Love Letters To The Places We Are From
It's not enough to shout "land back" into the universe without articulating what it is you're fighting for.
“Stories hold the hearts of the people.” An old man (I’m awful with names) in Nuxalk Territory in Bella Coola First Nation told me that once while we stared at a totem pole he was carving. “When you take care of the stories, you take care of the people.”
The man went back to carving and sat outside his shop in the rain. He gave me the 101 on the pole he was carving. It was a pole that was going to be sent to a neighbour community, it was to commemorate a kinship agreement between the communities, the pole had been removed by the church decades earlier.
“Without this tree, this story doesn’t exist,” the carver explained.
I sat and listened to whatever he told me, I didn’t pretend to understand what he meant, but I could relate. The sacred sites we have across Anishinaabe Aki in Treaty 3 territory hold our ceremonies, our songs, our stories. I had to imagine, that without the land we Anishinaabeg were from, we’d no longer be ourselves. We’d be something else.
I understood the carver. He left for lunch and I went to work.
Stories hold the hearts of the people.
When you take care of the stories, you take care of the people.
During the earliest days of COVID-19, like many, I was pulled out of work and sent to retreat to wherever covid wasn’t, to wait out the mysterious virus/not virus, zombie apocolypse, not quite zombie apocolypse.
At that time, the Stories From The Land podcast series was being adapted for CBC television with Wanderer Entertainment at the helm. Much to my surprise in June of 2020, Stories From The Land was greenlit for production. We were in the field a short couple of weeks later.
We lived in a camper trailer camp with a shared outdoor shower, a nurse, and a cook taking care of our individually wrapped meals. The challenge of shooting this series and working with the four communities that agreed to host us and allowed us to shoot with them is a memory I will never forget.
Through the life of the podcast, we recorded live shows, we accepted audio essays and community submissions, we did interviews, we recorded keynotes, we had an open door policy for anyone that wanted to share a story about where they were from.
We accepted poetry and songs, prose and essays, there were tears and a few fucks laid raw into microphones over the course of 3 seasons of the series.
For me, this project was always overtly political. This series started in 2016, long before “land back” became a catchphrase and thing we wore on a t-shirt. I wanted to make space for Indigenous Peoples and their communities to tell people who they were and where they were from because the lands, waters, plants, medicines, animals, fish, and spirit of the places we are from is essential to our pasts, present, and futures.
Adapting the podcast series for CBC Gem was interesting. CBC wanted a lighter touch, I wanted something hard hitting and political.
In the end, we did both. It turns out you can be political and subversive and irreverent at the same time.
Love Letters To The Places We Are From
I gave the series the tagline, “love letters to the places we are from,” because at the end of the day all that matters is the connection Indigenous Peoples have in their homelands and territories.
If you are Indigenous in Canada, you can wake up every day with enough reasons to be angry, to want to burn it all down and start again, and worse, hate this place called Canada. But I don’t know if that’s all that helpful.
It’s hard to wake up every day and live your life through love. It’s hard to love. It takes work. It demands your time and attention. Living a life through love is the most radical act of decolonization you can access today if you are Indigenous.
I often say, “story is the revolution.” I believe that, but so is love. Love is the revolution.
No law or legislation will ever change our inherent connection to our homelands. No Prime Minister or Chief and council will ever prevent us from being who we are so long as we stay in a forever relationship to the places we are from.
