts because of the condensed nature of this three-hour interview. And so have you ever thought about, like, we're in oral culture, and that's kind of why I like the podcast. I love listening.

I'm not a huge, I read, but it's not my favorite activity. I love going for walks and putting on a podcast and learning. Have you ever thought about doing like a lecture series with UFE or a podcast or something like that? I do, but not a lecture series, more of just a single lecture. And a lot of times I have different universities that call me in. And it usually takes me three hours to just do an intro to Stolo culture and history. Yeah.

Right. So basically I talk about Stalo, who are the Stala. What is our territory? You know, work well, much. What is our language, right? The three different dialects and different travel groups. What is Shwo'iam? What is Guelquil?

What is Shuli, you know, the spirit or life force? and what are sclalakum. Um, talk, give examples of different sclalcum. We have examples of different schochayam, different squalquil. Uh, talk about the Schweigwe and the winter dance. Talk about the, oh, what's missing? The little people, the Mimistilch, that live in the forest, and then the little people that live underwater, the Salmach,

because that's where the Shweigwe mass comes from, comes from the Salmach. So yeah, all these things, I, that's what I do. And so the Upper River Tour is the one I recommend, although I had someone from the Chilawak tribe didn't want me to say that because the Up River Tour, from Chilawak, up to Yale, up to Lady Franklin Rock, or Tachlis, we're gritting his teeth. From there, back down, takes seven hours. And I talk for seven hours non-stop, right from the, when we pull out onto the three-way, do five different stops. So I stop, stop there at Hunter Creek, stop there at floods, talk about the Thunderbird Mountain. go up to Coquah Lake, go to Suckers, Suckers Creek, Teltit campsite, and then up to Lady Franklin, and then back down the number seven highway. I even have to ask the bus driver to go 80 kilometers

an hour because if he goes faster than that, I'm talking too fast. And I'm trying to get as much as I can in that tour. Yeah. Right. So yeah, that's a lot of stuff to share about culture. I just think of the setup of like a 12 week, like a 12 week course, a typical university course, three hour lectures with you being able to share this information because you do seem like pressed for time in order to share all of this information. And I think that that's, that's frustrating to someone like myself who would be grateful to see you be able to do perhaps a podcast where you're doing three hour episodes each on starting with each topic that you're interested in and breaking these things down because I'm interested to know where the

passion comes from do you enjoy what you do like this seems to really motivate you seems to bring out an energy in you um i've had uh talked to people who they write a book but they don't they don't have that spirit in it where they're like they this is what they wanted to do this is the information they wanted to get out there so where does that passion come from well a couple of places oh i hope i can talk about it but anyways one is um i well it's hard Give me a minute. The first one happened when I was separated from my first wife and really depressed. like so so very much in love very hurtful and I was living in the home where three of us

all separated from our partners and we're living in the big brand new house but it was empty there's nothing in there we didn't have a table didn't have a couch we had a TV I just had a mattress on my floor and my bedroom because I, you know, separated and left everything. And I was very depressed. And every night I would go to the Seabert Cafe and stay there until 4 o'clock in the morning, go home, sleep for a few hours, get up at 7 because I just couldn't stand staying in that big empty house because it just reminded me of my big empty life. So this one night I got home at 4 o'clock around 4.30, I don't know, and I tried to go to sleep.

And I was so depressed that my mom came to me in a dream. And it seemed so real because I was laying there in my bedroom doors in front of me. And she comes in, she goes, Sonny, you're so sad and so unhappy here. You should just come with us. You'll be good here. And I remember waking up and sitting up, and it's almost like she went behind the door to hide. I jumped up and running him, looked around there, and, of course, she wasn't there. So I laid back down and trying to go back to sleep, and just on the edge of sleeping,

and I'll sudden my dad come from the East deceased already, too. And he comes in his son, it's no good for you to be here. You're so unhappy. She'll just come with us. You'll be happy if you come with us. And again, I woke up and jumped up, and he ran behind the door to, and I jumped up and looked, and he was not there. laid back down again I'd lay in there and did my best friend the late John Hans who passed away to

Hicum. Albert! Albert! He's you're so unhappy here. You should just come with us. You'll be really happy if you come with us. And then he did the same thing. Disappeared. And I never thought too much about that. It wasn't until my

nephew, the late Derwin Peters, passed away and their family was getting together and talking you know, about that tragic loss in our family. And I shared that dream with the late Danny Charlie, very respected man in my life. And the late Buster Joe. And I knew this because my dad had told me before,

but I'd forgotten about it, and that's what he said is sometimes when people dream about people that are gone or deceased, that they actually come to you in their dream and take your spirit away, and then you actually die in your sleep. So I'd heard him talk about that, but I'd forgotten about it, and it wasn't until I shared this dream. I remember Buster and Danny looking at each other and looking, they took turns talking, and they said, you should have died that night. They said your ancestor spirits, your loved ones came and they came to take you. They're going to take you with them. So you should have died, but you didn't. So that means you have a responsibility. You have something to do. There's some work that you have to do. So we don't know what it is,

but there's something that you have to do. And so that's why they saved you. That's why they left you. So I will think of that. That's a driving force. and the other one was interviewing South Amethick again and we were talking about place names and far as I was concerned he was very helpful with the place names that he was sharing but all of a sudden he goes you know what sonny and what

I really wish your grandfather was here been talking about my grandfather like Robert Dennis Peters Bob Dennis, as he's no saxophone player. And I says, oh, really, why is that? He says, well, the information I'm sharing with you is a drop in a bucket compared to what your grandpa could have shared. He said, your grandpa knew all the place names from Yale all the way down to Muscoeum. He knew them all.

He could have shared a whole bunch with you. So he said, I really wish that he was here. You know, so that really stuck in my mind that was actually following my grandfather's footsteps. So that's another one. Another one is, keeps me blind, is knowing that I have ancestor spirits that are watching over me. And it was actually an Indian doctor from the States. Oh, can't think it's the name now. But as a young boy, I remember my dad, when we lived in Svazam, my dad would always go get an Indian doctor, Shalam.

a different word for them up there and get them to do work on the family. And this woman from Lillowet, tiny little woman, he always go up and get her. And she'd stay with us for a week, two weeks, depending on how long she did work. She'd work on my dad, working on our mom, work on us as kids, and do all these things that an Indian doctor does write with a bowl of water and handkerchief and, you know, different things that she did. And I was really intrigued with her. I really fell in love, really loved that woman and respected her.

for everything that she did for us and what she represented, and even though we couldn't speak to each other. And I remember I was so intrigued with her that when I'd get home from school, you know, I'd go sit on the floor. She slept on the couch. We had a couch that pulled it open into a bed, and that's where she slept. And she didn't speak any English whatsoever. But I also intrigued with her.

When I'd get home, I'd go sit on the floor in front of her, and we'd just look at each other. And, you know, I'd ask her, I can't remember the Thompson word for a cigarette. She'd go, hey, and so I take her tin can and take some papers, roll her up, some cigarette, about 10 cigarettes, and I put them in a can cover it, put it in fire feet. And she'd grab one and start smoking it. Then I'd ask her if she wanted to drink of water, say the Thompson word for water. And she'd go, hey, so I'd go in the kitchen, grab a glass of water, and bring it to her.

And she'd grab it and have drink it. She'd sit there holding the water and have a cigarette and looking down at me smiling every once in a while, you know. And, yeah, I'd just sit there. I was just so intrigued with her. And same with my grandfather, where I get my ancestral name, Nakhatsi. So my grandfather is a young boy who's known as, so he was born in 1864, he's known as Bukh. As he got older, he is known as Nakhatsi, which means sacred strength inside. If you look at the word Chaka is in there, the Thompson word Chaka means sacred, same as down here.

And then as he got older, he is known as Meshk. And Meshk means like a storyteller or a preacher. Well, he wasn't a preacher, but he was a storyteller. When the late New York talked about him, she said that he used to, she talked about him traveling up to Spence's Bridge. And then from Spencer's Bridge to Merritt, stopping at all the different villages along that way and sharing stories. So you can imagine back then, no radio, no TV. It's a pretty important job that he had. And he would stay one or two weeks in the same village.

And every night go to different houses, sharing stories. And about five or six years ago, I found out that he actually went up to Lillowet. I met an elder from the Okanagan. I think his last name was Tabasket. Anyways, I was talking about my last name. And when I mentioned Meshk, he goes, Meshk. And I said, yeah, he goes, yeah. He goes, yeah, he goes, oh, we used to come up here to the Okanagan telling stories.

I said, really? I said, I didn't know that. He goes, yeah. And he said, last summer, he said, I was up visiting one of my friends up in the Lillwit. And we started talking about Meshk. And he said that Meshk used to go up there telling stories too. So, really, I didn't know that. I just knew that he went from Spence's Bridge up to Merritt,

but now I find out that he tells stories up there, so it plays a big role in my life because of all the different things, accomplishments that he did, and that's why I lead an alcohol-free life because he was alcohol-free as well. And also I look to him for strong worth ethics to share with my kids, and quite a few of my kids have strong work ethics, and because he was a trap,

He had a trapline from Anderson Creek to East Anderson River. It took one week to get to that in. He had a cabin there, and then one week to get back. When he was 18, he moved up to Boston Bar because his mom was from Chiam. His father was from Nickman. And so, Anna York said that when he turned 18, he moved to Spusim. When he lived there in Spusim, because he wanted to be kind of in between and the Kutmus between his father's heritage and the stall off between his mother's heritage.

But then when he met his first wife, she was from Anderson Creek. So that's when he moved up there. Anderson Creek. And so when he moved up there, he lived across the river from where the Canadian Pacific Railroad is because the Canadian Pacific Railroad was built from 1882 to 1885. And he actually worked on building those. So if you ever go up there, you look across to the CPR side, you see those stone retaining walls. He actually worked on it. He used to cross by canoe to go across there and work there. Plus, New York said that he also worked for the hop-yard companies. He was, the hop-yard companies had given money. take a train way up on a canal or williams lake somewhere up that way hiring people giving them advances and buying their their ticket train ticket to come down to pick hops either in aegs here in sumas or tilwak area and so that was another one of his jobs and he was also the gold panter and that's one of the pictures that you can see there's an old archival photograph of my grandfather taken in front of lytton right at the confluence of the thompson and the

Fraser River. And you can see my picture, my grandfather in a white shirt, as I had on. He has a cradle rocker. And my grandmother behind him, and my uncle, David, right in front. And then my grand-aunt, Chet, in the background. And Mrs. Joe Brown is in there. The two other ladies, don't know, unidentified ladies. Anyways, that photograph is my grandfather when he was plaster mining, using a cradle rocker. Yeah. And so, so I get a lot of what do you call it inspiration inspiration from him and yeah when this Indian doctor from the States came up and did some work while we're at the Travel Council he was doing work and that's what Indian doctors do it's all about our spirituality

that's our spirituality is all about spirits like taking care of our spirits like who was it in Old Pierre I think it is talks about seven different spirits that we have And anyways, everything, it's all about that. So if you look at all the different protocols that we have, that's what it's about. When you leave a cemetery, you can't leave part of your spirit in there. So the late Edna Bob said, when you walk out of the cemetery, call yourself. So that's what I do. You don't have to call out loud.

She said, just say, call yourself in your mind. So basically what you're doing is collecting your spirit as you leave that cemetery. So when you're walking out the gate, in my mind they go, Nakhahatsi, come on, let's go. You don't need to be here. Let's go. Right, so I call my spirit and take it. And that's the whole thing with the residential school thing that's happening.

I'm really proud of my nieces and nephews and my daughter, because that's what they did. Camloops, they brought their canoe up there, and that's what they went and did. They actually believe that's a teaching that we have, bring home the ancestor spirits, right? And so they actually have aunts and uncles that with the school up there, and that's why they went up there,

and that's what they did. They did a ceremony. because they're really good with drums. They're really good singers. They have strong, powerful songs. And that's what they did. They called their ancestor spirits and brought their ancestor spirits home.

Right. So same with that Indian doctor when he was doing work on me. And I've never met him before. Kenny Moses, which is his name. Never met him before. And I remember this one day, Randall Paul and I went up to Yale.

Denise Douglas, she was kind of one of my supervisors back then. And it brought me a lot of guidance in some of the work that I do. Anyways, she told us, she called us, and she said that the CPR had a bulldozer up in Yale doing some work. And she said, we better go up and go check, make sure they're not disturbing any archaeological sites. So Randall fell, we jumped in the car, went up all the way up there. And sure enough, the bulldozer was there, but it is gone. But we could see the place where the bulldozer was working. Sure enough, it cut into an archaeological site because we went in there,

all the fresh turned over flattened dirt looking in there and sure enough there was artifacts in there and I remember picking up this artifact and I was holding it in my hand like this all of a sudden I started getting really sick like I wanted to throw up got a headache and my hands were shaking my legs were shaking I was so I thought I better put this back down so I put it back down on the ground so up and they're just standing here trying to collect myself because I was just all shaky and felt really sick and then randall Paul comes up to me He said, oh, I'm going to go over there and check in the bush. I said, okay.

And I did tell him what I was going through, right? And he left walking over there. And anyway, so we left there. A couple weeks later, my younger sister, Sue Harris came to visit in our office. Our office is downstairs in the old doctor's office. It's all travel council office. She asked how things are going, how's work going? And then I told her what happened.

And Randall Paul overhearing me and goes, oh, you too. And I looked at him. I said, yeah, that's what happened to me as well. really? He said, yeah, remember when I told you I was going to go check in the bush? I said, yeah. He said, well, I felt sick. He said, I thought I was going to get sick. I didn't want to throw up in front of you, so that's why I went into the bush. Anyways, so that happened. Kenny Moses is working on me. And yeah, never told the story to many people, so I don't know. Anyways, he says, you start working, and he says, oh, it looks like you went to a place where your

ancestors were. He's, I don't know what you're doing there, but you, you reach down and you pick something up off the ground, and you're holding it in your hand, looking at it. And he said, but when you put it back down, you left part of your spirit in that, in that stone that you're holding. He said, but don't worry, I went back there. I collected your spirit, I brought it back and put it back on you, so you should feel a lot better. See, and that's what they do. So watch Indian doctors that they're doing work. That's what they're doing is taking care of your spirits, right, seeing whether or not, because they'll look at you and figure out whether or not there's a bad spirit that's on you or if it's a good spirit. If they find it's a good spirit,

you know, they'll look at it, listen to it, all these different things and put it back on you if it's something that you need, or if it's something that's bad that's creating a lot of harm to you, then they'll take it and bring it to the window or the door, blow it out and say, okay, you didn't need that. That was really holding you back, right? So we got rid of it, so you should feel a lot better now, right? So that's the sort of thing. But anyways, the other thing he said was, oh, it looks like there's an old woman overlooking you on your left, over your left shoulder. She's always with you. Her spirit's always with you, watching over you. And he said, I don't know who she is. You probably know who she is. And I knew right away who it was.

And he says, yeah, because she's there watching over you. And you probably pray to her for guidance and help, which I do, like that. And that's that old Indian doctor watching over me. So it was really cool. Like, well, how does he even know about this old woman, right? And he said, oh, and also over your right shoulder, he said, there's an old man. He says, I don't know who it is. You probably know who it is. But he's always there watching over you as well. And he said, I think you probably pray to him as well when you need help.

And right away, I knew that was my grandfather, my dad's, dad, Antoine, where I get my name, Nechachachat Zipan. Right. Right. So, yeah, that's a little bit about the spirituality. And that's things that kind of inspire me. And the importance, I guess, of leaving a legacy for my grandchildren. well. That is an absolutely beautiful story. I just got lost in it because I think that it's so

important that people find something that matters to them that gets them out of bed that I'm sure that there's been a lot of a lot of work that's gone into all of this sleepless nights of worrying if you got it right or if you got enough information. You've worked hard to create different books, build positive relationships with other people. And that's what I want to see. I guess more of like I I'm interested to know do you have someone you feel that is going to be able to take up your mantle what you've built upon because it terrified me at the end of my conversation with with Mr. Gardner that he felt like he doesn't know where this is going to go that this is something he's poured himself into that he believes is so important for the Fraser

Rowley like when he started it he was like I'm the only one and like when I started it it was almost lost when I started and so for him to put on all that time and then feel like there isn't that next generation to take up the mantle. It left me concerned. And so do you feel like the work is going to continue? You talked about retiring. Yeah, I feel well. I think, well, right now, so my last year or two of working, the emphasis or focuses on recording, like I was just given the word the other day to carry on as a teacher or professor at the UFV who's getting work on the side to record me telling these stories at the different places right now that's something i didn't realize about seven

eight years ago because my was my thought was that we already have everything you got the atlas you know you got the place name you got the meaning you got significance what else is there and you know they kept talking about you know storing these or um what he called it documenting all these things about my tours. And I was going, why are they? Then I overheard Dave Sheppey. Somebody else was talking to him. I can't remember who it was, but I overheard him.

He said, yeah, we do. We do have the names. We do have the meanings. It's all in the out. We do have the significance. But what we want is what Sonny talks about. Because what he talks about, those places, that's what we need to record.

Right. And then I thought about it. And I went, oh, right. Because I don't just go there and just say, place name meaning significance place name meaning you know I tell stories about something to me that's important that gives an example of that place name or what that what that place is all about so that's what I realized is that's the importance of it so now that I understand that now my focus is to like I'm developing a training manual and now also we're realizing the importance of video and also

the importance of what those things called drones as well like like Last year, I spent some time with Raymond Louis and Justin Kelly from Shohamel and also with others from the office there. But recording names that are important to Shohamel, like I think I came up 26 or 27 places within the Teet tribe. And one of the things I realized is you can't capture a place with one photograph, you know, the meaning of the place. You actually need a drone. And so we worked with this fellow from Camelope, sorry, which I could think of his name right now. But he had a drone, and I told him that, like, there's a place up above where Kevin Gardnerfish is up by Union Bar. There's the three sisters there.

Well, I can't even think of the name now. But the three sisters, they were waiting on the edge of the river. One was in the water, two were standing on the land, and they heard that Chachal's Transformer was coming up. And when Chakal saw them, he knew that they were just being nosy. So because they're being nosy, that's why he transformed them into stones. Don't be nosy, like you should be out here, like just being nosy. So the one woman that was sitting in the standing in the water, she was transformed into what's known as sister rock,

and the other two sisters are transformed into these rock bluffs behind her up in the mountain on the east side of the east side of the river. And so in order to capture that, I thought using a drone, like you can't just take a picture and capture that, because when you think about Kechal's traveling through the river, he's in a canoe, right? And so I thought, well, if the drone could travel along the water, like as if you're in a canoe, and you get to these important places where something had happened, the best capture that would be being in a canoe, approach sister rock, you know,

and then kind of have the camera kind of go up into the two behind her. And so actually capturing all three of them in the same photo, but you just come up the river by canoe and then you come through these three rocks. I thought that would be like the best way to try to capture that. Same with an idea for, we haven't done it yet, but the calls, you know, try to capture the calls in the photographs. So everything I told you about the funnel effect of the valley, the river changing, the importance of that whole flat, try to take a picture of that.

You can't. You know, there's something missing. So I feel, again, that a drone would be really good where you're traveling up river again. because from the river perspective, everything is from the river perspective, getting out into hope, seeing the whole, seeing that where the river turns and seeing the trees are coming down that way, seeing the whole flat and then kind of up and then go right to a tree that has bear or bald. And then you capture the meaning of the calls.

And the calls isn't, you know, it's not just that tree. It's that whole flat and that whole village site there. Yeah, I think that that is necessary. I think that having the recordings that you guys have, I think that, like, I love what stole those signals doing, but I think we need more, more longer form. I think that I do believe people can handle a three-hour interview. I'm confident that particularly indigenous people, we say we're from an oral culture. I want to see more indigenous people like yourself doing podcasts where you're laying everything out long form. It's just talking. And that makes it so accessible for people when

they're driving, when they're cleaning their house. It's just so easy to consume the information. whereas with books, people are always trying to find the time. So I'm hopeful that seeing people like Stolo Signal, I know that Dan George has his own podcast. That gives me hope that we're going to have this information more readily accessible for people who want to learn more. Well, I'm really encouraged with the young man that actually works in their department.

It started a few months ago. And he's actually the late Tilly Gattaris's great grandson. And it's only recently that we have identified him, and he's very, he's totally into it. I think he probably gets his inspiration from his great-grandmother, because Tilly Gatoris, as a young girl, as part of her puberty training, she was brought and sat where Chachal sat at Tachlis. She was sat there and left there overnight. It was actually my great-grandfather was one of her elders who brought her there and sat her in that rock.

And she had to stay there the whole night as part of her puberty training. And once other elders realized that her responsibility was to maintain the oral history, the Shofiyam stories, the stories about Hechal's, elders just came to her. They're just telling her. And she said even from other territories, they're coming and telling her story. Once they heard that she was given that responsibility. So that's why a lot of the Shokwaiam places, there's always the Tilly guitarist version of that story. Right.

And so this young man from Chiam, well, he's a council member now at Chiam. just recently became a council member. His name is Ray Douglas. And he has a super keen interest. Like, you know, it's part of his job, but also it's part of his personal life. Like, I don't know, I think he might have felt that he is intruding too much. I kind of miss his text with every weekend. He'd text me or something, you know, message me on Messenger

and talk about something that he's looking into. Oh, this weekend I went and did this. And what do you think about this? And, you know, so he's got a really keen interest, you know, not just from his work point of view, but in his own personal, private time, he's looking into it, right? So I'm really, really thinking that he's the right person that he's going to carry this on. There are other people that have been identified in the past. I mean, my late cousin Nelson, Leon, was another one, but then he passed away a few years ago.

That was such a tragic, tragic loss to our communities. Like he was from Chehalis, he lived in Squawah. He worked down into the Surrey School District. He was involved with so many different aspects of stola culture and history, and had a keen interest and came out with me on some tours and stuff, but then, yeah, he was lost tragically. It's a very tragic loss. Another person is Tarrington Press from Squa. The only problem with Tarrington is that he's very good at what he does, so he's a good interpreter,

and he's very good at doing the interpretation for the Longhouse Extension Program there at Kokeliza, and also the what's called the Stakaya program, like he goes out to the different schools, and that keeps him very busy. And when he look at the people that he worked with, it seems like he's the outstanding person there. But that's the problem is that he's so busy there. He can't come.

Like he's supposed to come out with me and out on my tours and learn. He's come out in a couple of times, but it seems like his big focus and even his own staff there because of such an asset to that program, they hold him back. You know, we try to make arrangements for him to come and they go, oh, he can't go, he's staying here. Right, so he's really good that way.

But yeah, hopefully sometime when other people there fill his shoes, maybe he'll start coming out with me and to the broader area and start learning more. I know even that one morning he was supposed to be there, we're setting up a tour down by the Chilliwack River and we're supposed to meet, I think it was at 1 o'clock, and we're supposed to be in a couple of hours developing that tour because it is the first time

I was doing a tour down by the Chilawak River. And so I wanted to talk about things around us that we could point to. So when the kids come, because of the COVID thing, we're doing it outdoors, right? Yeah, and then he was late. I don't know. I can't remember why he was late, but I just kind of was wondering, well, he was not interested that much. I don't know. And so we didn't get to talk too much about the stuff that I found interesting for that one spot.

Because you can pretty well, I've done it for other schools, too. I can pretty well go anywhere that they want to meet and just look around and just talk about everything around. There's always something, you know, if you only got an hour or 45 minutes or sometimes just in half an hour, there's so much to talk about. Like there's a school down by behind the old UFB campus. I did a talk down there and it's only like half an hour or 45 minutes. And, you know, time just goes like that because there's so much history around any place. You can travel anywhere and often just stop, look around, and there's stuff to talk about tomorrow. Yeah, I think that we're so lucky with individuals like yourself and it sounds like there's potential others to carry

on this work because I think you set such a good example in so many ways because you haven't focused too much on it but your choice to stay away from alcohol and that decision I think it sets such a good example because I'm sure you know within Chihuahua we've lost to me some pretty pretty remarkable people who could have made a real difference in my own opinion like Julian Yali just always stands out to me as like an incredible light within within hope but within the lower mainland and the fact that she's not here and those moments are just so unfortunate to me and so for your decision to do that allows you to be here be 100% present share your knowledge build more knowledge and be 100% focused on this when you're meeting

with elders when you're working with people like Keith Carlson to be present and to really make sure that this information is here because those extracurricular activities they're they are a distraction that seem to eat away at people's ability to focus on what they care about. And so I think that that sets a good example. I think choosing to work to share this, like I think you said, one of the elders was dedicated to sharing this information. I think that's so important. And you've been willing to come on here. You've been willing to write books. You've been willing to meet with different stakeholders and try and find that middle ground so we can keep this information alive. And I think that that just sets such a good example. And we're lucky to have

individuals like yourself who are willing to take the time and to share your expertise. So I really appreciate you being willing to come on and share your information. And we just did over three hours. Wow. Doesn't seem like it.