Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Fellowship, in June 2015 student Caitlin Snell interviewed Levi Southwind, a member of Sagamok First Nation who has held numerous positions in his community over the years. He currently serves as the Union of Ontario Indians representative and co-chair on the Forestry Working Group of the Resource Management Council. In this interview Southwind discusses the issue of economics in Sagamok First Nation, as well as the tension between First Nation communities and mainstream Canadian society, which has resulted in the suppression of Indigenous culture. 

How long has your family lived in Sagamok?

My whole life. My family's lived here for generations.

What are some areas of improvement you see for your community?

It depends on your view of community, I guess. In terms of us getting into sort of a capitalistic economy, it's not really an improvement, I guess, because it's not really part of our culture. In terms of making a living, I suppose, although socially we've sacrificed a lot in terms of how present day economics works, compared to how it used to work because I remember it for the family. For instance, when I was young I went to school and I went to a residential school, so I lived away near Sault St. Marie; that's where the school was. At the end of June we would come home, and we would spend most of our time on the land. The first thing we did was maybe pick blueberries, and the whole family went because we were all camping, and everyone contributed to the family economy. You had a job to do and if you were old enough to be able to harvest, your harvest would go to the family as a community and be sold to whoever wanted them. I even peddled the berries and went to small houses to sell them for the family. Today everything's so individualistic, and I think it becomes kind of a struggle for families to get to that old traditional practice of how we used to be just naturally, to get back to those times how we used to live. I think now we're doing this on a regular basis…

I never did receive much teachings in the way of culture from the family because it was taught by society and by the church to view it as heathen and that it was devil work and that kind of stuff. We were taught that it's bad, and our elders today even notice that we're in a very confused state culturally, in terms of what was Indian and what was not Indian because of these problems…Although I see it not because of economics, people can't really afford because of the high cost of living to maintain a separate household, they have to come back and sponge off their parents, but they don't really contribute to the family economy the way it was done when I remember, they just hang around and do nothing. It's a different kind of mentality.

I think the biggest bad influence that's come across to our people is welfare. When I was young, you know, everything you had that was on your table was earned by somebody doing work, and there were times when things were really hard and people would say, well, we can't get anything even when we work hard and go hunting, and sometimes it was hard to get something even from, like, fishing, to eat. We had to get something to sell or have a way to earn the money to have a way to go to the store to buy what we need. Over time that changed, but more so in today's generation…It's that people say, “Maybe we should go get the paper,” meaning voucher; they never gave us money, it was a voucher that you got that you took to the store to get what you needed. And my grandfather would say, "Hey, come to your senses." You know, to me it was like a “Shame on you!” for even thinking that, you know. We can do it on our own like we've always done. So that was primarily the way things were looked at in terms of being self-reliant and self-supporting.

Over the years when the welfare came, more and more people were getting a check, and I'd try to get people to work, they'd say, "Oh, no, I don't want to work, I can only make this much, and I can make almost that much by getting welfare and going to the welfare office," so it's really flipped right around. So, it really took away that self-reliance and self-determination of individuals of families and people, so it wasn't that bad, but in essence it's permeated in and around life and the family. I'm not saying that everyone's like that in general. There's just too much of it, and it becomes prevalent in our communities, not only in Sagamok, but in other First Nations because our situations are similar, like all these "little Africas"—that's what I call them—are just cookie-cut across the country. There's over 650 Indian reserves across the country that are living under this kind of system.

What is the role of culture in education?

When I went to school, there was none. The whole idea of residential schools was to get rid of the Indian people and the Indigenous peoples, not only here, but all over the world, to get rid of the peoples so they could access the land and its resources for the capitalistic economy. So, in that way there was no culture, and there continues to be very much a lack of the culture, the real culture. The culture that is being taught in the school system is really flavored very much by what is permissible by the white education system, so it's not our own culture. It's just the political stuff to make it look like the education system in Canada is doing something to teach culture to our people.

Even the church is the same thing. Church is there, you know, it's fine, it's good, don't try to convert me. So, you know, why the church is allowing a smudge of sage, sweetgrass, and everything? ‘Cause they're afraid they're losing their population, they're using their congregations, and the way they're doing that through our people and how they're keeping them in there is by introducing some of these drums and stuff like that so that our people are duped that the church is doing something for them. It's all phony. Even to the extent that our own political organizations have bought into that stuff. There's only a very few and they're outspoken, and those individuals rise and the government strikes them down and they say, "I'm sorry, but we can't give you our money because you don't agree with us." That's how they've always done it: when it comes to the culture, they play with it to the extent that it doesn't really give back the self-determination for our people because that's what they fear most, the white people, the government people, the people in Indian affairs, the people who control them before they get out of hand.

What role should culture play in education? How should culture be taught?

I think in our own societies, different nations or tribes had our own internal ways of teaching that; most of the teaching is through the family. But if you have multiple generations of people who've been exposed to the residential school systems who've been brainwashed into being white people and to believing that you're just nothing but a drunken Indian, which is what I was taught, so a lot of people even in my generation have that self-fulfilling prophecy mentality. You know, I was a drunk alcoholic for nine out of 10 years; you know, I went down that road, I lost everything, I was sitting across from the welfare people, people who had reported to me before, you know, that kind of thing.

There has to be a community movement, and I was involved in a community movement. Not really to convert people on the basis of religion, but really teach each other how to be good human beings, and if you choose to worship in the Catholic way that's good, fine, but at the same time you shouldn't call my sweat lodge ceremony paganistic. You should respect it and you're welcome to join me, and we have our ceremonies and when people are living together nowadays, it's not legal in terms of the white world, but what about us? There's no written way that's marriage in the way the white people look at it, but it is in the way that we look at it, so why isn't that recognized the same way. So we have to begin to really look at these things from our own Indigenous way of knowing to understand that, and we have to teach ourselves to back off. It's not going to happen overnight; it's a long process where you have these learning trips taking place, sharing with each other the journeys that we've been on, and we took the time to turn around and say, hey, there was something missing in my experience.

After I went to a treatment center in Ellert Lake here, I quit drinking and I was going to a lot of AA meetings, and it wasn't until I was age 35 in Toronto and going to AA meetings I went to an AA meeting at an Indian Friendship Centre, and there was a Native Treatment Centre in Toronto, but I didn't know that the Native Treatment Centre existed, but I knew the Friendship Centre was there. So, I went there and we were having the meetings there, and it was the first time I heard people talking about culture. They were talking about medicines, and the four colors and my Indian name and so on. You know, I got a lot of that stuff, I was hearing it for the first time, and yet it was like I understood it right away. I don't know how, it just came and I was able to really look at that stuff and say, "Hey, what's been happening to me and our people?"

So at the age of 35 that's when I really started to work on understanding what it was I had lost, and I came back to the community here, and I started to look at revamping the organization to look at how people in communities long ago were made to see it. It wasn't just the people on top, it was through the family and stuff like that. So I think there has to be a development of that curriculum; we have it here and there that we need to be sharing on a family social basis. Not that you're a student there and I'm the teacher here, but that we sit in these learning circles and we talk about these things. That's how the culture needs to be taught, so that when you come home it becomes a part of your way of life, not just something that you do on Sunday like going to church.