Nearly There

Over the last three months, I’ve talked to dozens of people across the southern interior about issues affecting First Nations people in B.C. I chose to focus on the role of education in First Nations communities in the past, present and in determining their future. I’ve now written a three-part series about my experience over the last three months that I hope to share with you soon.

Here is the series intro:

If knowledge is power, then many First Nation communities in British Columbia are looking to education to control their past and future. In our series, we’ll explore First Nations’ relationships with education and how that will play out on a community level.

I am working on finding a location to publish this series and will keep you posted on that process.

Cherlyn Billy

Cherlyn Billy

Yesterday, I spoke with Cherlyn Billy, the British Columbia regional manager for the Nations Centre for First Nations Governance. The Centre helps build capacity within First Nations to get the tools and information that they need to self-govern in whatever way is best for them or as Billy said, “my job is actually just to support First Nations in their inherent right to self-government.”

She’s a member of the Shuswap Nation, near Cache Creek, but now works with the Centre on located on Squamish territory. She was first elected to band council at 30 and has a background is in law and anthropology. She’s been working with the Centre since February 2007.

I spoke with her about her work and what the Centre does in terms of self-governance.

Here are some parts of our conversation:

“First Nations people have been governing themselves prior to the Indian Act and the idea, all the work that we do is essentially support and assisting them and remembering that cause we’ve been doing it for thousands of years and it’s only now that we’re starting to remember the  work that we used to do before. Generally, we do a lot of it already and what I go back to and share with people is when it comes to family funerals, we don’t have anything written down that defines our role within that but we know what we’re supposed to do.”

“A lot of it has to do with the children. Whenever you’re looking at anything that you’re doing, you have to have a vision and a lot of times it’s not for yourself, it’s more for the children who are coming and the way we look at it is seven generations, thinking ahead for them and so what we need them to have in place.”

“I support and assist First Nations as they implement their inherent right to self-govern, not matter where they’re at. They could be implementing the treaty but it’s not my task to say that they’re, everyone has their own right to define how they want to move forward on self-government.”

“The idea is to make sure that we create a new memory. Our tag line at the Centre is, ‘Creating a new memory in the minds of our children,’ and the reason for that is because that’s essentially what we’re here to do is change the memories of the past, to creating new memories for the future so that they don’t have to deal with those same things that we’ve had to deal with. You have to change the story, right, to create something new for children.”

“We’ve worked this year with probably about 70 First Nations in British Columbia out of 202... a lot of what we do supports them so I think that kind of response speaks for itself in the sense that as a First Nations organization with First Nations people working within it, people have been really receptive to wanting to move forward and a lot of response that we get here at our organization and hear is, ‘it’s been a long time coming and it’s very appreciated.’”

“First Nations are beginning to define themselves and create what they want to see for their own nation and they’re doing in a way that honours and recognized the work of past leaders and assistors and elders before them.”

“I can’t tell people what works and what doesn’t work for their nations... we don’t stay the same and that’s probably been the best gift that we have as First Nations people is the fact that we don’t stay the same. If we were to implement, we kind of go with the flow, right and see how things can work for us. I don’t know if it’s the title for chief and council or if it’s the people themselves. A lot of times if you look at something, it’s not always the title of the individual but who they are as a person that defines their role in the governance structure... cause you’ll find that a lot of our people, they carry themselves with the values of our people, right, and those values, I think, are what maintain the leadership. They’re actually the ones that provide the foundation for our leadership, our values and our principals as people.”

“To be honest with you, B.C., we’re very complex. We have the most language grouping. We have the most nations and I think that we don’t compare ourselves. We can’t look at one model and say that’s going to fit all and that’s how we approach it hear because if you look at a lot of our court cases, they’ve all come, the major ones have come from B.C. and they’re not all the same basis and the reason for that has a lot to do with our diversity here, but I wouldn’t say that we would follow anyone’s model. I think that we’d probably define it the way we see best because that’s the way B.C. is. We look to things and develop it in the way that most fit our need, not the needs of the government.”

“You have to be very open-minded and you have to love the people that you’re working with and not try and impose your own views on them because we’re so complex again, like I said and I wouldn’t say that this one model would work for them because it all depends on what the community views as being valuable.”

“I have been involved in a lot of different areas with First Nations across the country, mainly in Ontario and British Columbia and saw that there was great need for a service such as this.”

“I think as First Nations, definitely that’s what keeps us going is our strength and our perceptions of things, but I think that what I’ve notices is that a lot of people, a lot of organizations are taking an interest in the area of governance. I think you see it not only all across B.C. but across the country. If even our National Chief is talking about moving beyond the Indian Act and beginning to strengthen our governance structures so not just the national centre but a lot of other nations, a lot of groups out there that are beginning to move ahead.”

“We’ve always had governance so I don’t know why it’s happening. It’s just people are becoming more vocal, that’s about it. We’ve always had this in place.”

“The more knowledge that people have about who they are, about knowing where they come from, I think that’s where you begin to find your voice in moving ahead. If there’s anything else, when you look at yourself, you become more, you can talk a bit more about a subject once you learn more about it and once you feel more comfortable with it, with the topic and the more that you hear people telling the story, the more you being to say, ‘OK, I’ve figured it out.’”

“A lot of education that people need for self-governance probably comes from knowing the past and understanding the past.”

“Different nations have different ways of moving forward but our nation has always been quite strong in terms of looking at our aboriginal rights and title... that’s one thing that I think has made our nation quite strong.”

“Communities are connected in some way through family so whenever I think about my nation, I think of it as being part of my family and I think that’s the way that they govern themselves is with that understanding.”

When I asked her what the most satisfying part of her work is , this is what she said: “It’s working with the people and seeing the change that’s happening within communities and seeing how our organization has grown in terms of the work that we do.”

“The Centre is doing what it’s intended to do and that’s to develop the materials that are needed to see the end result and see communities kind of evolve to where they were before and our role at the Centre is building capacity within nations and that’s where I see us moving forward is moving that along to another level, developing capacity in First Nations.”

 “When we’re looking at building our communities and our nations, we need to keep in mind all of the people who make up that community and that includes a lot of our young people and we need to make sure that we have, when we’re creating the new memory, is making sure that we’re providing our young people the tools that they need to be able to undertake the leadership of the community and move it forward because that’s what our ancestors did for us and it’s something that we have to continue to be mindful of doing in the future.”

  

Nicole Cahoose-Joseph

I did an interview with Nicole Cahoose-Joseph but after the fact, she requested that the article and photo of her be removed because of personal reasons.

Fred Fortier

Fred Fortier in Hello Toast in Kamloops.

When I got to Hello Toast, a breakfast restaurant in downtown Kamloops, the place was empty. That made it easy for Fred Fortier to spot me when he came in. For the last couple of weeks, we had been trying to connect for an interview for this project and finally we’d found a time and place that worked for both of us.

Fortier is a member of the Simpcw First Nation’s band council and has been for 21 years. Currently, he’s the acting Chief of the band until till May. Though he’s a member of the council and the band of the Simpcw First Nation, north of Barriere, he lives in Kamloops. He’s 53 years old and has hopes to move back to his community.

In addition to being a leader in his community, Fortier was integral in starting up the community’s school nearly 30 years ago. I spoke with him about his experience with education and with government in a wide-ranging conversation that lasted nearly an hour and a half.

Here are some parts of that conversation:

On education:

 “In my reflection on education, it plays quite an important role because after probably 30, 40 years of me living in that community, I really see the benefits of education not only in my own children but the other children who have gone on to get degrees and help their people with some coming back to the community which is really interesting. People who have teaching degrees, business management degrees come back and help our people and having their children actually come back and go to the Neqweyqwelsten School so I think that’s the most important thing because it builds our capacity to deal with self-governance and self-determination and without an education background is the we hire non-Simpcw people to work for us and I think that we need to build our own capacity for self-governance and I think we’re in the right direction.”

 “This concept of Indian control of Indian education, what did that mean to community member, what did that mean to parents when you have full control of Indian education for the children? And I think it reflects on the role when I went to school. I went to a very rural school up till Grade 7 in Chu Chua so I never went to Indian school, they call Indian school, residential school. I went to school at a rural school in a rural environment mixed with not only other Simpcw children but also with other non-Simpcw people. First of all I think my educational background is a lot different in the concept of how I think about education vs. how people think about education when they went to residential school and that really is an issue because for us going to a non-aboriginal school and growing up, six years of doing that, we almost got to be integrated, you know. We always knew the non-Simpcw people were people who were friends. I still have people that I went to school with Grade 1 to Grade 6 that are still my friends so I think that when we started developing our own school we always thought about this, what is Indian control of Indian education and so what can we do differently than a regular school is doing right now for our children. You include the language, the culture, the songs, spirituality and how do we integrate that into our schooling system so the concept was the parents got together and there was only, very few parents, there was probably six of us I think parents, six or seven of us and we had 11 students and two weeks to get our school in order so we went to a band meeting. All of the parents, we encouraged the band administration or the band itself to give us money. We borrowed $15,000. We hired a teacher within two weeks. We had a school which was the old band office which was two rooms, a bathroom and we brought in the power saws and cut out windows, we made tools for our school, bought desks in that time period and started up and running. Since then we’ve been able to be clear about who manages the school and that’s the parents. It’s a parent-run school. It’s not managed by band council, by the community, it’s managed by parents. If you send your child there, you get to be part of management committee, the parents’ committee and the band administration, the money for the administrator is through the band. We just have an agreement to do that so we’ve been very successful of encouraging students and along the ways, one of the biggest challenges for us was the Indian school concepts, that we were just another Indian school on the reservation land. In order to get by that we had to encourage our other parents of children who would be coming in the following year, to go and convince them that this school is important to us culturally and we can provide the same kind of school as Barriere plus. That I think was instrumental in the sort of concept and idea of how we would be building our Neqweyqwelsten School up like that and since them we’ve sort of got away from this Indian school, no this is Neqweyqwelsten School, this is your school and to be proud of that school system because without being proud of that school system, those children will not be proud. They won’t be proud to be Simpcw. They won’t be proud to be Secwepemc and I think also when we look at it, one thing that really won the school over and its children was the cultural component.”

“We have been putting the drumming back into our community so what’s the importance of the drum. That’s the question you’ve to ask yourself, why do you want to teach the drum. It teaches confidence. It teaches spirituality. It teaches the ability to be self-respectful not only to yourself but to the drum itself so there are certain rules on how you have to carry yourself when you’re drumming so no drugs or alcohol so you can’t be drunk or stoned when you’re playing the drum. You must refrain from all alcohol so it teaches you discipline and I think that where we’ve now been able to start teaching the young people of Head Start and moving up and once they start to sing, they start to be able to look at what the relationship is between the drumming and the singing and spirituality, the sweats because there’s a connection there and how we do that now is to be able to encourage the people to go to the sweats as young people and old people because the ability to heal yourself is through the sweats as well. You have to have a choice in life and that choice is either go your ways of destroying your inner being, your inner self, your self-esteem or moving in a direction of accepting your culture and your spirituality as a Secwepemc person.”

“I’ve seen a lot of reaction between parents and kids about language, how to in simple words to talk simple words for children and I think it’s quite difficult as a parent because I don’t speak the language. It was a generation of no language. My father is a fluent Secwepmectsin speaker, fluent. He’s one of few fluent speakers in our community. He hasn’t spoken his language in probably 20 years or more and so he’s 75 right now and it’s an opportunity for him to teach his, to talk with Charli and with his grandchildren about the language and the importance of it because his position  was that language teaches you nothing because it was beaten out of him and so in order to sort of get that language back, you have to teach the whole community not just the parents in the school. That’s the difficult part of it. It’s a challenge to the communities is to embrace that as grandparents, as elders and to be able to help people, doesn’t matter what age group they are and help them so they’re not embarrassed about their language. You don’t feel slanted about learning their language and I think that sort of attitude was there awhile ago and I think that’s the attitude that needs to come back into our community is our elders need to now start speaking the language, speaking it fluently amongst us so that we can start bring our language back because the language is part, if we understand the language, we’ll understand the land and without understanding the land, we’re not people.”

“The language provides you with the ability to, I think look at the world with a different viewpoint than anything else. Our language is based upon what we do, not what we have done.”

On self-government:

“Without our control of our people, their minds, is that the control of our young people’s minds as far as giving them information instead of them getting information from the public school system clouds their vision about who we are as people and I think that’s the most important thing to be able control our people in a way that we put information that they need because after Grade 5 everything repeats itself forever, everything. The way that you filter things in, the way you filter things out, your values, your attitudes. If you can bring up a child that has those great attributes of those things, you’ll have a good community.”

“If you’re going to look at where you want to be self-determining people, you can’t have that if you’re hiring people who don’t think like a Secwepemc or a Simpcw person, you need to be able to think like an Indian, that’s what our elders always say. It’s how do you get that attitude in them. First of all you own the land, that’s the attitude you have to take, If you own the land, I own the land as a Simpcw person, that’s the attitude you have to take as an aboriginal person, Simpcw, Secwepemc. If you don’t believe that then I think this whole philosophy of self-determination is a moot point because if you don’t come with an attitude of owning the land and making sure that land is looked after I think just in general you’ll lose sight of that, you’ll say oh ya, the province, Crown land OK, we’ll go ask permission, No it’s about we own the land and if we own the land then that land is part of our language, our culture, our spirituality. It feeds us. It clothes us. It provides economic development to us and so without land we are nothing, we’re ordinary citizens... The ability for us to be self-determining is based upon a good educational system that brings people forward that are going to be lawyers, doctors, policy people, resource managers, foresters and geologists because in our area we have a vast amount of responsibility. We have mines coming in, we have forests, fisheries, I think in this whole issue of self-determination we need to have those people to manage our resources now and into the future.”

“I think the way that self-determination is is you have to have a good base of education to find who you are and to control the future of what you’re going to do on the land because without that truly we won’t have anything. We’ll basically be fighting the government again like our elders did. I’m not going to do that when I’m old.”

“The true issue between us is revenue sharing between us and the province and the Federal government, the rest is gravy cause we know if we got the revenue sharing for all the natural resources in our territory, we don’t need government handouts any more...so when people look at the way First Nations are, they say, oh ya, you get government handouts. You get free houses, free everything, well we don’t need free everything if they give us our land and our resources and that’s the fight that our young people have today.”

“I see we’re taking on a lot more responsibilities than some of the, dealing with mining, I think the natural resources like forestry end of things...we’ve learned some hard lessons. Most of those hard lessons have come from having no control. If you want control of your destination, you have to control what you’re doing. You can’t give that control to anybody else to consultants, to management firms, you have to have that control all to yourself and I think that’s where education, the control of education, because without that control, you’re helpless.”

“In order to be a leader in the community, you have to be grounded. You have to be able to take what the community says and deal with a lot of things on a provincial and Federal level, right, so in order to negotiate as they say you have to be grounded in some really good values. Nobody gives anyone anything for nothing, especially First Nations, you go there and take it our negotiate it and you negotiate what you get, that’s the philosophy and I think if your not grounded right in who you are and truly believe that you are a good person as a Secwepemc or even as a Simpcw, you have to be grounded in that. You have to have those value systems that look at how you’re being respectful not only your own people but how you’re being respectful of other people.”

“It’s more reflective of a legal dominate culture in the way that we see ourselves as Secwepemc or Simpcw people and the way that the federal government sees us and the way that the provincial government see us.”

“I think we can still define who we are a people, regardless of what the Federal government does.”

“We control our own destiny and we’ve been doing it for a long time.”

Daniel Saul

Daniel Saul outside the museum.

Last week, I spoke with Daniel Saul. He’s the manager of the Secwepemc Museum in Kamloops but is from the Simpcw First Nation, north of Barriere. He looks after the staff, facilities and grounds. He’s been manager since 2006 and before that he worked for the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society.

He was born in 1949 and is 61 years old. He went to a school in Barriere then one in Moose Creek. He was taken to the Kamloops Residential School in 1958 and then paroled from the school ten years later.

I sat down with him outside the museum on a beautiful warm spring day. The view from the spot had the old residential school on one side and the museum facilities including a pit house on the other.  I spoke with him about his job at the museum, the role of education and his own experiences.

Here are some part of that conversation:

Role of the Secwepemc Museum:

“I think it’s a cultural and educational centre and that’s the big role. Most museums they play the same role but we have First Nations staff and interpreters so visitors come here get the whole gambit of the experience so we like to think it’s cultural education as well as tourism cause tourism’s actually a form of learning, formal education because they come to see us to learn, to learn about things and we also learn from them. I mean, it’s really interesting to see how things work and what they think and all this kind of things and a lot of is the way people thing we should be, like some of the questions we get asked like, how come you don’t have your outfit on or your regalia or costume is usually what they ask and then we explain it, this is the 21^st century and it’s really not practical to do that kind of stuff unless there’s special events or some kind of ceremony or things like that, right, to wear regalia. Number one, it’s too hot in the summertime plus you don’t want to damage them right cause getting the real material is getting scarcer and scarcer so like when you do have the regalia, you’d want to keep really good care of it so it wouldn’t get damaged.”

“The whole idea is for everyone to get to know each other, right so how can you do that if you don’t participate, if you don’t talk to each other, if you don’t mingle together and ask questions and learn from each other because if you don’t do that, then it’s like a segregation and when that happens, people don’t get the truth. They may read things in books, but that’s not all that’s true as you know, in newspaper and TV’s and movies, things that are actually not what is portrayed. We have in the museum a lot of information and we say is what you see is the First Nations point in history because we never get to write it so when the visitors come they get to see our point of view on all these things, how did it effect relative to them and most of the educational tools and books, it’s not so bad now, but in the past it had one point of view.”

“When you go to a place and you want what’s there, minerals, fish, trees, all that kind of stuff so what do you do, you get rid of the people who are there.”

“There’s real bad and there’s good. A lot of people just, Oh I didn’t realise that kind of thing and there some people like that, it’s good when they say that but a lot of people say, well I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it, whatever, stuff like that, well doesn’t matter but now that you know, you can help make things right. That’s all you can do basically.”

“The whole site is kind of like a historical site because it was a residential school, right. You know that’s not a very good topic but it was a part of our history so we can’t ignore it. The museum, it’s all together and it’s used as an administration building, etc. Etc., they had the buildings here, these are historical buildings and the park all within one location, rather than move somewhere and try to rebuild and all that stuff and we do the schools and it gives them a chance to get out of the classroom, come here and visit. We also go to schools but it gives the students, they remember more if they’re actually here inside a pit house or doing actually activities, they’ll remember that whereas in a classroom, it’s good in a classroom when they learn but it’s very sterile. Because when we bring people through the building, they’ll remember that... I think it’s the effect of being in the whole environment.”

Reclaiming the space of the old residential school for the Secwepemc Museum:

“Absolutely. There was a lot of discussion about that. It was some people’s opinion, well we should just tear the joint down and be done with that, like I think with Lytton and Williams Lake, correct me if I’m wrong and I get asked that quite a bit, right, how come it’s still there and I say, well, like I said before, it’s part of our history whether you like it or not. You can’t just block that out. People, you have to learn from that. History’s not always good, it’s painful a lot of times, but it’s still there. It does no good to hide it or try to ignore it because so many people have been affected by that you can’t so when I first started doing this, when I first came back here, it was pretty tough for me to actually go through that kind of stuff cause that was like, I don’t know, 25- 30 years later after I left here.”

“It was actually pretty strange because when you go actually through the buildings, you see the same places and the same rooms and the same physical surroundings and things start coming back to you and you start, ‘oh gee, I don’t know. I don’t know about this.’ When I was first asked to do a tour, I was pretty hesitant about it and I struggled with it, just looking around. I didn’t do a very good job and the people I explained to them so they understood right. It took me awhile right and after I’d done it maybe a dozen times, I started getting better, not easier but better and after awhile it was better and I used this. They say in counselling there’s things you have to confront whatever it was so I used that experience to look and overcome those kind of like fears.”

“You get the real hands on, like we’re the real, we’re the survivors. We were there. We experienced it and a lot of people don’t know the actual experiences, what did we do? What happened when we got up in the morning, what did we do then? So we go things like that with them and it’s way different from reading in a book like that’s fine there’s nothing wrong with books but you don’t get the experience of somebody who’s actually there, who can look at a book and say that was full of beans.”

“I was brought here when I was in Grade 3 which was 1958 and I got out of here in 1968 so I went through all the main buildings, junior boys dormitory, intermediate, senior boys and I think it was 1963, we transferred into the, this was called the Annex where the museum is. Even though we were surrounded by hundreds of kids, we were all very lonely because you’re lonesome for your family, you know and we were very poor and they didn’t have vehicle or anything like that to come all the time until the later years and then we had let’s say, 1965 or more when they started loosening up here and I think it was probably ’63 when they started transferring us to schools, public schools in Kamloops and then we’d come back here at the end of the day, the dormitories but being away from your parents and your family and stuff like that and after all that time you don’t even know who they are. In the summer, I’d go or during Christmas, I’d go if I had some place to go, someone to take me, right, but after that you don’t really know who they are. Even when I’d get to back home to where I lived, there’s people, ‘Oh, you go to the school down there kind of thing’ and the mistreatment, you know the bad food, the cruelty, that kind of stuff but in the end I felt it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t cause that. I didn’t do anything to be treated like that because my parents never punished me like that. They’d give me a stern warning or something but they’d never beat me. I was never beaten in my life until I got here.”

Abuse and issues at Kamloops Residential School:

“It was here. It just never came out until later on. I think the Native Brotherhood in the early ‘60s movement to shut these schools down because of all that and we weren’t learning anything. When I went to school in town, I noticed I was two or three grades behind and it was really tough trying to catch up. We just had any old teacher who came along. A lot of them weren’t teachers so consequently when we got over there and I thought I did really good on my first test and I was like, ‘holy Toledo’ but there was no incentive to really do anything here like it was just do this and shut up and do it and if you didn’t you got a good whooping basically so you just did things so you wouldn’t get punished. That’s not learning, that’s avoiding.”

“Most of the time was spent on religious stuff. We had to go to church every morning and Saturdays and three times on Sundays and more when it was a Saints day or something like that or Lent or something like that and then when we’d get to class and have another 45 minutes of religious instruction so the learning was, I’ll just give you an example, when you learn a times table right, one times two and all that so this nun would stand there and hit our desk and say one time one is and you’d have to go right up to 12 times 12 so if  we weren’t able to stand there and recite that, we got punished. Then OK, we could recite the whole thing by memory but we didn’t know how to multiply, they didn’t really explain to us.”

“It was pretty bad. It was pretty rough cause then people thought we were stupid and that’s wasn’t true. We were very bright but not schooled in the proper schooling techniques or learning techniques or stuff like that even how to study, they’d just say study. OK, so we’d sit around and draw cartoons and pass it to each other but they didn’t explain, OK study what do you actually do. Do we just read it or memorize it or what? It was pretty strange but when we got over to the other school, they assumed that we knew all that, how to do your whole chapter and that kind of stuff, we didn’t. Shot in the dark kind of thing.”

Disconnect with home communities that the residential schools caused:

“I knew everybody and who they were because I never forgot about it. That time away you kind of lose touch and things. When you’re together all that time, then you know but when you’re separated and there’s a lot of people from my community that were sent her and come back, you’re kind of isolated from the community simply because you’re not sure of what’s been going on and all that because we’re completely different. We’re isolated at the school. We didn’t get things from the outside. Rarely would we sneak over to town now and then. In the end, I was the youngest one in my family cause they all left here before I came here so there was whole years and years that I saw them rarely. I’d see them in passing or visit that kind of thing. I had six sisters and two brothers even then I’m still getting to know them and learning what I’m supposed to know because here, we had to learn everything differently, under threat of punishment. You don’t learn that way so a lot of that stuff and when you grow up or get a little older and you come out of here, residential school, what was normal here was not normal outside because here you had to look after yourself. You learn how to fight, you learn how to steal just to survive here but once you got out and got to say in the city, you were thrown in jail for things that were completely normal here.”

“What happened in the end, the people here, the other student were taking the place of my family so there was kind of a disconnect in that way because when I got back, I didn’t really have anything in common. I’d have more in common with the people I went to school with.”

On Sk’elep School of Excellence:

“I think it’s pretty awesome because my granddaughter goes there. To see our own people managing it and teaching in the schools and our own kids there and they’re setting the rules even though they’re adopt the B.C. curriculum, there’s all these added things that go along with it, culture and language and things like that and its new compared to these at the time so give you a certain, ‘we did this’ so that gives you a perspective of taking back what should have been yours in the first place.”

“Most bands are pushing education as much as they can and I truly believe that because no longer can the First Nations sit back. They have to have professional, master’s degrees so we get at the same level as everybody else with a lot of these big companies and governments and big groups that try to do stuff on our lands so we can deal with them table to table.”

“Number one with education, they have to be aware of the issues, what’s going on, what’s the position of this government part or the position of the minister or matter of fact your own people. What is our position? What do we think about it is number one, us, our community, our small group. We have to have a position and we have to do it with knowledge. We can’t just throw a dart on the wall and say OK, I like that guy or whatever so a big part of that is finding out who’s who and what’s the issues... education will give you that. It’ll show you how to do that.”

Taking back responsibly from the Federal government:

“We just have to be careful that through the years and stuff, the Federal governments sense of doing that, sooner or later they’re going to say here take it all, but when the say that they don’t slide the funds along with it so I’m neither saying it’s good or bad, I’m just we need to be very careful of what’s happening.”

“I’d like to see the majority of our people be very well educated. I know everyone cannot get a degree or masters and all that but there’s other things like trades and all that, which usually pay more right and those kind of things, whatever people are happy with... I think the main thing is to be happy with what you’re doing and be a good contributor to your society.”

“They will progress, they’ll be ahead. They’ll succeed. If you’re successful individually and if you’re successful as a group, then everybody’s successful and through that perhaps we can eliminate a lot of the negatives. There’s always going to be negatives like dependencies and things like that but that’s through everybody but to minimize that and ... when you’re occupied like that and have a good job, enjoying it and you’re committed to it, there’s really not much time be going out and doing whatever.”