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Kihci-manitow, Creator,
had a thought.
And whatever Creator thought about came into being.
Kisikookuk refers to that light, that energy.
And that's one of the first thoughts Creator had.
This light, this energy we call acak,
we call spirit, and we carry that within us.
So acakosuk, those stars,
they are a part of us, and we are a part of them.
Oh, that the boss?
Hello?
Hi, is this Wilfred?
Yes, it is.
Okay. Um, do you have time to talk?
Uh... Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.
Okay. I understand you put on presentations,
and I was wondering if you'd like to come to our community?
Presentations regarding?
The stars.
Oh, the stars. Okay.
Yeah.
And where is this?
It's halfway up James Bay
on the Quebec side.
Holy smokes.
Yeah, well, we can keep communicating back and forth.
Right now, I'm just on my way to a Sundance.
Pawamanikititicikiw is what I'm known as from my people.
And it means, "He has dreamt a dream and keeps it."
I'm from Opaskwayak Cree Nation,
North Central Manitoba.
I'm also known as Wilfred Buck.
Young Wilfred: In my younger days,
I was commonly known as Smokey Buck.
I am of the fresh-out-of-the-bush,
partly-civilized, colonized, displaced people.
Trained and shamed by teachers, preachers, doctors,
nurses, law enforcement, movies,
radio, and television to be a pill-popping,
hard-drinking, self-loathing, easily-impressed, angry,
non-conformist, maladjusted, disaffected
youth of the dirty Indian Baby Boomer generation.
I lived and died in North Central Manitoba.
This is my reality-fiction.
So when they asked me to come, they said,
"Wilfred Buck is doing a presentation over there."
I said, "Oh great," I said, "I definitely wanna go."
And they said, "What do you want to do?"
I said, "I want to smoke fish."
And they said, "Why do you want to smoke fish?"
I said, "Because there's a teaching about this
that's connected to the stars," I said.
Oh, yeah.
This thing here, it's like a lodge.
This represents the star world, up there, where we come from.
And so, the idea why I wanted to smoke the fish
is because the fish are stargazers.
Sometimes, they just sit there like this, and they fast,
and they stare through that Hole in the Sky,
and they're able to see the future in there.
There's a big fish up there, namiw, the sturgeon.
Oh, yeah.
And he swims in that sky.
And his head touches one side of that Milky Way,
and his tail touches that other side.
So they say, ahcahk sîpiy is the present,
and where his head touches is the future,
and where his tail touches is the past.
So, you get that whole continuum up there.
Make sure that door's facing that way.
It's very important that you speak the language
because the language originates from the land.
The language embedded in it has all that knowledge,
that sacred knowledge that's there.
So, look at there, see that?
That's Keewatin from the root word kîwê, which means home.
That's the star they use when they're traveling at night.
They keep the North Star on their left shoulder
and they're pointing this way.
And this way is east.
So keep your eye focused right there.
You'll see one star that doesn't move.
See that?
You are getting sleepy!
When you go to school,
they never mention Anishinaabe constellations,
Ininewuk constellations, Dakota constellations,
Lakota constellations.
Through the process of colonization, we lost...
Well, we didn't lose all this knowledge,
it went to sleep on us.
So now, we're slowly rediscovering
what those stories were.
So, this is the Flying Up Moon,
and it's also Namiw Pisim, the Sturgeon Moon.
The sturgeons start making their eggs during this month.
Our skies had all the stories that we hear about.
They're all up in the sky.
And our people were never lost.
No matter where they were, all they had to do was
look at the sky and they knew immediately where they were.
That means anywhere they went was home.
Young Wilfred: My first recollections
are of the Saskatchewan River.
It made its way down from the Rocky Mountains,
across the great plains and into Manitoba.
By the time it got to The Pas, the river was wide, fast,
and filled with silt.
My grandfather lived on that land,
and everything came from that land.
Everything.
I remember tents in spring, summer, fall, and winter.
I remember the smell of weasels and muskrat,
of rabbit and beaver,
of duck and goose.
I remember walking down calm, silent trails.
In that stillness,
you could hear the snow squeak.
One could predict known patterns.
Experience and clear memory was key.
There were laughing memories and hard memories.
This is where we camped that one time
we saw a comet in the sky.
This is the place you learned to track your first moose.
This is where the eagles gathered
before they went south.
This is where sturgeon spawned.
This is where you learned to be a man.
This is where you learned to be a woman.
This is where you learned to be a human.
This is where. This is where.
I remember wâwatêwin the northern lights,
static energy in the air and the smell of ozone,
like after a lightning strike.
I remember looking at that sky saying,
"Holy smokes, mâmaskâts, it's wonderful."
Alvin.
- Wilfred. - Nice to meet you.
- My daughter, Autumn. - Daughter?
Yep.
And there's my son, Mistawasis over there.
Doorway's here, probably right here.
You got to line yourself up with this and that pit.
Oh, that's the centre?
Yeah.
Ground's pretty solid.
Walk it slowly.
Okay, walk it.
Ladies in the middle, tie up the tree.
They say Cree people,
we have a matriarchal society, eh.
And our matriarchs are the ones
pretty much in charge of everything.
Nowadays, you have all these men running around,
doing all these ceremonies, and they're saying,
"Women can't do this," and, "Women can't do that."
And I'm saying, "Well, what happened to
the matriarchal society? Where did you get that from?"
And what happened was when everything was outlawed
and we had to go underground, the men had to go out
in some secret place and do the ceremony.
And the women stayed home with the kids, right?
Because it was all during the night.
The youth that are growing up and seeing this,
they say, "Huh, that's the tradition."
And then pretty soon they're saying,
"No, women can't do this,"
because that's what they experienced.
Yeah. I was always told that women,
they took care of our medicine,
they took care of all that until we were-- Yeah.
Until we were ready.
...Again?
No. My hair, I can just feel that my hair is a mess
because there was so much spiders in it in the bush.
See, these ones are nice and flexible.
Under. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wrap it.
One of our origin stories,
when we came to this place to ôta askiy, this earth here,
from up there, we changed from energy,
we changed to a physical form.
When I heard that, I cried.
This makes so much more sense 'cause I always had a difficult
time with Christianity and organized religion.
When I was six years old, I was sent to Sunday school.
They forced me to go to Sunday school.
And I was sitting in Sunday school, six-year-old,
one time, and, "If you people,"
and she was talking about us, us Native children, right?
"If you people, if your parents, they don't follow Jesus Christ,
they're gonna go to hell."
"And your relatives--
that's where your relatives are, in hell," she said.
And I looked at her, and I said, "You're telling me
"my grandfather and my grandmother,
that's where they are?" And she said, "Yes."
I said, "Okay, well that's where I wanna be. And I left."
And I never went back there.
Young Wilfred: My visit to this place
began on September 27th, 1954
at St. Anthony's Hospital in The Pas, Manitoba.
I was one of three children born to Louise and Alfred Buck.
My father's parents were Carrie and Alfred Buck,
and my mother's parents were Bella and Edward Ross.
In the early 1960s,
things changed in the era of hydroelectricity.
The world conspired against my people
and forced them from the land they loved.
Everything was flooded,
lives thrown into the turbines
of hydroelectric progress.
The self-sufficient people who had lived off the land
found themselves living near towns that
resented them for their intrusion
and blamed them for their confusion.
We were marginal citizens whose rights could be
trampled when circumstances required
or profit demanded.
It seemed the only place tolerated our people
were the bars,
and this is where a lot of them went.
With all the sudden changes,
my father slipped into depression,
and not being able to make a living for his family,
began to find the numbness of alcohol.
My parents split up, and I was sent to live with
my mother's sister and her husband.
We moved from place to place.
Parties always followed along with the violence.
I usually was left to my own means.
Nah, it's totally different.
Totally strange.
Feels like a ghost town.
We used to raise hell in here.
So all this area here used to be a used car lot.
And when I first took off from my foster placement,
I lived in a car lot here for one winter.
I stayed in one car and a buddy of mine
who was also in the same situation I was in
stayed in another car.
We used to gather our solace in the bush.
After partying and fighting
and feeling horrible about ourselves,
we'd go in the bush, and we'd find peace,
and we'd hunt,
and we'd bring food out for our families.
That was the only thing that made us feel like
we were worth something.
Young Wilfred: In the summer,
friends and cousins would gather every morning
and head out to the bush.
We spent countless hours out there.
Young Wilfred: All the bullshit,
racism, and pain could be forgotten
with the thrill of the hunt.
Only when it was getting dark did we go home.
On Saturday mornings, I would get enough money
to see the afternoon matinee.
Man in film: All units clear.
Switch over to standby.
Woman in film: Zero Red, minus five.
Young Wilfred: It was Whites on one side,
and Indians on the other.
Sometimes I would sneak away and walk three miles to visit
my siblings across the river.
On one of these visits, a wolf kept showing up.
When I arrived to my mother's place,
everyone was gone.
My siblings were victims of the Sixties Scoop,
a government apprehension of Native children
who were adopted out and shipped off
to everywhere but home.
Had I not been stopped, I would've been stolen.
My mother never saw them again.
She left town to the city of Winnipeg.
She died on the streets of that city,
like so many of my people.
Acahkos Iskwêw, Star Woman,
a being of energy traveling the cosmos.
She came across this hole in the sky.
She wanted to go there,
but she knew she couldn't navigate that portal.
She needed assistance and she knew there was a being
looking after that doorway,
Kokominakasîs, Grandmother Spider.
Kokominakasîs said, "Before you go down to that place,
there's three conditions that you have to meet.
One is when you go down to that place,
you gotta take a physical form because as a being of energy,
you can't learn and you can't experience
what's down there unless you take a physical form."
Acahkos Iskwêw said, "Okay, that's fine.
I can do that."
She had to bring a gift with her when she went
down to that place, a gift to remind her
of where it is she came from and where she had to return to
when she was finished.
The gift was the star blanket.
And so again, she agreed to that.
The third condition was she couldn't stay long.
So how long is long for a being of energy?
So she stayed a lifetime.
Grandmother Spider, she sent a single strand
of webbing through that Hole in the Sky,
and Acahkos Iskwêw came down.
And through her, we all get to this place.
That single strand of webbing is called the umbilical cord
and that's how we all come here.
So this originally used to be Opaskwayak Cree Nation here,
all this area here.
One of the first things that happened when this bridge
was opened in 1906 is all the OCN people
got rounded up on this side of the river.
And the Chief, he was forced at gunpoint to sign a paper,
ceding that part of the territory.
And then the people got rounded up
and got marched across at gunpoint
to this side of the river.
And so, right over there,
that Anglican church, they say that's where
that impact crater used to be for the meteor.
So they used to hold ceremony all along this area here.
And with the coming of the missionaries,
they dug up that meteor and rolled it into the river.
And this pretty much happened all over the Americas,
wherever there were holy sites.
Those sites were destroyed
and churches were erected on those sites.
It even looks clearer than it used to.
So, all along this river, right from Grand Rapids
all the way up to Cumberland House,
families made their living off this river.
It was a vast thriving ecosystem.
My grandfather, he settled up the river
at a place called Barrier.
Hydro development came along, and they built a dam.
And with the fluctuations of those waters,
constant flooding and constant erosion,
they couldn't make a living out of it anymore.
So thousands of families moved away.
And my family came to The Pas.
And the place where my grandfather came
was up at this place over here called Umpherville Settlement.
And when he got there-- And when he got there,
he probably lived maybe eight, nine years,
and then he died.
And then he gave up. He gave up.
He didn't do nothing no more. He passed away.
So from being a self-sufficient person to
living off the handout of the government, he died.
So my wife asked me a couple days ago
how I felt about coming back here,
bringing my mom back.
And I told her I was angry, I was very angry.
And my daughter asked me, "Well, why you angry for?"
I said, because...
...they killed my grandpa.
Just like if they took a gun and put it to his head.
And they never accounted for that.
Thousands of people had that done to them.
Not only at Saskatchewan River,
but Churchill River Diversion.
Thousands of families.
The head of their families were effectively murdered.
It was a slow death and it's still going on,
that slow death.
Young Wilfred: After my siblings vanished,
I withdrew into my own little world.
I spent every scrap of money
on buying model World War II airplane kits.
During this time, everything went to shit.
My uncle and grandfather hung themselves.
My aunt finally had enough of the beatings
and left to the big city.
My mother, my father,
my siblings, my uncle,
my grandfather, and now my aunt.
Who else was left?
Had to change my way of thinking.
Had to go into survival mode.
Had to hurt before I was hurt.
Had to take before I was taken.
Had to put me first before all else.
Had to leave before I was left.
The first time I drank alcohol,
I drank until I blacked out.
Go, go, go, go!
♪ Raise a little hell, raise a little hell ♪
♪ Raise a little hell ♪
Young Wilfred: A gang of us started
breaking into stores, houses, automobiles,
and beating on people.
We got good at it
and the white kids started calling us The Marauders.
This affected my schooling
and after a couple of years I was expelled.
♪ If you don't like what you got ♪
♪ Why don't you change it? ♪
♪ If your world is all... ♪
At this stage of the game, I thought life was good.
♪ ...rearrange it ♪
We used to hang around at the old junkyard,
a good hiding and planning place.
One time, we managed to steal 20 cases of beer.
♪ Raise a little hell ♪
This was my first sight of the city of Winnipeg.
Through bars.
So you stayed here, Wilfred?
What's that?
You stayed in this area?
When I was young, yeah.
Really?
Up to five years old, then they moved us into town.
Really, eh?
My grandfather had the camp out here with everybody.
-In the wintertime? -All year, eh?
Yep. All year long they were here.
I remember going up Carrot River
and the sky was just black with geese and ducks.
I remember that.
I remember seeing that, going up to go hunt.
Now you just see little flocks here and there.
-Did you get anything? - Oh, yeah.
I didn't even have to open my eyes.
- Just point and shoot.
We came up with our students here.
We got in the camp and they had to get wood,
so they're making all this--
breaking all the trees and everything else like that.
So we set up the camp and then about three o'clock--
two o'clock in the morning, they heard the moose in the back
and they thought that was me trying to scare them.
But I was always amazed though
at how the locations were selected.
Because even with this one here, if you look, you know,
we seen some sturgeon jumping on this side.
But at the same time, you got the wide view for
the moose to come out.
Everything's connected to the land.
Everything.
Especially out here, you can see that night sky.
There's a star up there.
It makes a circle and it continues on.
And one of the names they have for that is môswa ahcahk.
It means the moose spirit.
Oh, is that right, eh?
Yeah, because it's called retrograde motion.
The planet. It goes in the sky.
And then as our earth passes Mars,
it looks like Mars stops in the sky, then makes a circle.
Then it continues its journey.
And of course, that's what a moose does, right?
When it's startled and you're hunting that moose,
it'll make a big circle like that.
And that's what they call it môswa ahcahk.
We should have brought granny.
Yes, I figured you would be thinking about her,
coming out here.
The land is sacred, because our relatives are here.
And this is part of who you are here -
this place, this Barrier.
So glad you guys come with me.
I was just scared to come out here.
Young Wilfred: When I got out of detention
after five months, I was sent to the store for cigarettes.
I remember thinking, no one would miss me
if I decided to disappear.
I walked into another world.
This was the beginning of a long, dark night.
My time spent on the streets was a series of misadventures
where drugs and alcohol were central to my existence.
I learned from the others and survived,
living in used car lots, shelters,
abandoned shacks, and tents.
Being a thief, a liar, a drug dealer, a shadow.
Resourceful, unreachable, untouchable.
I learned how to run away and I was very good at it.
I found this solved a lot of my problems.
As time went on,
I began to see I was surrounded by assholes.
One winter night after making a big scene
with my girlfriend at the bar, I left,
swearing and cursing at all those assholes.
I was met by a fist.
I came to, lying on the sidewalk.
I found I had no money.
Assholes strike again.
I started walking the ice road.
Next thing I know--
I'm screaming, thrashing,
and crawling at the edge of the ice.
I get a grip and as I rise to stand up,
down I go again.
Fucking assholes!
I make it out of the water.
It slowly started to dawn on me,
could I be the problem?
Nah.
I was the victim.
The poor picked-on little Indian boy.
So this one's called Star Walk 2.
And then you point to the sky
and it tells you what's up there.
There was one I wanted to ask you about.
It's connected to Orion's belt.
It looks like a bear.
Oh, yeah.
I'm not sure if you heard of it. Where is it?
It only comes out during the winter time or something.
It will be out probably about maybe three or four o'clock
this morning, it'll be up.
Because the Pleiades are coming up right over there
and behind the Pleiades is Orion.
Yeah, we call that Pipoon Nikititicikiw
the Winter Keeper.
Because of being-- it only comes out when it's cold, eh.
Oh, yeah.
All right!
We'd like to make a special presentation.
My late Sundance chief all used to tell us,
whenever we gather like this, we make spirit.
We make spirit and we make community.
And I thank you, my relatives for doing this,
for each and every one of you.
Also, I'd like to acknowledge my family and our oskâpewis.
Without our oskâpewis, none of this would happen.
Without my family, I'd be nowhere.
Kisâkihitin nitôtêm.
I love you, from the bottom of my heart.
Love you too uncle!
Hiy hiy.
So if you look over here,
you can see the Pleiades coming into view up here.
Right there.
But I wanted to show you this.
You see this W in the sky right here?
Roman and Greeks, they call that Queen Cassiopeia.
I tell the kids, you look at this W in the sky,
it's very important.
It stands for Wilfred.
That star right there, they call that Mitiy Kisik.
Mitiy Kisik means the heart of the sky.
The heart of the sky.
It's pretty much in the centre of the precession.
The wobble of our Earth's axis moves in
a big, huge circle, like this.
And it takes 26,000 years, they say,
to form one complete circle.
But the amazing thing about that is
right in the centre is Mitiy Kisik.
So that tells you our people have been
watching the sky for how long?
To notice that, to know that.
So we look up at that sky and we see all those stars
with all those Tellings up there,
and we know that we are part of something
bigger than ourselves.
Part of something greater than our mind can ever imagine.
For my Elders, that's okay, if we can't imagine that.
That's okay.
Young Wilfred: In 1974, some youth journeyed
to Ottawa for a rally with the Native People's Caravan.
This is significant of what the government,
and I don't know, maybe the public thinks.
There's some sort of innate fear of Indians getting together.
All Native people, we're not fighting a segmented
struggle all over the place.
We're all fighting together.
Young Wilfred: I arrived back in The Pas
and found things had changed on the rez.
They wanted to start a powwow group.
This is where I started to learn about our culture
and began singing.
We travelled all over Western Canada.
Eventually I left the powwow group
because it was getting in the way of my lifestyle.
One summer, I was going through withdrawals
after failing miserably at a treatment program.
I heard about an Indian gathering in Morley, Alberta.
Something began to grow.
I got to camp and ended up sitting all alone.
This old man asked me why I wasn't at the workshops.
I said I was sick and needed to rest.
He said, "You need to do something,
but rest is not it."
That day, I drove wherever he told me to go
and did whatever he told me to do.
The first stop was to a field.
He instructed me to pick 128 rocks.
We had to put tobacco down and pray.
I thought, "Is this old man mad?"
I was told not to pick just any rocks,
certain rocks.
And not just any size, a certain size.
I learned about limestone rock,
granite rock, and rock with moisture content.
I learned there are rocks that explode
when placed in a fire.
The next stop was stand of willows.
I did what I was told, grumbling all the way.
Young Wilfred: I came to realize
we were making a sweat lodge.
All the work focused me and got me out of myself.
Probably about 95% of the Elders that are alive now
were exposed in Morley, Alberta.
They bought that back
and they spread out all over the place.
And now we have these Sundances all over the place.
Because of the vision of people like Ernest Tootoosis,
Wilfred Peltier, Art Solomon,
Grandpa Joe Doucette from Mistawasis.
One of the people from Morley that I was working
with, Grandpa Joe Doucette, he looked at me
and he passed me tobacco and he said,
"You know how to build a sweat lodge?"
I said, "Yeah, I know how to build a sweat lodge."
He said, "Go build one."
So I went and built a sweat lodge
and that was the first sweat lodge in Winnipeg,
we built on the banks of the Red River.
And then from there, I passed tobacco to that man
and I asked him to teach me.
So I worked with that man for a good 6, 7 years.
And he taught me about matotisân,
he taught me about ospwâkan,
he taught me about the ceremonies,
he taught me about the dreams, and he taught me about space.
Because we were in those lodges sometimes
and sitting in this lodge, and the floor would fall away
and we'd be floating in space,
and we'd be looking at everything.
And this is how we're connected.
We're not just something separate.
We're totally immersed in everything around us
and everything is immersed in us.
Young Wilfred: In the fall of 1982,
the walls were closing in.
Everyone could predict my lies
and had heard all my sob stories.
For several months, I was in a total mind-numbing,
spirit-killing, don't-give-a-fuck,
messed-up blackout.
I finally came to consciousness
feeling totally sick.
Sick of drinking and drugs, sick of stealing,
sick of lying,
but most of all,
sick of myself.
On January 23rd, 1983,
I went into treatment for the 20th time.
I met an Elder, a Cree woman.
After what she shared,
I saw the world in a totally different way.
I found something that was missing in my life.
Something that was ours, that was Cree.
It was a sacred thing, and it was a powerful thing.
It seemed like a bright light was turned on
in my dark universe.
She said, "In order to walk away,
"you can't just change one or two things.
"You have to change everything."
Now, I was hanging onto the edge of darkness,
looking for the light.
Come on!
Go, go, go!
Come on! Let's go, let's go!
Yeah!
-Whoo! -Whoo!
Nice! Nice!
Young Wilfred: The only work I could get
with my seventh-grade education was manual labour,
for barely minimum wage.
So I went back to school instead
and spent 16 months finishing four years of high school.
I found my path into an education degree.
For the longest time,
I did not cry.
No connections, no loyalties,
no roots.
I was building a new world,
but did it have to include this hole in my stomach
that the wind whistled through?
There's a constellation up in the sky
called Sisikwun, and Sisikwun is The Rattle.
At a certain point of our orbit around the sun,
there's two stars that rise up, and when that constellation
points directly at those two stars,
that signifies spring has arrived.
When spring arrives,
we're tilted in such a direction towards the sun
that we get more exposure to the sun
and the earth absorbs that energy.
Then, at some point, it releases the energy.
And when it does that, it melts everything.
The ice doesn't melt from the top down,
it melts from the bottom up.
The earth exudes that energy and it warms up the water,
and the water crystallizes the ice.
And when the wind blows those crystals together...
...The Elders say that sound is the sacred sound
that tells everything, "Waniskâk, time to get up!"
The root word for sisikwun is sikwun, which means spring.
Young Wilfred: One time, I fell asleep.
My ancestors came
and took me flying across the great desert.
I saw something was coming,
a woman on a pinto horse.
She looked at me and said, "Sometimes we are lonely.
"Do not miss me. I'm on my way."
Then, she galloped away into the haze.
Those spirits they said,
"Before you wake up, tell me what happened."
And so I had to repeat the whole dream.
And then when I did that,
they looked at each other and they said, "Good.
He's gonna remember," they said.
And that's when I woke up and that dream was just clear.
And I was wondering what that dream was about.
Then, probably about maybe four or five years later,
I'd met Connie.
So, one morning, I'm coming down the stairs
and I hear her talking to my son and my daughter.
She's talking about this dream she keeps having
about this horse.
She's riding this pinto horse.
And right away that dream hit me, eh.
And I come down and say, "You're the one!
"You're the one that come and told me you were coming."
That's how my wife told me she was coming
before I even met her, eh?
Wilfred Buck breathes and dreams
and lives the stars.
I think his passion for the stars
probably came from when he was young,
when he was alone, you know?
When he didn't have his parents,
when he was by himself on those streets,
in those mean streets, wherever he was,
and he could look up at the night sky and say, you know,
"What is up there?"
And then, when that Elder told him,
"The way you want to teach children
"about land-based education, take them outside
"and let them look up at the night sky.
"There's so much knowledge up there."
I was teaching
at South Winnipeg Technical College,
grade three up to grade nine.
In the wintertime, we'd go down the trail,
we'd make a fire, make tea, make bannock, go snaring.
Manitoba First Nations Resource Centre,
they called me and they said, "Hey, what are you doing?"
So, I told them.
They said, "Wanna come and work for us?
"You'll be our science guy.
"Your job will be to put First Nations' perspective
into sciences."
"We can't tell you what to do
"because it's never been done before."
And in that process, one of the Elders said,
"If you really wanna learn about this,
"you have to sit down in ceremony
"because it's all connected to ceremony.
"Everything is connected to ceremony."
When you do that, and then you go look at that sky,
sometimes it'll be just like somebody moves a curtain
and you'll see something.
Young Wilfred: We have to go back
to the teachings of our ancestors
and we have to understand what they mean.
Not just verbally, but also inside our spirit.
What that actually means.
It gives you a sense of belonging.
And once you have a sense of belonging,
then you know you're part of something,
and that part of something is your responsibility,
not to try to destroy that.
Like, our Elders tell us that all things are sacred,
life is sacred.
Be it these little bugs here and whatever.
They're all sacred, eh.
And so, my process is to get to a point where
maybe I don't have to kill all these little bugs
that come and bother me.
I'm not there yet, though.
And there's a big bloody church.
Dad, go stand over there.
You gotta hold something?
You're our speaker tonight.
- Yeah. - Wilfred.
Elizabeth Wood, MIT.
Welcome. We're really looking forward to hearing from you.
- Yeah, thank you for coming.
So, you are the star professor.
- Oh my God...
Oh, don't-- I'm gonna get embarrassed.
I've been looking forward to meeting you.
- I'm a anthropologist. - Okay.
So, I've known about you for a little while.
Oh, that right?
I can't wait to hear your conversation today.
All right.
Really nice to meet you.
All right.
Greetings, my relatives.
Pawaminikititicikiw is what I'm known as from my people,
and it means "he has dreamt a dream and keeps it."
Look around here. Everything you see here was a dream.
A dream provoked a question, "What if?"
And then, pursuing that dream, it become a reality.
So, science is a dream.
Our knowledge is a dream.
That's where it started.
One of our esteemed Elders
by the name of Dr. Leroy Little Bear said,
"Technology, maybe 30 years ago, that was a dream
"and now it's a reality."
Other methodologies arrive at knowledge
in different ways, but the same ideas are there.
They're just seen from totally different perspectives.
We had a sweat lodge last night,
and one of the reasons why we go into matotisân,
the sweat lodge, is to understand
that we're part of something that we'll never understand.
And it's okay we never understand it.
It's okay.
It's good that we don't understand it because,
if we tried to understand it,
we'd get big, huge, massive heads,
'cause, "Yeah, I know everything."
And it's good that you make peace with the unknown.
Because the unknown is where you get your questions,
where you get the answers, where you get the dreams,
where you get all those things from, the unknown.
Yesterday was very powerful to be invited
by Wilfred into his sweat lodge.
What I found powerful about that
is that you invited us in your space,
and I felt that space was very different
from a space like this.
It was completely lacking of the coordinates
that I'm used to hold onto
when I'm making sense of the world.
So, the only way I could engage with that space
was actually to let go and to surrender to the experience.
At a time when we look at science and technology
as the cradle of progress,
I also recognize that you have brought an understanding
that is very sophisticated
because it is embedded in a community ethics
and a way of living together in harmony with each other
and the environment,
and it also encourages us to question,
"What is the purpose of the work
"that we are doing in our academic institutions?"
There's no fixed agenda.
We're just gonna go in and whoever shows up
and wants to go in, can come in.
Are you forgetting a direction?
Hey. Are you going a direction?
- Sorry about that!
- Five lashings. - Okay.
I was wr-- I was wr--
We need the cedar right away.
Oh, man...
Thank you all, Kim, Wilfred, and Leroy
for being here.
This is honestly, like, the highlight
of this entire project for me,
to have these incredible people sit here with me.
So, thank you very much.
I'm humbled to be up here with them.
This exhibition, it ends with the stars,
and so I was able to also paint Wilfred's portrait.
So, the exhibition begins in the stars
and it ends in the stars, and here we are tonight.
When I first started this journey,
of looking at acakosuk, those stars,
I never heard at one point that there were anybody else
involved in looking at the stars,
other than the Romans and the Greeks and Western astronomy.
All these things I learned about,
going through university, was about my people,
but other people were telling me about my people,
about who I was.
Other people were telling me where I came from.
Other people were telling me about what I believed.
All this learning that I did
was specifically through a Western point of view,
written books making up these fairy tales about my people.
And we believed them, going through that colonial system.
Leroy Little Bear: The Buffalo Treaty speaks to
the buffalo being a very important part of our culture.
Many of our songs,
many of our stories, many of our ceremonies
are connected to that buffalo.
I have a friend of mine, and he's working
on buffalo skulls and buffalo hides for Sundance,
and when he sleeps and he does ceremony,
paskwâw mostos, they come to him and they tell him,
they tell him what happened to them.
And what's happening to our people,
it's exactly the same thing.
- Yeah. - And it's still happening.
And the Western world has to acknowledge that.
They talk about Truth and Reconciliation,
but there's no truth.
Leroy Little Bear: If they were to tell the truth,
they would have to change their story.
The Christian story may be a good story
over there where it originated...
but it was not a good story for us.
Our stories grew up right from the land,
from the sky, and so on.
At a cultural level,
it's almost as though they wanted to make us empty.
When you have somebody with no culture,
then there's no guiding norms,
there's no guiding ways.
There's no grandmas, there's no grandpas
to tell us the story and so on that guides our life.
I would like to leave one thought with the audience,
and that is,
it's kind of the vogue on the part of scientists
to go and have a conversation with the Dalai Lama.
Well, these two scientists,
they went to visit him.
He told them, "Hey, in our tradition,
we have to make tea for our visitors."
So, he got busy and made some tea for them.
The cup was full, but he kept pouring.
It was spilling all over the place.
These two scientists were looking at each other.
"What's wrong with this guy?"
So, finally, one of them said,
"Hey, the cup is full.
It's spilling all over."
And he kind of says, "Oh. Okay."
Then he looked at the two guys,
and he says, "You know what?"
"You guys know too much."
"How about if you go back home..."
"...and empty your minds out a little bit?"
"Because if we talk right now,
that knowledge will be like this cup."
"It'll just spill over,
and we won't learn anything."
Most of our ceremonies
are about emptying your cup,
emptying your mind and so on,
so new knowledge can come about.
And that's why you go and see
an Elder for a teaching,
they always hold a ceremony.
And in Western science
and our modern world,
ceremony is missing.
Thank you.
Hiy hiy.
That first Sundance lodge,
those Sundancers that came,
the first thing they said when they walked
into that arbor area where that tree was,
okimâw ahtik,
they came in there, and they cried
and they said, "I dreamt about this place."
And we knew that the spirits guided them there,
the dreams guided them there.
And this was meant to happen.
Dreams instruct us,
and they're not some subconscious thing.
They're part of our reality,
and then we make them more so
when we follow through on those dreams
and make them live, make them live.
And these dreams showed me this Sundance lodge,
and each dream showed me a different step
of that Sundance lodge.
And each dream instructed me how I should go about
doing this, what I had to do.
And when I went and told the Elder about that,
he said, "Well, there's no interpretation that's needed.
You know what you have to do."
And of course, I knew what I had to do,
but I didn't want that responsibility.
I didn't feel like...
I earned that responsibility.
So I...
I ran away.
For four years, I ran away,
trying to get away from that responsibility.
Then I ran into this man,
Don Cardinal, an Elder.
I worked with him for probably about six years.
He sat me down one day. He said to me,
"You know, what are you waiting for?"
He said, "Look at me.
I'm not going to be around forever.
What are you waiting for?"
That's when it hit me.
I said, "Okay.
Time to stop running."
"Time to step up
and time to start taking on that responsibility."
Those dreams that were given, I'm told,
were given through acakak,
our spirits, our helpers,
our guides.
And it's not up to me,
they've chosen me, and there's nothing I can do about it.
And I still have doubt. I have lots of doubt.
Sometimes, I just feel like throwing everything down
and walking away.
Sometimes it feels like there's a big void there,
especially when you look
and you see all the pain that's around you.
If it wasn't for ceremony,
and if it wasn't for prayers and dreams...
...then maybe I would've just walked away
and said, "Fuck it."
But my family helped me through that.
And this ceremony...
that we carry
hopefully will help somebody along the way.
-Hey, sister. -Hello.
So, this is it, eh?
Awesome job. Awesome job.
Yes.
- We found rock formations. -Oh, yeah?
And we had a man come in to look at them,
and he said, "That's a Thunderbird nest and a sâpis."
Is that right?
Yeah, and it's real close to the lodge.
Awesome.
You know what I'm thinking, just looking at it?
This is it. We don't need to do no more work on this.
That's what I was saying.
We just have to put up the poles.
Yeah. The spirits come and blessed this place already.
Yeah, yeah.
-That's good. -Yeah.
Awesome.
I work on bones.
I'm going to show you this whistle.
That eagle was wounded
or hurt in some way.
And he healed himself.
So, if an animal can heal himself like that
or a bird can mend his bones,
why can't we as humans do the same thing?
Okay, straight back now.
Okay. Floor it and slam on the brakes.
We'll unload it that way.
With all this oskâpewis-in-training here,
it's like the young men finding their way back home.
finding where they belong,
where they're needed.
Can you get me about 10 or 12 good sized ones
so I can make a pit-- uh, circle for the fire?
Okay. Yeah, for sure.
As the healing starts,
the community starts to realize what's going on,
and it's like, "Yeah. Okay. This is real.
Like, this helps people."
So they start coming, and then they get more helpers
and they get more dancers.
And then the Sundance grows.
So, when we're looking for willows,
we're looking for ones that come
from pretty close to the ground,
maybe about this diameter.
I'd say about eight to 10 feet long.
And so what we'll do is, when we get ready to go do this,
everyone will get some tobacco.
You guys will put your tobacco down, and some of the guys
will have some machetes, and we'll start to cut them.
We need seven for each Sundance lodge,
and then we need 16 for the community lodge.
All right. So, let's go see what we can scout out, then.
What I seen was, I was flying behind him.
I was following. I was following him.
Following him.
I went to a white clear.
That was it. It was a quick, fast dream.
Mm-hmm.
White eagle, brown tips.
So, it looks like you're going to have to fly
with the eagles.
It's like three seasons.
Those eagles are summer.
So, within the next summer,
you've got to fly with the eagles somewhere.
Of the many gifts that Wilfred has,
the name of Dreamkeeper that he carries
is that gift of being able to interpret--
interpret dreams to tell us what they mean.
A lot of times, there's connections
to that star world, and we're fortunate enough
to have a guy like Wilfred, who can explain
what it is we're seeing, what are we dreaming about.
When we're in ceremony - sweat lodge, Sundance -
things that are going on that we don't know
are connected to that star world.
Yeah, well you got a year to...
to prepare, and if you're meant to do this,
then during that year, things will be clarified.
Yeah.
Okay, wrap it up and tie it.
There's a lot of healing
that's needed to be done on the lands.
And just seeing my cousins come out,
and seeing how much they glow from the ceremony
just makes my heart full
because there's so much trauma,
and there's so much bad stuff in our community right now
that we need to be dealing with.
So, it's good to see them starting to feel that,
so then we will someday
be holding the ceremony, and you know,
teaching the younger ones.
Bend it over that way, towards the doorway,
until you can get the top leaves under.
Over then under, right?
Yeah. Same way.
Watch your fingers.
You'll be tied to the lodge.
You'll be one with the lodge.
When you see the children come here...
...there's-- there's a difference.
They, uh...
They know what it's like to be in a community that loves them
and knows that they're safe.
And if they need a hug,
all they need to do is ask for a hug,
and they get one.
Because they're here.
And they feel so safe and loved.
And that's the most important thing.
That's what Sundance is about.
This is one of the ways we get reconnected.
We come to these places,
and we do these things, and we humble ourselves.
You see those dancers out there,
they're humbling themselves.
They're giving up their food, they're giving up their water.
Because they know this is what the people need.
These dancers put themselves in a certain state,
where they earn the right to cry for those people.
There's a constellation in the sky
called Namiw, the Sturgeon.
His nose touches one side of the Milky Way
and his tail touches the other side of the Milky Way.
Where that sturgeon swims, that's the present.
And where his nose touches, that's the future,
and where his tail touches, that's the past.
There's thirteen stars to make up that constellation,
but there's seven main ones.
And those seven main ones represent generations.
Right now, in the present,
we're right in the centre of those seven.
So, at the two extremes, you have your great-grandchildren
and your great-grandparents.
My people have a name for that. They call those câpân -
the ones that tie together.
What you're speaking now,
you're going to give to your children,
and your children are going to give
your great-grandchildren.
And then your great-grandchildren are going
to take those stories, those understandings,
those perspectives into the future.
So, if you want those people in the future to be strong,
to be understanding, to be proud, to be kind,
then that's the story
you have to give these ones in front of you,
so the câpân can take them forward.
Person shouting: Dancers, time to get up!
My family wants to acknowledge the work
that these oskâpewis has been doing for the community,
has been doing for the Two Prayers Sundance Lodge
since it started, thirteen years ago now.
We'd like to present a gift to our brother here.
Thank you for all that you've done for my family.
I really appreciate it.
♪ I am just a poor boy ♪
♪ Though my story's seldom told ♪
♪ I have squandered my resistance ♪
♪ For a pocketful of mumbles ♪
♪ Such are promises ♪
♪ All lies and jest ♪
♪ Still a man hears what he wants to hear ♪
♪ And disregards the rest ♪
♪ When I left my home and my family ♪
♪ I was no more than a boy ♪
♪ In the company of strangers ♪
♪ In the quiet of the railway station ♪
♪ Running scared ♪
♪ Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters ♪
♪ Where the ragged people go ♪
♪ Looking for the places only they would know ♪
♪ In the clearing stands a boxer ♪
♪ And a fighter by his trade ♪
♪ And he carries the reminder ♪
♪ Of every glove that laid him down ♪
♪ Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame ♪
♪ I am leaving, I am leaving ♪
♪ But the fighter still remains ♪
One of the things that Sundance represents
is community.
People say it's a four-day commitment,
but in actual fact, it's a life commitment.
You should be willing to make community wherever you go.
The most powerful way is the way of spirit.
And what our people believe
is just as valid as it was a thousand years ago,
if not more so now.
We can regain that knowledge.
It's been gone to sleep,
but we still practice those methodologies.
We still practice the Sundance,
we still practice the sweat lodge,
we still practice the vision quests,
we still practice the traveling,
sharing and talking to people.
We still dream.
And all these things are the methodology
of how we obtain knowledge.
So, we can regain all that knowledge.
It's just out there waiting for us.
And we just have to make a commitment to do it.
Oh, we must be going too slow.
People are trying to pass us here.
I'm doing 98 here.
♪ Where are you warriors? ♪
♪ The people call ♪
♪ They are cornered by a monster ♪
♪ With their backs against the wall ♪
♪ They are calling for their leaders ♪
♪ To lead their pain away ♪
♪ They are crying for you warriors ♪
♪ What do you say? ♪
♪ Are you stuck inside an office ♪
♪ Working 9 to 5 a day? ♪
♪ Results don't seem to matter ♪
♪ Oh, you just collect your pay ♪
♪ Are you ridden by the rule books ♪
♪ And not what the people say? ♪
♪ Do you see their fall from glory? ♪
♪ Do you help them on their way? ♪
♪ Where are you warriors? ♪
♪ The people call ♪
♪ They are cornered by a monster ♪
♪ With their backs against the wall ♪
♪ They are calling for their leaders ♪
♪ To lead their pain away ♪
♪ They are crying for you warriors ♪
♪ What do you say? ♪
♪ They are crying for you warriors ♪
♪ What do you say? ♪
Okay. That's it.