STORIES / Okara’shòn:’a
White Lightning
The Lafleurs lived on my mother’s street. The father had a market in the village where the Court of Kahnawake is now, Lafleur’s Market. His name was Dave Lafleur.
Going with Tradition
There’s a festival called the medicine ceremony. You take the seeds that you’re going to plant and you bring them to the Longhouse. You pass around the medicine and you drink it through your body.
Conservation
The white man grows only one kind of food and keeps growing it on the same land, he doesn’t give the land a chance to come back.
Root cellar
There were about 25 Mohawk boys from both Caughnawaga and St. Regis at the Garnier residential school when I was there. And the older ones had our back, us younger boys.
Maple candies
If you’re gonna travel the world, maple candies are the best ambassador of Canada. I was doing the circumpolar meeting of Native languages in Tromsø, Norway.
Hide my medicine bag
When I go to Europe, I put my hair inside my hat and I hide my medicine bag. That’s so they don’t recognize me because they could be problematic sometimes.
Left handed twin
In our Creation story, the left-handed twin is the Creator’s brother. I don’t hate him. He’s still my grandfather. But Christianity says, “No, you’ve got to hate the Devil, be at war with the Devil.” All this made up stuff to confuse the hell out of humans.
Day and night
In order to comprehend the Longhouse creation story, you have to see the birth of the twins as sacred energies.
A heavy job
I used to do readings for people. When people have problems, like if they’re scared that somebody is sick in their family, they would come to see me.
Working on bones
My grandmother used to work on bones. Not broken ones because broken ones are very hard to heal but she would work on their muscles.
Dancing softly
My grandmother and her sister performed at the Indian Village together and they did a dance called “Harvesting the Corn.”
The two sisters
My grandmother’s sister stayed just up the road from us. We stayed here on this corner lot with our grandparents, about four houses away.
How to run a powwow
We had a big problem here in Kahnawake and Kanesatake way back in 1990. After everything was over and the dust settled, we tried to reconcile with the neighbours and surrounding communities. We sent out an olive branch, figuratively.
My grandmother Elizabeth
We had a hard time continuing in education because the church was in control of the education here, the nuns. They had these special nuns from Boston. Sisters of St. Anne they call them. And they were experts at what they call proselytizing – how to change who you are.
