??
(chanting and drumming)
??
(boat motor purrs)
(seagulls call)
(water splashes)
-For us, everything points back to salmon.
(boat motor purrs)
??
People say the salmon are the miners’ canary.
Salmon were so important to my people,
so important to the signatories
of the treaty from Lummi to preserve that way of life.
Because without salmon, I'm no more.
I'm from the salmon people.
(raindrops falling)
(birds singing)
(rain falling)
-I started working with tree kangaroos at the Woodland Park Zoo and learned that tree
kangaroos are endangered in the wild in Papua New Guinea.
The whole goal from the beginning was
how do you create a sustainable population of tree kangaroos?
? Head, shoulders,
knees and toes, knees and toes.
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes. ?
(laughter and clapping)
(cheering)
The YUS community, which is an acronym
for Yopno-Uruwa-Som watersheds or the rivers.
It's a cultural term
and it's also a political term.
They consider themselves YUS people.
Part of the goal
with the YUS community was to make sure
that they had the knowledge and the understanding of
what does it mean to make decisions
and protect your forests for the long term.
-I believe that the best thing we can do
for conservation is supporting Indigenous-led conservation
and bringing together different Indigenous groups.
-After getting here, it hit me very emotional.
I think, because it made me so happy that people still live
the way I lived 60 years ago.
(singing and drumming)
When they brought us in
and honored us with
traditional song and dance,
I cried.
And I don't know if I was supposed to cry,
but what an honor.
And for me to see that these people
have the power and the strength
and the pride and the ability
to maintain their lifestyle.
They have what a lot of us lost.
(fire crackles)
That's beautiful.
So anxious to even learn more about them.
And I also want to share and I've been sharing my history,
my culture, some of my tradition with them.
And tomorrow I'm going to cook with them.
-They put on a traditional pig feast
and traditional sing-sing, and they went all out.
And so Kathy could experience all of that.
(singing and drumming)
-We believe everything is connected, whether it's the air we breathe,
the water we drink, the water that provides us seafood,
the plants that give us food and medicine.
Everything is connected.
They asked me about clearcutting of land
in our home and why and what do I do.
And so they were impressed that I protest.
So we rallied in front of our fishing grounds
and we said, no coal.
And we won. We tore up their checks.
We burned it on the site
and we fished our traditional here.
-People of YUS, they own their forests,
so they get to decide, is it logged or is it not?
And I think it was quite powerful for the
YUS people to hear her talk about protesting, you know,
and trying to protect her forest.
-I'm impressed that they own this land
and they have a say in what happens to this land
so that they don't lose what they have here today.
I still rally.
I travel wherever I can.
In this, July 2013,
we went to the Columbia River to stop the coal from going out ...
And I did explain to them today that everything is peaceful.
So you're fighting for your rights.
Your, what shouldn't happen to your land or your environment.
And I said, Yeah, that's what I'm doing.
(people clapping)
??
-Let’s give a big, warm welcome to our Papua New Guinea Indigenous relatives.
(people clapping and cheering)
(singing)
-The Canoe Journey has been going on for centuries.
It might not have been framed or designed
the way it is now in this modern time.
It's, back in prehistoric times
or pre-treaty times, it might have been a potlatch.
-And before the potlatch there's ceremony.
(singing)
-We provide food for every canoe family
that shows up, every guest that arrives and takes part
in this celebration ceremony where we all come together as
human beings, as people from various different cultures and
languages spoke, songs shared, dancing.
A coming together of communities.
(singing)
-And to be able to know
a little bit more about what our ancestors
would have done and to let the youth
understand and know a little bit more
about how we what what we did and what who we are.
(camera shutter clicks)
-We did discuss threats before both of us.
We have common fights, common struggles, and a common will to protect, to defend.
-Sitting out back around the fire,
there were lots of questions.
You know, because to them what they wanted to do
to protect the culture they had,
their questions were all about how do they do that
from our experience
and where we are, what could we advise them?
-One of the main messages that the Lummi representatives
said to the YUS delegation
was, you still have your land.
Take care of it, protect it,
because we lost so much of our land and our resources.
-We can share with them our successes and failures
and how we've celebrated victory
and what it took to get to that victory.
We're still in that old world and we're caught between two worlds.
We have one foot in this world, but we have one foot over here
and we want to be here, but we have to find balance in both.
And that's really the struggle that we share in common with them.
(people singing and drumming)
(camera shutter clicks)
-So the Papua New Guinea wanted to do a ceremony for us
and they wanted to use all the regalia
that they had brought with them and so they had decided
that they were going to do a marriage ceremony.
-And the idea was that they wanted to solidify
the relationship between Lummi and YUS.
-The marriage ceremony and
them allowing us to see it and be part of it
meant that they understood
that our culture and the things we did are as important to us
as what their culture is to them.
-I can't tell you how or why, but I know
their presence was needed at that time.
They took part in a honoring, a celebration, a battlecry,
a moment when we needed them and their rich, deep connection to their culture,
to their land, to their oneness with what we call nature.
Being here with us and sleeping on this land
that we call home, that we call Lummi, someone
so far away, yet so closely connected to our way of life.
-You can't put a price tag on the value
of the cultural exchange that happened between
the Papua New Guinea and us here at Lummi.
It's nothing you can get out of a book.
It had to happen.
It had to happen night by night, evolving into what it did
to where we were just both comfortable enough
that we could share.
-But these individuals hold a special place
in my heart that I can't really put into words.
But it's it's a connection that will always be here
in a relationship that will never be severed.
It's a forever relationship.
In Indigenous communities, we have ways of telling the story.
They’re fighters,
they protect,
they’re strong, they're resilient,
they're survivors.
We're still here.
??