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.”