STORIES / Okara’shòn:’a
Home wedding
My first dance was an adventure. Back then, they used to have what they call a dollar dance. The bride and the groom stand on the floor and they start playing slow music and people come up there and give the best man or maid of honour a dollar and he or she gets to dance with the bride or groom.
Going with Tradition
There’s a festival called the medicine ceremony. You take the seeds that you’re going to plant and you bring them to the Longhouse. You pass around the medicine and you drink it through your body.
Conservation
The white man grows only one kind of food and keeps growing it on the same land, he doesn’t give the land a chance to come back.
Working on bones
My grandmother used to work on bones. Not broken ones because broken ones are very hard to heal but she would work on their muscles.
Dancing softly
My grandmother and her sister performed at the Indian Village together and they did a dance called “Harvesting the Corn.”
Keeping it cold
My grandfather’s birthday is in the summer and he loved his strawberries. He loved his strawberry juice and his strawberry shortcake so he would have that for his birthday.
The strawberries are coming
Long ago, the people lived in small villages, sometimes bigger ones depending on the sizes of the families. And they lived in longhouses. There was an extraordinarily cold winter with a lot of snow and the people suffered.
Porch stories
When I was growing up, the families were much closer than they are today. They were closer because of the shared language and also because of the storytelling.
Women and Mother Earth
The most important thing in our culture is the women, not the men. We are only tools of the nation.
When the sap is going good
I used to work on maple syrup in Ganienkeh in 1977 till 1984. I had 1500 taps that I would tap myself. I started in February when there’s still snow on the ground and I had to go through every tree, drilling the holes, putting in the plastic taps that go down to the lines.
Jars of maple candy
In Ganienkeh, the Warchief, who was the main guy for maple, used to tell me, “Boil it longer”, because he didn’t like the fancy grade A syrup. It’s too light.
Dawned on me
I always remember how it started. I was working, it was very shady during those summer days. And all of a sudden, it dawned on me, what I wanna be.
Creation story
I don’t know if Spirit up there, somewhere, is watching over us. When things happen, you go back to your Creation Story, and Creation Story tells us that when we’re born, we come from Spirit World, and we come into this physical world to have an experience of what it’s like to be physical.
It’s all in your language
If you hear things in our language, and you wonder, “Why do we say this?” The language teaches you. It’s got your history. It tells your present day, and will tell you tomorrow.
The great goodness is already here
The Great Law of Peace: that’s somebody’s mumbled up translation. Kaianere’kó:wa, that’s what we call it.
Rock audition
There’s a Tlingit legend that if you don’t pass the knowledge, Creator will turn you into a rock. I don’t want to be a rock.