okay my name is reg crow shoe I'm from bikini First Nation my Blackfoot name is Alec I seen that in our language it means dear chief that's a Blackfoot pecan II language and that's the language I speak I just want to say that I want to start out with a smudge in our culture smudge is very important smudge when we like to smudge it sets a formal place where we can tell stories in a formal way and in our culture stories are important stories I would say we're a oral culture and stories talk about relationships between nature other human beings animals and the and universe we live in and every time they interact those interactions create experiences and stories so those are what we're talking about today because those stories we bring them to the smudge and Wonder smudge they become formal stories not just any stories but a formal story so for oral culture our practice with the smudge is important so that we can talk about an oral story so with that I'm gonna start with a smudge so this is much much I'm gonna put the herbs on it or the sweet grass and as this Moke comes up the smoke connects us with creator so that we tell the stories the way we hurt them I used to bet the beer I will not be not dose okey dad's got your mother Christian quick Oh kiss from walking on ups at oak any target syndicate okay coconut regatta teennick see I need managed oxy mcdabble quit it Oh cheap Maps one more sip I'm not a sit-up iam I need up you must be good stuff in cease our to Nyx's okay no father I don't in hama nickel quarks no fire away now six not value to it doctor doctor cheaply as any Chianti okay Tom a comet Anna Christie quick it's just cenotes friend accomplished cheese Thompson so Axl just cynic is it a beaming known it's rock amongst I got oh you dog ox is Cobra comet on there's the watching man oxy battlefield sunlight the first story I want to talk about is the story about pandemics and I was talking to my father a few years ago we lost him in 2000 but he was born in 1889 and at that time he lived his hundred years and about 20-25 years ago we were we we sat down many times to visit but we were visiting and he was talking about stories about the smallpox the smallpox was a pandemic and he spoke spoke to smallpox from two perspectives one from a Western physician's perspective and one from the traditional healers perspective so when we Anja was talking about our our traditional healers perspective he was saying that through our creation stories and through our connection with nature those connections with nature give us medicine gave us knowledge of how to administer medicine and we understood it through our language and our ceremonies so he talked about how the medicine people were given herbs and plants as medicines but through the many thousand years of contact they understood things about what is blood what is bone what is a deer yeah if your body gets hot what is temperature what is fever they understood all those and through those stories they were able to put medicines together to deal with these sicknesses that came so that was their connection with the land that allowed them to become medicine people and through the smudge into ceremonies they were validated as healers so they they healed other people so back in 1850 one of the first pandemics that he talked about was 1850 the government did a head count of the Conny Indians in southern Alberta and that head count they had four thousand in 1850 day they said there was approximately 4,000 feet gunny members between 1850 and 1883 the relationship with indigenous and the newcomers was still struggling the government then introduced a give today to the begoony First Nation blankets that were infested with smallpox so as they as our ancestors accepted the blankets they didn't know there were smallpox on them so by 1883 there was looking at out of the 4,000 we looked at 2,600 2,600 died from the smallpox and out of that the ones that didn't contact smallpox was about 900 so between those years the medicine men dealt with dis oh macha fixin as through their traditional medicine they were helping some of our people survive but also there was a doctor his name is dr. Walker he wasn't he worked with the be gunning in South be gunning and he estimated that there was the same numbers that passed away and survived and there was 1,300 that survived but he said he couldn't understand why the Indian medicine man and his ceremonies were doing a lot better than the white man physician that was appointed by the government to look after the Indians and Oh as I read his journals he wrote in his journals he said the Indian medicine man through his trickery through his magic practices and he discounted any of our knowledge and called it trickery and mysticism he said through that mysticism he couldn't understand why he was saving more Indians than he was so that was the relationship ship back then so he was trying to convince that Indian healers to take on Western medicines to deal with this pandemic but our elders used our knowledge our ceremonies to treat this pandemic so today I hear the elder saying we've already distanced the young people from our knowledge and today is epidemic is starting to be different because our young people that aren't don't have access to our knowledge are confused they don't know what to do they're scared they're worried and we need more of the elders come back and start working with them through our smudge through our practices our language and our stories to give them confidence to say we can't and these are some of the lessons we learned from those stories back then we can let the sickness consume us because if it does and we can't separate ourselves from the sickness then we're gonna get sick ourselves we look at things like social isolation and and staying home then those are protocols we understand those as protocols to the sickness because the sickness is another creation and it has protocol that we follow those protocols we're going to survive so those are the beliefs that come out of those stories that help us survive these pandemics through our belief systems that we need to give our young people some of those systems today and yeah you
