TREE TALK
by Gary MartinHappy May
How’s it going this month! I hope that all Moms had a great Mother’s Day!
We also have Memorial Day to honor and to reflect upon. Graduations are happening. Congratulations to all our special Headstart Friends! You’re a very special group every year! This is a good month for kids! On May 9, there was a fun Natural Resources Day with Inchelum School. (Photos this month.) Cathy DeSautel (in “retirement”) and her Washington State University Extension Program all-star team, put on a great event! Owhi Lake Kid’s Day with Nespelem School was May 11. (Photos next month.) We visited with Omak and Okanogan 6th Graders this month at Camp Progress and Camp Disautel. Students from Davenport and Odessa came to Owhi Lake for the Lake Roosevelt Forum’s Student Discovery Week. Nespelem 4th Graders are at Lost Lake Camp for a week. All these fun events and days of honoring, make for an exciting month! THANKS to everyone who help to make these events happen! Congratulations to all graduates! Take care and we’ll talk with you again next month. J
Fish & Wildlife Youth Coordinator
Way: My name is Aaron Carden; I am the youth coordinator for F/W. I travel across the reservation; I am learning the meaning of traditions, culture and identity. I spend time with our elders and our children so I’ve seen both sides of our reservation. They are two separate worlds yet they live side by side. If we as a people want to survive in the world as a tribe, we need to join as one to teach and learn our traditions in order to keep our culture and identity. Our people are a strong people. That shows when you talk with the elders and when you teach our children. We have fought the white man and his ways for so long that we continue to fight each other. This stops us from teaching our children the ways of our traditions and language. They have not learned right from wrong. Our children fight so hard to be individuals, yet they copy another person’s way in the music and the way they act. This is the white man’s world taking over our children. If we cannot get along, we will not save our traditions and language, we will be lost in this world. If you do not seek your culture, language and traditions you will not find them, and if you do not share your knowledge, no one will learn them.
Our people need medicine, not drugs and alcohol. The medicine is in the earth, you will find it in the roots, berries and the meat you eat. But our ways are changing. We need money instead to pay for our food, not skills to go out and gather the meat that swims upstream or that deer walking the hills. As I look through the window of our reservation, I see broken down young men from the drugs and alcohol. These men and women were once proud, now they lower their head following a poison given to us by the white man.
It is not wrong to learn other people’s ways, but it is wrong to forget or ignore who you really are. Instead of forgetting our culture to learn another, learn both cultures to be twice as strong. You will know what he does not, and you will learn what is in your heart and that it is worth fighting for. Our leaders need to learn these traditions so they can be proud to stand up for them, not to ask who wants money for the land, what little land we have been put on is worth fighting for. We need to be strong to take care of our children and they will take care of you when you need. I look for our traditions and culture in the history books, yet I find it is locked up. We as a people need to let others know who we are, let them learn about us and maybe that will help them understand, and they will believe we are worth fighting for.
Take your children’s hand; help them learn their people’s identities as a member of a tribe. Our people are lost and it will stay that way until we find our strength. The strength of a strong people, people that take care of the land and not own the land, Mother Earth will be here when we are gone and willing to share her knowledge to our children. Speak your language and you will hear her words. The white man does not know her language, so he does not hear her wishes. That is why our world is lost. TO LISTEN IS TO LEARN, TO SHARE IS TO TEACH.
Our ancestors befriended the white people, maybe to learn about a race they knew nothing about or to aid his burning in his heart (white man). They had a story to tell of mean people who wanted to take away their freedom and their culture. Now we have a story to tell, not just our tribe but all the tribes in North America. The whites came here in peace to get away from their king and his unruly ways, they wanted to live in peace, grow crops and live as a free people. They met the Indian people and told them we all could live in peace, all we need is your land, this land was not ours to give, we are the people of the land, we belong to the land not as owners, but as caretakers; caretakers who respect her needs and her songs of peace and harmony. We as a people only took what was needed to care for our children and elders. We didn’t need fences or addresses to tell us where we lived, our ancestors taught us to follow the seasons on what we ate and where to travel to sustain our survival such as roots in the spring, salmon in the summer, berries in the fall, and deer in the winter. To only take what was needed and reassured there would always be more for our children and their children after.
Now our children are lost due to the white man’s dream to be free and not be told how to live and not be put on small acre farms fenced in.
Due to our lack of knowledge of these other people, we have learned the hard way about the white man and who he truly is. The white man has taken more land than he needs and put us on a small piece of land and changed our ways to meet his needs. All of the fencing people out of their land, they have fenced us in. What are we to do, maybe he wants us to go ask him to build us a ship and travel to someone else’s native soil and take away their culture to make them fit in to meet our needs. I think not. That would just make us white.
We are a strong people and we can still be a strong people by learning our culture and traditions. In the circle of life things, things go back to where it began. We need to prepare ourselves to be given back to the land as it once was. The white man ways are starting to fall apart, his kayos will bring his tribe back to his culture and maybe that will lead him back to his native soil to take back what was stolen from him, instead of stealing our children’s culture. The white people should have learned our culture and ways, which might put peace in his heart. Indian people don’t let the white man make you feel ashamed of who you are and what you believe.
Our story must be told, so go out and learn that story. Find out what is truly burning you up inside. This will bring peace in your heart to be free of other people’s ideas of freedom. I am sure if the white man could ask his ancestors of their story, it might stop the burning in his heart; if not, his heart will burn him up inside, for he knows what he has done is wrong. I do not look for him to change things back to the way it was before his arrival. I pray Mother Nature and the Creator will grow weary of his world; she will judge him and maybe his new ship will be built. You have heard my story from my heart, not the greed for your land.
Aaron Carden
OMAK/NESPELEM FORESTRY
CALENDAR OF EVENTS
June 21, 2006
Public Meeting
Catholic Longhouse, Nespelem
5:30 – 7:30 pm
Presentation, discussion and gathering of input, for the
“Swimptkin Creek” Natural Resource Project
Contact Person: Phil Wapato 634-2565
