I LOVE AKWESASNE!!! HOW MANY OF YOU DO TOO?

The title of my short presentation is VALUE. We say we love Akwesasne, what is it that we love about it?

The people – artists, lacrosse players, babies, youth, elders

the land, the gardens, the plants

the waters, the fish

the grass – sweetgrass that we smudge with and use for baskets, all of the other medicine plants

the animals

the trees that gift us with maple sap and syrup, black ash splints for baskets, hickory for lacrosse sticks

– We have thanked all of these things at the beginning of this gathering.

I love Akwesasne also, because of the teachings that have been passed to us from the people that cherish our culture and teachings and live them day in and day out. Due to our history, there are some Akwesasró:non who don't know our culture. Part of our history is that both the US and Canada have instituted policies to take our culture from us – and those policies have been successful in many ways. In the Akwesasne Museum we have a story posted next to a dugout – made in the Kanatakon district of Akwesasne by Loran Oakes in the 1800's – that illustrates a point that is important to remember today. Sheree Bonaparte, a member emeritus of our museum advisory committee, shared this story that was passed to her by the late Jean Herne, at an archivists' conference, and she allowed me to use it as a label in the museum, by the dugout. Jean grew up on Plum Island – one of the islands in Akwesasne on the St. Lawrence River. Her family lived off the land – Jean knew how to expertly prepare and cook wild game – a skill that she passed on (her son wrote a wild game cookbook) – they had gardens and picked wild plants for food and medicine, they fished, and had all they needed – but they did like to use flour and sugar – for those products, they would row to Cornwall. Sometimes a surprise storm would hit once they had already reached Cornwall and gone to the store, and before they were able to row back home. She remembered that they would turn their boat over on the riverbank, stow away their provisions underneath, and sit under the boat, to wait out the storm. Once the storm was over, they could turn their boat right side up, jump in, and row back home. Sheree used this as a metaphor for us, as Native people, who have weathered some very bad times, – protecting ourselves as best we could from the overarching and never ceasing attempts to get us to forget our languages, to stop believing in the power of our medicines, to give up our ceremonies and to take on the values and culture of mainstream non-Native culture. In Akwesasne, we still have fluent speakers – some of whom simply refused to stop speaking their language, even though they were beaten for it in school, people who know vast amounts of our cultural knowledge because their ancestors continued to teach our songs and dances to their children and to carry on our ceremonies in secret; and we still have master traditional artists because many of our grandparents and great grandparents were able to help put food on the table by selling their arts – usually in Akwesasne that meant basketry – sometimes they were only able to trade baskets for the goods on the shelf of the storekeeper who then turned around and sold them for much greater prices; but because we have ancestors who stayed strong, worked tirelessly, and sacrificed throughout the storms in our history, today we can turn our boat right side up – we can openly practice our ways, we can take it upon ourselves to learn our language, we can turn to those culture bearers of today and reclaim our history and our indigenous knowledge. That is what we are trying to help with at the museum – to let people know that we still have so much of what makes us unique – and to help in teaching our own people what the value of that is.

Today there are also non-native people who want to learn more about how to live in a more harmonious relationship to the earth – there are some visitors to our community who would like to right the wrongs of the past and as a first step, they would like to know more about us, as neighbors from a different nation, right in their backyard.

I mentioned that the story I just retold is on a label next to a dugout at the museum – we now also have a birchbark canoe that was collected here prior to 1925 & was returned to us by the University of Colorado, Boulder, and soon we will also have another dugout – currently at the Massena Museum. We are stacking them one on top of the other – on a stand made by Mohawk artist, Roger Cook. We are running out of room and have had to decline some offers of collections that are simply too large for the space that we have. Our storage space is overcrowded, our exhibit space is overcrowded. One of the ideas that we would like to have help with, from this initiative that has brought us together tonight is to guide us and to assist in identifying resources to work towards a new museum. We did some initial planning in 2010-11, and have that as a building block. We would like to work with the artists to have a new space – we have world-class artists, but we don't have a world-class facility to house their work.

A community member stopped in the museum last month or so to talk to my co-worker and he commented that he had never been there before. I said, "Well, look around and tell us what you think! Give us suggestions – what do we need to do better, tell us what we're doing well..." When he came back in the office, I asked what his suggestions were and he said, "Well, to begin with, you need to get out of the basement!" We have a beautiful museum, a recent visitor to the museum commented on how nice it is – "one of the best I've seen", he said. He and his wife live in the Carribean. We have a good number of international visitors, world travelers who want to understand more of the people indigenous to this land. It is important to share our story. Part of standing up for indigenous rights is to educate ourselves and others as to our history, our culture, our language.

It is important for us to show outwardly what it is that we value as a community. We don't need to hide that anymore for fear of it being taken from us; the danger now is that if we keep it hidden too much, we will be hiding it from the next generations and keeping it from our own people who haven't had the chance to learn our own ways due to past policies.

By devoting more attention to what we can call "Cultural Tourism" we can show, as a community, what our values are – we can put into practice what we always state – we love our culture, we love our language, we love our basketmakers and the arts – WE LOVE AKWESASNE!