♪♪♪
Downloaded from YTS.MX
[CARMEN] We still need to move forward with a purpose.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
The purpose of bringing our children home
to healthy communities, bringing them home
to their culture, their traditions, their language.
♪♪♪
[CARMEN] In all of our communities,
we have so much children that are out there,
and we have a lot of membership
that aren't even within our communities.
They could be all across Canada.
And I'm not just speaking about the ones that are in care.
And some of them haven't even come home,
or they don't come home.
♪♪♪
But home will always be there.
♪♪♪
[CARMEN] This year's ride was very impacted by the pandemic,
but it still had to go on in some way.
[NEIL] Our people were faced with so much things
in our history. We look at these pandemics that,
that wiped out a lot of our people, so with this pandemic,
I think we had to take that seriously.
But also, what's really important as well
is that we need to keep this prayer going.
I can't imagine, if our ancestors never stopped praying.
Where, where would we be today?
With all of the things, and all of the history
that we went through as Aboriginal people,
where would we be today without ceremony?
[BILLY] For whatever reason, you know, the illness,
the corona, the policies that everybody
is just kind of arbitrarily making up with this illness,
don't know what to do, really.
So, everyone's trying to do their best
to keep everybody healthy.
I just, you know, I remember years ago reading
something from Chief Dan George about how colonialism,
and when people came over to the land,
they, one of the first things they took from us was the land,
and the next thing was your spirit, taking away ceremonies.
And I felt that. I just felt, ah, you know.
Here's another situation where, as a culture
we've got this important ride that we're doing,
and it's going to be cancelled,
and that really took my spirit away,
and broke my heart.
How do we look after our spirit during these times?
How do we look after our families?
And the government is telling us,
"No, we self-isolate. We stay home."
All of these things.
And these are very safe practices,
and they're very, very good advice.
But I feel that one generic answer does not fit everybody,
that everybody living, you know, in Canada especially,
we don't know, we're not empathetic to those who live
in our First Nation communities.
We're not privy to a lot of the people living in the north.
We're not privy to what this pandemic really means,
and how do we really look after each other.
So, having the ride this year was very difficult
in that sense, that there was two point of views
where we have to look after Spirit,
or do we look after our liability?
[BILLY] Neil phoned me up, and he told me
that he had an idea, that he was going to go ahead
with the ride anyway.
We're trying our best to do right by all of our Nations.
When you think about our communities,
there's Wahpeton, and they're Dakota,
Beardy's Okemassis', and they're Cree,
Piapot. They're Nahiawak.
Muscopetung is Saulteaux.
Standing Buffalo is Dakota.
Wood Mountain is Lakota.
We have a lot of different language groups,
different tribes within QBOW.
And to have respect for everyone,
to have respect for everyone's culture.
You know, it's always led by prayer.
Everything Neil was telling me with this, it's led by prayer.
So, for me, the Creator is going to make it happen
the way that it happened.
And again, coming to this ride just with an open heart,
and a raw spirit, to be open to whatever comes.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] When we first started our camp,
we didn't know how it was going to be.
I knew that we were going to come here,
I knew that because of the pandemic that, man,
there was only going to be a few of us here at that camp.
There was only going to be a few of us,
and I was thinking, how can we represent our communities?
How can we represent them when there's just a few
of us here? I don't know how to do that.
To us, we had so many questions.
And then all of a sudden, we had this man,
Archie, come forward, and he says,
"Am I allowed in the camp? Or am I breaking any rules?"
I think in our, in our Aboriginal way,
we're always a people that are always receiving.
And that's that respect that we were taught.
We were taught those things.
So, Archie showed up with is wife, Andrene.
They showed up, and they were on the ride last year,
and Archie took the bull by the horns, he came.
He says, "No, I remember from last year,
"we set up those tepees every day.
"So, I want to set up those tepees."
So, he did. He came, and he worked really hard.
[ARCHIE] You know, I'm going to do it.
I'm going to try my best to do whatever needs to be done.
I set up a tepee without my brother, Cheyenne, here.
That's... I miss you, Cheyenne. I need him.
(LAUGHS)
That's what it is. It's good to have, it's good to have
the family back together.
How can you say no to those things?
How can, when our policy, when all of these things
tell us, you know, these are our rules.
But then, that's when you realize that, no,
we need to put our ceremony first.
To not be able to ride out into the communities and stuff,
and to ride those distances, to sacrifice ourselves
for our children, for healing,
which is what I was looking forward to.
And with this COVID, the COVID-19,
it changed everything, and scaled down everything.
But it... We carry those tobacco ties,
and the prayers of all these communities
that couldn't be with us, yet they pray with us.
And to have that here on our land is truly amazing,
and an honor.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] So, the sweat always faces east,
so we're going to face the sweat that way.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] The Sioux people were given seven sacred ceremonies,
seven rites, and the sweat lodge was one of the rites
that was given.
So, I'll say something. Every hole we make
in Mother Earth, we'll put some tobacco in there.
We'll ask her for help.
Because what we're doing is we're praying,
we're praying for our children to find their way home.
We're praying for our, our relatives, our families.
We're praying for them.
So, everything that we do with the sweat lodge is a prayer.
So, Clayton, you make your first hole right there.
[NEIL] You can take off the...
[CLAYTON] This thing?
[NEIL] Yeah. Just remember where that place is.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] Say a prayer. Put some tobacco down in that hole.
Say a prayer.
♪♪♪
[CLAYTON] Quite the experience.
I've never been asked to get all of this stuff together
to prepare a lodge. Neil honored me with that,
and asked me to get the... pick the willows, the rocks.
When we built that sweat lodge, Clayton Neubuhr went
and beforehand he picked all the willows,
he cut all the wood, and he picked all the rocks.
And that was the first time that he did it.
He didn't know, he didn't understand,
but he knew that he had to get these things.
He was so proud of himself.
He was so proud that, you know, not knowing his culture,
not growing up with it, that he was really looking for,
for confirmation.
Did I do these things right? Are those the right kind
of willows? But really, he had it.
To some people, just to go cut willows,
and to bring them out, yeah, it's a task,
but to look deeper in those thoughts, right?
Those thoughts are actually prayers.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] A lot of the times that the Lakota, Dakota,
they use a word called (SPEAKS DAKOTA).
(SPEAKS DAKOTA) is, "As it is above, it is below."
So, if you look at a tree, how a tree is,
how those tree's branches are on top,
that's how the root systems are on the bottom of that tree.
So, as it is above, it is below.
So, this is here, that's how we do above,
that's how we do below.
So, we know that we're doing, building this in balance,
that we're building this in a sacred way.
We're building this with prayer.
Because a lot of the times, our roots, they have to be strong.
We have to be grounded.
We have to know where we come from.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] So, even though we made a hole there,
this is where our sacred grandfathers are going to go.
Since we took that from Mother Earth,
we're putting it upside down because now this is going
to become our altar. This is going to be our altar.
This is where we're going to put all of our offerings.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] Twist it down.
Okay, I'm going to take one of these, and tie it.
And give one to Clayton, too.
[CLAYTON] Tie it at the bush top?
[NEIL] Tie it right, right... No, down here.
[CLAYTON] Oh, near the wood.
[NEIL] Yeah.
[NEIL] So, we're going to do the same thing on this side now.
♪♪♪
So, now we're going to strengthen the sides.
So, you go in and out.
You go in, you go out.
Then you go in. You go in there, yeah.
Okay, keep on going.
Then out.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] We can make a difference, not by talking,
but by doing things.
And I think that's the strongest lesson
is that in today's world, sometimes we talk too much.
When we talk too much, we overthink.
When we overthink, we really, we put that energy
out there when we overthink.
Sometimes that overthinking can be negative.
Sometimes that overthinking can hinder us.
So, instead of falling into those, into that trap,
or falling into that pit, we decided to pray instead.
♪♪♪
Because of how our camp is now, and it's very limited
with the people that are here,
and we don't have a lot of our members
from our communities here with us,
so we need to utilize whatever we can,
and right now we're utilizing social media.
[NEIL] In the morning, before we begin our days,
we look at our Facebook page, and people were posting prayers.
We read them.
And we made tobacco ties.
We made prayer ties. We made these prayers.
Every morning we made those prayers,
and to me that's so important because people
who cannot be here still have a chance to pray with us.
When we made those prayers, we smudged them off
and we sang a song. We offered them to Wakan Tanka.
We went to the horses, and we got those tobacco ties,
and we tied it on the mane of that horse.
We smudged off those horses, and we said a prayer
with those horses to help us carry those prayers
because we all need help. Our children need help.
The horses not only carried us on their back,
but they also carried the prayers of these communities,
they carried the prayers of the people that's out there
that are still lost.
Some of them are struggling with things going on
in their life, with death, praying for their loved ones.
So, we made those tobacco ties for them,
and that first morning our youth rode,
and it was awesome to see those smiles.
But to me, what my memory was was when those boys
were on that horse, to see in their face,
what I saw was pride. How they sat on that horse,
and how their chin was up, just how proud they looked
with their long hair, their smiles.
You know, I knew that even that part is ceremony.
Their thoughts are their prayers.
(SINGING AND DRUMMING)
[KAMAO] Before we had horses, we walked.
We walked wherever we had to go.
Once horses came, you became ten times
what you were before. The strength of the horse,
and the spirit of the horse helped you, helped mankind.
In the same way, I find that this helps you, therapy.
In normal therapy, we're struggling through our issues,
we're trying to make progress, and we do make progress
but it's very slow.
With a horse, the progress and the help received
is magnified.
♪♪♪
[CARMEN] So, I've worked with Social Services
here in Saskatchewan.
Sometimes I, I wonder what the heck was I thinking?
Like, who gave me that power to go into someone's home?
Yes, these children needed it. Yes, they weren't safe.
But you don't know where these children are placed
when they're apprehended from their homes
within the cities.
I can't apologize that I have compassion fatigue.
I can't apologize that I have vicarious trauma
because I've been doing this for close to forty years.
Social Services says they've changed,
and I have to tell them, how can they lie to me
to my face when there are more kids in care
than during residential school?
How can this legislature pull a whole bunch
of Sixties Scoop adults in, and apologize
for what they did to them, but yet continue
to take children?
♪♪♪
And they're thrown in...
These children are just placed in homes
that they're not familiar with at all.
And some of those homes had eight children,
eight foster children in there, and it's from different cases,
different communities.
All that Social Services saw was addictions and violence.
I saw post traumatic stress disorder.
I saw the results of what residential schools
did to my family, affected to people in our community.
In some cases, it took a year to a year and a half
of consistently walking with families
to get to the core of the pain.
And it is intergenerational trauma, eh?
Effects of colonization.
PTSD, yeah?
Number one reason why children are apprehended
is domestic violence, and addictions.
The maltreatment one is but a sliver,
but yet we are a major institution in this city.
Foster homes, see?
This strategy right now through, according to their
documentation is to increase foster homes
by five hundred by the year 2022.
How does that tell me they're changing? That's bullshit.
[LORI] I think adopted kids tend to think
that they were not wanted, and so for me anyway,
to have that feeling internalized at an early age
that I wasn't wanted, that I was given up,
really affected me, and I know that it's affected
so many others. It really takes a lot to come over that,
and to understand that there's pieces of you
that are missing.
You never know that you're really ever going to be
whole again, and it's hard, it was hard for me
as a young person to find other people
who are cross-cultural adoptees who could really understand.
I felt like I was trying to be forced to become
something I wasn't, and I desperately wanted to learn
about who I was, and where I came from,
but I didn't know where to go,
and how to find out about those things.
♪♪♪
And I pray for many children because you don't know
what they're going through, especially now-a-days,
when you think about all of that media on suicide,
teen suicide, mental health. That's real.
That's real, and a lot of them don't know
how to reach out, and a lot of them don't have
that positive role model in their life
that they could trust.
♪♪♪
You know, they always say that things happen
for a reason, and when we were starting the ride,
a couple of days before we were going to start
these prayers, we ran into this young man.
He was in Regina.
And this young man, he's a Métis, a Métis man
in his early twenties.
He walked from his community to Regina
to make changes for, to create awareness
to help with suicide.
And I thought, you know, I'm very happy that...
that even this cause is coming to light
because, you know, we have a lot of our First Nation communities
that a lot of our youth are ending their lives too soon.
(FIDDLE PLAYS)
[TRISTAN] So, my name is Tristan DeRocher.
I'm a twenty-four year old Métis man
from Buffalo Narrows, Saskatchewan.
I've been fiddling for all of these years.
I started when I was nine, I'm now twenty-four.
And I'm very tired of playing at funerals,
and in the presence of grieving families,
for deaths that were absolutely preventable.
I've played at gravesides for children.
I've played at gravesides for elders who took
their own lives. I've played at gravesides and funerals
in the presence of grieving mothers for young boys
who died because of overdoses,
and I could have been playing at the playground
all of those years.
But I wasn't.
(FIDDLE PLAYS)
[TRISTAN] Canada is a diaspora.
It's a mass displacement of people from all over the world,
from all different religions, and cultural backgrounds,
and idealogical persuasions, and they should be given
the freedom to practice their own ceremonies,
to practice their own methods of prayer,
and to pray in whatever language was the language
of their grandmothers. That doesn't happen here.
What happens is we still have this very dogmatic,
Anglo-Saxon, religious moral reference point
for what is civility, what is appropriate,
what is allowed.
And even if they're not going into sweat lodges
and ripping us out anymore, and charging us
for singing with our drums, for having sun dances,
for having sweat lodge ceremonies,
for having (SPEAKS DAKOTA), and for having
Indigenous ceremonies that not too long ago
were literally illegal, something that they
could be held criminally liable for, and punished for -
in my grandmother's lifetime!
So, we're still waking up from that.
Although the RCMP don't come and take our drums
out of our hands, confiscate our sacred objects,
burn our children's braids, the racist language,
ideologies, and foundational dogmatic beliefs
are still present.
And so, in a lot of ways we need to be careful
of how people speak, we need to be careful
of the language they use because encoded in that
is the justifications for dehumanization,
demoralization, disempowerment,
and the pedagogy of the oppressed.
The issue of suicide is, is the core of what people
are seeing. Poverty, post traumatic stress disorder.
People will say addictions, okay, all that other stuff,
violence, all that other stuff.
See, whether it's external or internal, but it is PTSD.
Repatriation, bringing some kids back to the community,
reparation work, which means repairing damage done.
(DRUMMING)
(SINGING AND DRUMMING)
[NEIL] All of a sudden, last year it was like
bring home the children, you know, the Sixties Scoop,
the residential school.
It was a physical thing to bring home our children.
This year how it was different was it was more internal.
So, a lot of the stuff that we had inside of us,
all of our childhood traumas, we have to heal
that child somehow.
So, in that sense, that's what was different
is that we need to bring that child home.
We need to look after that child inside of us.
(SINGING AND DRUMMING)
My knees were just sore, my back was sore.
But that's that sacrifice that we make.
When I'm sore like that, that's when I pray for our family,
that's when I pray we become closer to Wakan Tanka
because he pities us.
And then when we're in that pain, and we're not praying
for ourself, we're praying for our children,
we're praying for the ones who are sick.
(SINGING AND DRUMMING)
[NEIL] Last year I saw this boy, you know,
always around his mom. Didn't want to stray away
too far from his mom.
But he got on a horse, and all of his little brothers
were all running beside that horse, just following him,
just happy, and that pride on his face
on how happy he was, to see his mom.
Of course, she had her phone out.
And you know, just that pride.
Yeah, so I was fortunate enough to meet Brock last year
at the horse dance ceremony.
He is an amazing young man. I could see power in him
from the get go, the first time that I met him.
He is going to be a leader.
[BROCK] There's some kids out there
that they know they're Aboriginal, Native,
but they don't really know their ways of life.
Even though I'm a young man, I have lots of youth
that look up to me, and ask me questions.
I have little nephews coming up to me.
That really touches my heart.
[NEIL] I call him a man now because I look at him now,
all of his younger brothers look up to him.
He's a role model to them. He's a man of few words,
but his actions are very loud.
This is the way of life that I'm going to live for a long time.
That's where that story continues because even though
he's still learning, what he knows,
he's still carrying that on, and not only carrying that on,
but he's showing pride in what he's doing,
that he's proud of his culture, to know these things.
He's very lucky to have his grandpa and his uncle,
and he's very lucky to have a strong mother in his life.
[CARMEN] This way of life is very important to me
because I'm a single mom, and there's things
that I can't teach my sons as a (SPEAKS DAKOTA),
as a woman.
♪♪♪
And the way I raise my children around ceremony,
around culture, around the drum,
that's, to me, that helps me raise my sons,
helps me teach them things because they're surrounded
by their uncles, and their grandpas, and their brothers,
and then men that are here, and teaching them things.
[NEIL] And that's part of what we were doing here is to,
just to show these children that, that sometimes
we have these family breakdowns,
but what our culture teaches us is that us too,
as uncles, we take that role of a father.
As a grandpa, we take that role as a father.
You know, these are things in our way, in our old way,
that's what we do.
[CLAYTON] Oh, a hundred percent. I believe that the children
should be involved in their culture.
It is, it's who they are, it is what they're...
What they're about. Even though they don't know it,
they don't know nothing about it,
exposure to it is nothing but positive and healing.
♪♪♪
[NEIL] When you're letting go of all of those feelings,
when you're feeling that insecure, or that fear...
A lot of times when you're a kid, we always cover
that blanket. Oh, I'll use that blanket as a security blanket.
So, to help you pray, and to help you pray
that the experiences that you had as a young boy,
that these horses to help you.
I put this blanket on this horse for you
so this blanket will help you when you're on that ride,
when you're feeling those emotions.
When it gets hard, just cry. Let it out.
This blanket will be your security. It will help you.
♪♪♪
(SPEAKING DAKOTA)
♪♪♪
[DARLENE] We have a lot of problems in big institutions,
and policing is one of them.
So, sixty women were brave enough to be part
of that research. So, there's hundreds more
that aren't coming forward that have been threatened
with child welfare and apprehension by police.
So, that's why this work is so important,
this work on keeping our families together,
making sure women are safe, making sure children are safe.
[CARMEN] All of our Nations are all going through
the same thing, they're all fighting the same battles.
And the concept of bring the children home...
It's a big commitment when you think about it
because a lot of our communities are battling so much.
So much alcohol, drug addiction, suicide.
You know all of those issues that our communities
are all battling, and when you bring awareness to it,
when you're starting to speak about it,
it brings it to life more.
It also gives comfort that people are doing something
to try to make change. And it's not always about
writing in a classroom or talking to a politician,
you need an art form. You need a medium like theatre,
or a podcast, or blogs, or a documentary,
to really impact people around the country
for these things to change if people are tired of things
not going right for the lack of equality
that's happening to Indigenous people.
♪♪♪
[CARMEN] And our youth aren't so quiet anymore.
They're starting to speak out.
Not all of them, but there are youth that are willing
to speak, and they watch. Our youth watch the adults.
They watch their leaders.
They're paying attention. They might not seem like it,
they might not be out there, but they are.
That's why it's really important that us, as leaders,
us as adults, that we try our best to do our best
for our children, to give them a childhood
that they don't have to heal from.
♪♪♪
[CLAYTON] Yes, that was a wonderful idea
by my father to take the two hour ride,
and it's definitely not a trip for a beginner, that's for sure.
That's, that's a good ride.
We went on an evening ride, and we went a different route,
and to go through those thick bushes,
and to go through that winding trail,
and to go through, we went through a slew of water,
I think to go through that was really amazing.
The things that I learned on there, like,
I think I actually, I actually, you know, I enjoyed myself.
I forgot all about those stresses that I was carrying,
I forgot about all the pain that I was carrying,
all the negativity that I was carrying.
I don't know what happened to it.
But we were going up this steep hill,
and the horse I was riding, it was a real old horse.
And it was a nice, slow horse, and that's kind of
my pace now is kind of nice and slow.
But this horse started galloping up this hill,
like full tilt galloping, and, and to feel that exhilaration,
and to feel that power of that horse.
You know, to hang on, but you still can control that power,
you can steer it. Anywhere you want,
you can steer that horse.
That horse is connected with you.
But the feeling you get when you do these things,
and the power you feel from your horses,
and the learning experiences you get are, are phenomenal.
[NEIL] And to walk through that water, you know,
you have to trust in that horse.
Trust that horse is not going to throw you off.
But when you think about it, those are lessons in life.
When that horse trots, you know, you're bouncing,
you're bouncing, and I'm wearing glasses and these bounce.
Sometimes it's kind of hard to see when you're trotting.
But when that horse is galloping full tilt,
it's more comfortable on that horse.
It's not as bouncy, and that air, that wind rushing
in your face, and it's a really good feeling.
And that's kind of how life is, you know?
The hard things that we face is when that horse trots
because that's kind of how it is.
You go into those bumpy roads.
Sometimes life gets like that.
We either need to slow down our horse so we can see,
or we need to find a goal, or find something
that we need to work towards, and gallop towards it.
So, riding that horse, that horse taught us so much
about life, it taught us so much about ourselves,
that all we have to do is pull back on those reigns,
and whoa. That horse will stop, it'll slow down.
Or else you need to kick that horse, come on, let's go,
and you'll go faster.
And in life, we have that choice to do those things.
So, when we planned this ride, there's a lot of that,
that trotting. A lot of trotting.
But when we got here to this camp, filling our pipe
every morning, reading those prayers
on that Facebook page, this virtual ride.
We never did that before.
Reading those prayers, seeing that people are still
praying for us, and still behind us,
that's a very exhilarating feeling too,
that we're not alone, that we may be just us
in this little camp, but there's people out there
that are praying, you know.
John Eagle Sr. in Standing Rock told me the day before
the ride that he was going to light a fire
and he was going to keep it for four days,
and he was going to pray, and that to me,
because I know how hard it is to keep a fire going
for four days, that commitment that it takes,
I was so blown away, and I was so happy.
And Jim Miller talked to him before,
because these guys were on the ride last year
and they helped us, they guided us.
Because of the pandemic, the border was closed.
Jim Miller said that he was going to make prayer.
Him too, he was going to go into a sweat lodge.
Him too, he was going to pray for us, that he loves us,
and he misses us.
And I'm very thankful for those things.
There's something about connecting to a blood,
blood relationships. Like, to have family that's,
you know, that's part of you, part of your DNA,
a lot different from my adopted family.
My adopted family love me, and I love them,
but it is, it's just so different to sit with them.
About fifteen years ago, I quit because I fell off
the beaten path, I guess you could say.
And it feels good to come back to it.
My first sweat here was, it was so awesome
to get back in touch with (SPEAKS DAKOTA).
And here, he was in there. I get to hear him,
and that was... I haven't heard him for a long time
because I lost him myself.
I guess you could say I lost myself, eh,
and I'm still fighting to get Archie Waditaka back,
and it's hard to find him. But bringing home
the children, that's the real thing.
People that haven't been in their community at all,
they're coming back, and they don't know people,
and they feel different. They feel some kind of way.
It's a sad, sad thing, but we're here for them,
and the message we're sending out
is a positive message too, well, to everyone, really,
that needs to hear it. And I'm just proud to be a part of it.
♪♪♪
[DARLENE] In this one case, I was assigned to a girl
who had already had her children in the system
for about four or five years, and they were reviewing
her case again, and we went to the Social Service office.
It's dirty stone. And we were brought into a boardroom,
and there was about ten people in there,
including someone from the Minister's office.
And we had to present the case of should the children
be returned to her.
When they came to ask, "Darlene, what do you think?
"What do you think about this case?" My opinion.
I said, "Well, she can't parent without practicing parenting.
"She needs to have the children to do it
"day in, day out to build her skills as a parent,
"and as a mother. And I don't understand
"how we can keep children away from their mother
"for five, six years. How can they build skills
"without their children for that long?"
So, you know, that's the real conundrum
is it just doesn't make sense to ask,
"Is this person ready," when you've never given them
the opportunity.
Going back to our value systems,
and every culture is a little bit different,
or every community's a bit different,
but they know what that looks like,
would be the opportunity to define some of those
programmings, and offering those cultural connections back.
So, for those that have been in the system
and want to learn more, and no matter what,
at the end of the day we all want to know
who are we? What's our purpose?
What are our values?
We're going to seek that out, whether it's at a certain age,
or just at a time in our life as, you know,
we're exploring our relationships
with families and friends, and moving on.
♪♪♪
[CARMEN] When we committed to this ride,
we committed to four years.
We feel that we still need to go on with it
regardless of the pandemic, and to try to do it
in the safest way possible.
[NEIL] How do we move forward?
Do we trot with our horse, or do we gallop,
move forward? Because this ride is a four year prayer.
Next year will be our third year. What do we do?
Do we pull on that reign, slow it down?
Do we trot, or do we gallop?
Because this ride has to mean something.
So, I think moving forward to next year,
I think we need to look in our communities.
I think we need to really address our children,
address our families, and we need to say,
"Here, this is yours. We're giving it to you.
"This is yours. This gift that we're giving to you,
"it's so sacred, and it's so strong."
But we need to offer that, bring that horse nation
to our communities, breathe life into our parents,
our grandparents, our uncles, so that they take a role
in doing that, and helping.
Because I think that moving forward,
if we include everyone in that prayer,
our prayer will become stronger, then it will grow like that.
And that's what we need to do with this ride.
That's what we need to do to give back
to those communities.
♪♪♪
♪ As long as we're running ♪
♪ Running towards the day ♪
♪ As long as we're alive ♪
♪ And able to breathe ♪
♪ As long as we're falling ♪
♪ Falling on our knees ♪
♪ As long as we're fighting ♪
♪ To get back on our feet ♪
♪ As long as we're hoping ♪
♪ As long as we're loving ♪
♪ As long as we're in pain ♪
♪ But we're always smiling ♪
♪ We are alive We are alive ♪
♪ In hard times we keep stride ♪
♪ We are alive We are alive ♪
♪ Together we will end every fight ♪
♪♪♪