60 years after Dan Krenmer's potlatch, village island lies abandoned.
Its houses are empty, the people gone.
In the faces of the totem poles, one senses a change, a way of life succumbing to the effects of intervention.
Of those who left their villages, many came to live in Allard Bay.
The island is shared, a white municipality at one end, Indian reserves at the other.
While in many ways Allard Bay is similar to other fishing communities, it has also become a center from which we have begun the task of reclaiming all that was almost lost.
A lot of people have heard about the Quagu, we're probably the most highly anthropologized group of native people in the world.
But a lot of those people who have read about us think that we all dined, that we've disappeared because we were the vanishing races those early white people said we were.
And when you look at museum exhibits in a lot of places, it's as if we were gone.
There's no reference to us still being here, still being alive.
And we are.
For years there were few potlatches, many people forgot the dances and their meaning.
But some remembered.
Enough of the old people believed that it was right to continue potlatching, and so they did in spite of the law.
And how lucky for us that there were some of them.
Give me a Once more, artists create traditional masterpieces.
Following designs that are centuries old.
And once you've done the design thing, this is the most important thing anyway.
You should be on your way with anything.
A 40 foot pole or a 12 inch mask.
You have to think design all the time as you're doing it.
Doing it exactly as the old people did it.
Still, in many ways, LRB is a modern town.
Although the government has placed strict limitations on our fishing rates, most of us continue to make our living from the sea.
You could call us more like the salmon people in this area.
This is how we ever lived on from time and we still depend on the fishery and the sea.
Our people have always fished where, when and how they went.
We can no longer do that.
There's a maritime on Black Cod, Halibut.
The next thing you know it'll be clams and everything like this.
The ocean is our life.
It's our whole life line.
And we're going to be fishing for the whole of our lives.
I think to cut off the life line like the salmon, the fishery, is like taking a dirt away from the farmers.
We no longer would exist.
We're now looking at hours in fishing where we used to look at days.
I think we've got to tell them this is it.
We're not going to be pushed anymore.
We can't be pushed anymore because we're right to the bottom now.
Many political battles are being fought these days in Alert Bay.
Of all of the things that have been taken away from us, none symbolizes our loss more than the masks taken after Dan Cranmer's potlatch.
For some years we negotiated with the National Museum of Man to have the masks returned to us.
Finally, in the early 70s, the museum agreed to return its portion of the collection on the condition that we build a museum in which to house them.
And so in 1979, construction began on the cultural center.
Working with cedar logs, our carvers prepared the posts and beams that would later support the building.
The structure itself has been designed to blend past and present.
A unique aspect of the design, a traditional big house space in which to exhibit the repatriated treasures that we now call the potlatch collection.
By the summer of 1980, the center was almost completed.
This was a very special place.
A special time for all of us, especially the old people who never forgot what happened to us in 1921.
The objects in the potlatch collection have been arranged in this big house space, more or less in the order that they would appear in the potlatch.
And they're not in cases, the feeling some of us had when the time came to display them.
The reason the pieces were returned was that they'd been locked up for so long in a strange place that it seemed wrong to lock them up again.
With the potlatch collection finally in place and only a few days remaining before the center would open, the rest of the exhibits were installed.
Objects from our own basements and attics placed in the center for storage.
Gifts given to the center by artists and museums, and a series of photographs of our old village sites, each with its creation story.
The center was to be far more than a museum.
It was in fact our box of treasures and a focus for all our efforts to strengthen the culture, language, and history that were almost lost.
We named it the Omista Cultural Center.
Omista means the return of something important.
In earlier days, people were sometimes taken as slaves.
By other groups.
When those people were returned to their homes, either through payment of ransom or through a retaliatory raid, they were sent to a Omista.
When we were looking for a name for this place, we talked to the old people.
And a couple of them said, it will be as if those masks and other treasures are Omista.
They're coming home to us.
Oh We dedicate the Omista Cultural Center to our forefathers, who struggle and suffering during the years of Padla's prohibition have left us a legacy in which we can take pride.
We recognize their greatness and value, the rich history they bequeath us.
The Umista Cultural Center is not a memorial to a dead past.
It is a symbol of our survival and in it we strengthen the culture we might have lost had not our forefathers been strong for us.
Applause Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language Speak in a foreign language You've heard some of my other chiefs talk about losing our language.
You've heard some of our people talk about losing our dances and our songs, our legends.
It's not an easy thing for a man to do that.
It's like stripping away his soul.
There's nothing worse than that.
Almost 60 years ago, Lord Shafrinim Itsu strips away Mr.
Kramer, had nothing.
Oh, I know that the Lord has given us a lot of money.
We have a legacy in which we can take pride.
We recognize the rich history we bequeath us.
We have a good time.
There's a good time.
Opening day, although there was just this enormous joy and happiness, I think for some of us there was also some sadness.
I saw it as the chief spoke today that I wish there had been some way that those people, my father included, could have been here to see what we have accomplished.
Then I realized that there was no reason to be sad, that somehow they were here with us.
If we had forgotten all of them, I don't think we would have worked as hard as we did for the return of this collection.
We came very close to losing our culture, our language, for a lot of people even interest in knowing about those things.
We're lucky, we're very fortunate that we have something to build on, that we have old people who care, that we have younger people who are beginning to realize that we have something to build on.
We realize the importance of knowing these things.
And we're lucky that we have this center in which to try and build some of this store of knowledge that all of us need to know who we are.
The old people are the links to our history, so that the past does not die with them.
Their memories and stories are being recorded at the center.
When the old people are gone, then there'll be people like me.
All we can do right now is try to find our way back to the past, and if this takes us back to the past, then we'll be able to build our future.
If we remember what we've done, then we'll be able to build a future.
That's a great idea.
Yeah, I think it's a great idea.
Because the past is gone.
When the old people are gone, then there'll be people like me.
All we can do right now is try to learn as much from our present generation of old people so that we have that kind of thing to teach the younger generation.
Anikilok the transformer moved through the world changing things.
Changing animals into people and rocks into different forms.
He came to the Nimqish River where a man lived named Gwantna Lalis.
Can you say Gwantna Lalis? Gwantna Lalis.
Okay.
So Anikilok showed up and he said to Gwantna Lalis, do you want to be a mountain? No, Gwantna Lalis answered, for mountains have slides and crumble away for as long as the day's dawn in the world.
Anikilok asked again, would you like to become a cedar tree? Gwantna Lalis replied, no, cedar trees were struck by lightning split and fall.
Then they rot away for as long as the day's dawn in the world.
Finally, Anikilok asked, would you like to become a river? Yes, let me become a river that I may flow for as long as the day's dawn in the world, Gwantna Lalis replied.
So Anikilok put his hand on Gwantna Lalis' forehead and pushed him flat on the ground and he became the river Gwantni.
Gwantni.
Okay.
There's a whole different generation coming up.
And that's the very reason why we started teaching it right as young as nursery school aides.
It's because you can't grab people when after they're already teenagers like they did to us and say, you're an Indian.
All of a sudden we're Indians.
We're all trying to be white when we're growing up.
There are some people who feel that the kind of things we're teaching children now has no place in today's world.
That potlatches, that language belongs somewhere in the past and that we have to get on with the business of living today.
And that the language that you work in is English so you don't need anything else.
Some of us don't believe that.
Tzencha, Kwakwala.
Tsucha, Kwakwala.
Good.
And this is? Tsucha, Tsucha, Tsucha.
Teaching Kwakwala to the children of Alert Bay is an ironic reversal of the situation their grandparents faced at the same school 50 years ago.
It was really kind of tough for us because we didn't know how to speak English when I first went to school.
And I left the classroom.
I was talking Kwakwala to our friends.
And the teacher caught me and she said, you must not talk Kwakwala.
And she sent me back in the classroom to make me write it 500 times in a book.
I like that house which we can see over there.
Axton, Tlaqa, Giuqui.
Is that Axton? Now with so few people left to speak our language and an incomplete written record of it, we are making efforts to save Kwakwala with the help of a linguist.
Tlaqa, Giuqui.
Probably we've got two or three generations more in which Kwakwala will be spoken actively in the community.
Unless we can turn the tide now.
We have a chance to do that.
How about if you were standing next to a house? I like this house that's close by here.
How would you say that? Ada and I get together and work on words and phrases that we think the kids could easily be taught.
These are then put into books, illustrated with local scenes so that the kids can identify so that they are the community's books.
The Kwakwala speakers have given me an interesting opportunity.
The opportunity to pay back an Indian community for all of the generations of anthropologists who took away their understandings rather than giving them back to the community.
The language programs and cultural programs that we teach in the schools, I don't think we just teach them a language, but we try to include a lot of the child's history or where certain students are from.
The people in Ritbe are called? Namgis.
Namgis? Bakji Namgis.
What about you, Colleen? Do you know where your mom and dad are from? My dad's from Kwa 'i.
I feel a lot of our people try to go and be something they're not to be accepted into the white society.
But I feel with our Umistah Cultural Center here that hopefully this will help them find their real identity and they will be proud of it.
It gives me a pleasure to see the kids are interested in learning our culture because I grew up with it when I was a little girl.
I just love to see the children dance.
When we look at the way the children are learning the movements of the dance, we can congratulate ourselves for doing a pretty good job.
On the other hand, we have to realize that we're competing with a lot of modern things that are very much a part of our kids' lives today, like television and cars and video games.
We really don't know how these kids feel about the kinds of things we're teaching them.
We don't know how well it's going to work.
We can only try.
I think you have to believe that it's important for them, even if they don't realize it right now, that it's really important for them to know who they are.
They may leave the island eventually and go and live somewhere else.
Their chances of making it are going to be a lot better if they're strong, if they feel that they're worthwhile people.
Otherwise, they're simply not going to make it.
You guys can come up and take a closer look at it as part of the Humsum.
You could sum it all up by saying that it's important that you know your past if you're going to be fighting for your future.
The issues that we are dealing with can be all lumped into one thing, Aboriginal rights.
What we think is Aboriginal rights includes the fishing.
That's an Aboriginal right.
The right to maintain our cultural language.
That's an Aboriginal right.
The right to govern ourselves, teach our children.
The right to maintain everything that goes on in our community.
The right to control the habitat and the environment that surrounds us.
Those are all Aboriginal rights.
All of these things we are dealing with on a day -to -day basis.
It's a constant struggle, and I suppose it's going to be a struggle for time to come yet.
We've won some victories for people in this area.
The masks have come home.
The old people are teaching the children what they know.
We're rebuilding and we're growing stronger in all sorts of ways.
We use this centre as a focus of that rebuilding.
And all the time that we're doing these things with our kids, we realise that there are all sorts of other things happening outside of this centre over which we have no control.
The fact that the logging industry has practically wiped out whole salmon spawning streams.
The fact that those logging companies make a lot of money on what were our traditional lands and that we don't share it in those profits.
The fact that healthcare facilities for Indians are pretty inadequate.
The fact that the education system for Indians has been pretty inadequate.
Those are the things that we have to continue working at at the same time that we celebrate the good things that have happened for us.
But most of all, we celebrate the fact that we're still alive.
We're still here.
We've survived and we'll continue to survive.
And we're always going to be here.
Thank you.
