Original subtitles

We have taught our children the

earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the

This we know.

The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to earth.

This we know.

All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.

All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.

Man did not weave the web of life. He's merely a strand in it.

Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Chief Seattle.

Whatever you want to be, you can transform into.

That is the gift.

And so the spirits all came forward.

One says, I'll be Cedar.

I want to give all to them.

Another spirit really liked that. But I want to be able to walk all over the

mountain. I don't want to stay in one place.

I'll be deer. They'll call me deer.

And they can use my antlers, eat my meat.

With my clothing, they can make drums.

They can use my hoofs. I like that.

I shall change into this for your new children.

All the spirits came forward, and all the spirits changed into something.

My relatives.

All my relatives.

You go into the woods, that's your brother, that's your sister.

They're giving their all to you.

This world loves us.

And this is the way it was.

Our gratitude can still be found in ceremony and song within the walls of

longhouses, great structures where we meet to celebrate all that it means to

who we are.

Within this Tulalip longhouse on the shores of Puget Sound, the council of

Native Americans met to share their tribal memories and ongoing history.

Back home, my real name is Kun -Kun -Kunigeti. It means big thunderbird.

Bobby Joseph is a Kwakiutl potlatch chief from the coastal region of British

Columbia in Canada.

A journalist for the Vancouver Sun, he has worked all his adult life for the

advancement of Native people.

I am Sasi Ash, younger than Seattle.

Jewel James is a lineal descendant of Chief Seattle from the Lummi Reservation

in Washington State. He is a carver of traditional Northwest art.

and chairman of numerous national organizations committed to environmental

preservation.

My name is Pilula Cush.

I'm Bear Clan of the Northern Chumash of the Copacabana of the Chumash Nation.

As a clan mother of the Northern Chumash of California, Pilula Cush has worked

tirelessly for the protection and preservation of sacred sites of her

She is also a traditional storyteller.

My name is Judy Trejo.

I'm a northern Paiute.

I'm from the desert.

Judy Trejo has a master's degree in education.

She teaches the Paiute language at an elementary school on the Walker River

Reservation in Nevada.

She is also a traditional singer.

My borrowed name is Alan Slickboo Jr., a name given to me.

Al Flick Poo Jr.

is a traditional whipman of the Nez Perce tribe of Idaho.

He has been active in the maintenance of Nez Perce traditional spiritual

practices.

When I was a child, I used to have to listen. I used to be told every day who

I was, where I came from, who my relatives were, what my responsibility

what my name was, what that stood for.

So there was always that kind of relevant, contemporary meaning to

history. Like it was real, it wasn't a textbook of some other time, some other

place, some other people.

Before the arrival of the white man, there were more native people in what is

now California than any other part of the continent.

The cultural diversity of close neighbors was astonishing.

Over 200 distinct languages and dialects were spoken, some as different as

Chinese as from English.

People often spoke as many as 15 languages.

From the coastline, To the mountains, the

abundance of the earth determined the roots of culture.

Each animal, each tree and rock has a spirit and a history.

Our shamans and our priests knew the secrets and powers of the natural world.

Our identity was our landscape, and our landscape was sacred.

One of the things that's been wrong over time is that other people have tried to

present our history.

Other people have tried to say what they think we say or to illustrate how

we feel.

And none of them have done the job, obviously, because none of those things

are important have been saved through their process.

And that's essentially the difference between how other people write a history

and how we tell it, how we live it, how we perpetuate it, how we sustain it.

And it can only be done orally.

That's exactly what they are, just legends, just myths, just folklore.

But to us, they're a sacred creation myth. It's a way of teaching our

It's more than a myth. It's a reality.

Our mythic stories aren't just fantasy.

They carry potent facts of our past.

Greg Serris, a Coast Miwok Kashupomo, tells of one such story that has been

for generations, of a whale who lived in a creek.

many miles inland from the coast of Northern California.

The team of geologists happened to be working in the creek over here, and they

unearthed whale fossils from the period of the last Pliocene.

And we said, according to the story, that during the time of the flood, there

was a whale in that creek.

This was told generation after generation for 10 ,000 years.

They got very interested, these geologists, and they said, God, you

Indians have this myth.

that about this whale in the creek and we found the fossils. The Indians also

say that during the time of the flood, the people went on top of that mountain

and went into a cave. They went up to the cave and carbon dated charcoal on

walls from fires that dated to the same period.

Now, if that's a myth, you give me some evidence of Noah's Ark. Do you have any

splinters or wood from that?

Of those who ventured from the coast of California.

The most accomplished seafarers were the Chumash Indians.

Great ocean -going plank canoes carried them beyond coastal kelp beds to the

open seas.

They fished for swordfish, halibut, and tuna, harpooned sea lions, dolphins, and

whales, always honoring the spirits of those animals who gave their lives to

them.

The Chumash were the bankers of the region, developing a monetary system

throughout what we now know as Southern California.

We were known as the people who make shell bead money.

And people think, well, you know, that's pretty crass.

But our money, the shells, have spirits in them too.

Spirits were in all the natural world.

And we shared the earth with them freely.

For my family and the Chumash people, the coming of the Catholic Church had

the most long -lasting effect.

They talk about it in terms of contact, and to me that implies a gentle coming

together of people.

So I always deliberately use the word invasion, because that's what it was.

Contact between the Chumash Indians and the Spanish first occurred in the Santa

Barbara Channel in 1542, just 50 years after Columbus had landed.

In 1769, more than two centuries later, the building of the first Franciscan

mission would mark the beginning of Spanish control.

In just 65 years, they would enslave our people as field workers, domestic

servants, and laborers.

Attempted escape or refusal to work resulted in a penalty of death.

Men and women were forced to live separately.

It was as if the heart had been torn from our tribes.

They came with the idea of changing our people to save us from our heathen ways.

And they were willing to do that at any cost.

They are so savage, wild, dirty.

Disheveled, ugly, small and timid that only because they have the human form is

it possible to believe that they belong to mankind.

Spanish priest.

All it meant was that they lived with the earth. They believed the tree was

spiritual. The plant was spiritual.

The medicines were spiritual.

And organized religion ripped that out.

Our people were brutalized beyond description.

It was a holocaust that came down on us.

And then the epidemics hit.

All of these diseases that our people had not been exposed to before, had no

of dealing with.

Smallpox, measles, and other deadly diseases spread like wildfire into the

surrounding villages.

Our bodies couldn't deal with them. We didn't have the immunity to them.

And our medicine people didn't know what to do with them either.

So they noticed that the people, the priests and the other people who were

the missions, weren't getting as sick as much.

They were getting sick, some of them, but not like with our people.

So maybe what happened was our people decided to go there.

And maybe they would be able to gain a protection.

But what they discovered was they kept getting sick anyway.

And when they tried to leave, then they weren't allowed to leave.

And if they did go, the Spanish army was sent after them.

And the ones that got away, they went as far as they could and they told the

neighboring people, look out, this is coming, this is coming to your people

Gente de razón, rational people, was the term the Spaniards used to distinguish

themselves from us.

In spite of the brutality, the belief in their own benevolence remained.

As one observer wrote,

Whether the Indians be really dragged from their homes and forced to exchange

their life of freedom for one of confinement and restraint, The change

seem advantageous to them. They lead a far better life in the missions than in

the forest.

When that first Spanish boot touched the soil, the mother earth of our people,

everything was changed.

It was the end of the world for these people.

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The territory of California passed in the hands of Spain to a new, independent

Mexico. When the mission period ended, the native populations had been reduced

by two -thirds.

By the 1840s, we could not escape westward expansion and American

The United States took California from Mexico.

On January 24, 1848, a nugget of gold was discovered in an old Maidu village

site on the American River.

With this new flood of immigrants, the final chapter in the taking of our

homelands had begun.

That was the big thing they were looking for. They were always looking for gold.

And there was gold in our area. The native people knew it.

It wasn't huge amounts.

But there was some.

But we didn't tell.

People died for this.

It has no value. Why would you die for something that has no value? They said,

well, why don't you go get this gold if you know where it's at?

And the old, old elders said, we have everything.

You have clothing.

You have food.

You have a house.

You got the winter. You have everything.

Manifest destiny was a rationalizing principle upholding the belief that

was a divine inevitability to the conquering of his continent.

It soothed the white man's conscience and justified the taking of Indian

A debate over the fate of Indian people suggested only two alternatives, protect

or exterminate.

What happened, what began to happen was a killing frenzy, and they went nuts.

There were not just bounties, but clubs that were set up among the white people

to go out and see, like, how many Indian scalps or pieces of body, sometimes it

would be fingers, that they could bring back to prove that they'd killed

somebody, or a foot.

Peter H. Burnett, governor of California in his annual address of 1851,

proclaimed,

It must be expected that the war of extermination will continue to be waged

between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.

The inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to

avert.

Peter Burnett, Governor of California.

Within six years the European population of California had swollen to nearly a

quarter of a million people.

For the indigenous Californians, the reality of extermination was at hand.

Across the parched land known as the Great Basin, the flood of pioneers lured

gold encountered small bands of desert Indians.

The Shoshone, Goshute, and the Paiute were among the hunting and gathering

tribes living by a precarious dependence on the cycles of nature.

We traveled in small bands, our people did.

And we went where the food was plentiful. The boy never would say,

The grease brush is nice and yellow. The deer is fat. It is time for us to move.

I was taught to talk to the plants and tell them what I needed them for before

replaced whatever I took from them with a small gift.

When I think back of what this land was like, it was a land of plenty.

Beautiful salmon trout that spawned up our river.

We had deer, ducks, geese.

You know, we had a way of life here.

It wasn't, remember, just gold. These guys came out here just for gold. They

looked around and said, my God, there's also land. We're going to stay here.

Nobody's claiming that. It's just a bunch of Indians.

It was a real sad time in the life of the people here when we were so much in

between cultures, from the traditional roaming ways to starting to

be in one place. And it was a time when everybody was looking for hope

for the future, you know, what was going to happen to us.

A man who works in soil cannot dream in wisdom.

come to us in dreams.

I ate medicine, man.

We relied, as we had for millennium, on our traditional dreamers.

Many of them envisioned an apocalypse that would miraculously rid our world of

our white oppressor.

Hundreds of native prophets began spreading messages of divine hope.

The best -known movement, the goat dance religion, was founded by a Paiute

messiah known as Wovoka.

Wovoka was a combination, I think, of a traditional medicine man and

Christianity.

Among the Paiutes, he was simply old man Jack Wilson.

Some people called him Grandpa.

He predicted dates when the sun would go into hiding.

He predicted dates when the earth would shake.

He preached the buffalo coming back and the whites disappearing, but yet again

he taught brotherhood, kindness, be kind to each other, work together.

I think it was something that we all needed at that time because it was such

sad time, and I think it gave us strength.

Wovoka had been struck with a revelation from God.

His vision for peace was carried to sacred dances based on a traditional

brown dance.

It quickly spread to hundreds of desperate worshippers.

The ghost dance was in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the

you know.

California, it traveled so far and so fast.

Ghost dance camps sprang up and thousands would gather and dance for

trance and exhaustion.

The government's fear of the ghost dance movement escalated when it reached the

plains.

As rumors spread that Lakota tribespeople were assembled, fear became

and nearly 300 people were massacred by the United States Army at Wounded Knee

in South Dakota.

27 men of the 7th Cavalry received the Medal of Honor for this massacre.

You can kill my body.

You can damn my soul.

I'm not believing in your God and some world down

below.

You don't stand a chance against my

prayers.

We shall live again.

We shall live again.

I am one of six people left that do the ghost

dance song in the Great Basin area.

Come on, Jack.

Old man Jack Wilson said, you will have to lose almost everything.

I see this happening now.

We almost became an endangered species.

But we don't sing them kind of songs no more.

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The difference is the heart.

That's the difference between their world and our world.

You can't write the things that move the heart on paper.

Chief Seattle has been quoted, and people read it. How can you buy or sell

air or the land?

The idea is strange to us. No heart.

We negotiated treaties with them in an honest, good faith.

We expected their word to be good.

Great nations like great men keep their word.

They never kept their word. They never paid for the land.

They never treated with us in honesty.

People say that we could have been one of the largest reservations in

the United States today if it wasn't for them treaties.

Cheers.

Your great -grandmother, my grandmother.

Alan Slickfoo's father, Alan Sr., is a tribal historian for the Nez Perce

and author of two books on Nez Perce history.

Alucut, Chief Joseph, younger brother.

Julia Thomas Slickfoo, that's grandma.

Here's the Slickfoo brothers.

The aboriginal lands that were identified as belonging to the Nez Perce

consisted of approximately 13 .5 million acres.

The Treaty of 1855, which was negotiated in Walla Walla Valley, created 7

.5 million acres.

In 1863, more land was taken away from the tribe. Today, the Nez Perce Nation

holds 750 ,000 acres out of a total of 13 .5 million.

Million acres, as they claimed as their territory.

The Treaty of 1863, I have referred to as the Steel Treaty.

I guess this is one way that you can describe this, is when Chief Joseph said

that the white man, he came to my lodge. He said, Joseph,

I like your horses. You have very fine horses.

I'd like to buy them.

Joseph said, no.

I don't want to sell my horses.

I like my horses.

Joseph said, then he goes to my neighbor.

Joseph has some nice horses. I want to buy them, but he won't sell them. My

neighbor said, okay, give me the money, and I'll sell you Joseph's horses.

You can have them.

This is the way the land was taken.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce refused to sign the 1863 treaty.

Others without authority signed away the beloved Wallowa Valley of his people.

He died in 1871.

In 1877, after 15 years of refusing to leave Wallowa, Joseph's son and

the Nez Perce faced an ultimatum from the United States Army to move to the

reservation in Idaho.

It ignited a major conflict with the Indians.

For months, 300 warriors and 500 women and children successfully fought a

running battle across the Bitterroot Mountains and the high plains of

miraculously avoiding defeat.

Then, just 40 miles from the Canadian border, young Joseph gave up.

His people scattered and desperate.

In his words of surrender could be heard an echo of resignation that resounded

throughout reservations across the United States.

Hear me, my chief.

I am tired.

My heart is thick and sad.

From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

We do say we don't own the land, the land owns us.

But as stewards, we see that it's all been destroyed.

They destroyed our memory so that we will have no defenses for the land.

This is a history that's not written.

This is a history that's not spoken about.

They don't teach this to their kids.

In 1887, a new piece of legislation was introduced as a final solution to the

Indian problem.

The General Allotment Act was designed to destroy communal land holdings, the

very foundation of our tribal life.

Individual tribal people, members, were given so many acres dependent upon the

terrain. If it was good, flat, tillable land, they were given 80 acres.

And if they were kind of rough terrain, grazing land, tillable land combined,

they were given 160 acres.

And whatever acreages were left, the United States government said, these are

surplus lands.

As surplus lands, we will now open the reservation for a big land rush for

settlers to come in.

take over those lands that are surplus.

By the 1920s, the government had claimed for open sale to whites over half of

the lands promised to us in treaties.

We were expected to accept the privilege of citizenship that came with private

ownership of land and abandon our communal way of living.

It was the last step in civilizing the savage.

And so, when our elders grieve, we grieve.

Because we know we'll be the elders next, grieving for what the children are

losing. The memory of what was right versus what's wrong.

We are linked in the chain to carry on our culture. If we cannot keep it up,

what is our children going to know in the next generations to come?

And as I put on my war bonnet on some of these dances,

these honorary dances that we have, I continue to dance proud

with my war bonnet.

And when I dance that way, I think of the chiefs along the Snake River,

the chiefs of our people.

I think of...

And it's Tuesday.

And myself, I am.

The

Native

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History is a living thing.

And history is being created as we go through our lives day by day.

And it's true that we have to talk about the times.

in the time before time when the animals were people. But we also have to

remember to talk about the things that are happening now within our lifetime.

If I tell you my history, I tell you from my own experience as well as

it to the pillars that made our societies drawn to these creation

My children, they can learn all of these things in a book and it wouldn't have

the same meaning.

In 1993, 18 coastal communities of the Pacific Northwest launched their canoes

from Seattle, Washington to Bella Bella, British Columbia, retracing their

ancestral trade routes for the first time in almost a century.

When we talk about these canoes, they're simply not just a form of physical

transportation from one place to another.

They represent for us a spiritual quest.

one where we can reach back deep into our history and be able to look at how

ancestors used to live, how they used to relate to each other.

They've represented for us Native people along the coast a renaissance of

spirit, heightening up our consciousness.

this deepest yearning that we've always had since the beginning of time, to be

connected. And that's basically what this whole canoe forum and exercise

represents.

Not only our presence, but our past, our history, the richness of all of the

ceremonies associated with canoes and people and the sea and the land and the

resources. We're all there and all tied together.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, the tribes all up down the coast, Northern

California, California on up, all the salmon people, people that fish, whether

they're right on the coast or inland into the plateaus where the rivers all

flowing.

As long as the salmon get there, the people have a cultural memory, a

traditional memory, a ceremonial memory.

The first salmon ceremony, when the first salmon come back, we respect them

because they...

brought nourishment. They sacrificed their body for us.

The salmon was chosen as the chief of the run.

Now the soul of the salmon will be returned to the water so they can send

the spirit of the salmon people and tell them it is time to come home.

Our culture is evolves around them, and we begin to center on them.

And then when they're destroyed, something that was part of our solidness

taken right out.

In this century, salmon, the lifeblood of our people and our culture,

became increasingly endangered by the damming of rivers, timber cutting on

watersheds, and unrestrained harvesting techniques.

Native activists fought and died for their treaty rights to

fish and for the responsibility to maintain this precious resource.

In the 60s, we were taking virtually the United States on and we were taking the

state of Washington and hopefully forcing the United States to take our

and protect the treaties.

A leader in that struggle of two decades was Nisqually tribal member Bill Frank

Jr. I went to jail over 90 times.

I'm now chairman of the Northwest Indian Fish Commission, which...

is a spokesman for the 20 tribes in Puget Sound and along the Pacific Coast

here. We coordinate all the fisheries and the natural resource of the tribes

a coordinating body for the tribes and fisheries management.

Our salmon out here is not doing very good now.

They migrate out to sea for four or six or eight years, and then they come home,

and they don't have a home now to come back to.

I was traveling on the Columbia River when I was about 13 years old.

And I stopped along the Columbia River, Salila Falls, they call it now. And at

any particular time, you could look out and you could count several hundred

Chinook salmon up in the air at one time, trying to get over these falls.

That was a wonder of the world.

How beautiful this was.

The Army Corps of Engineers destroyed them falls.

We'll never see that again in our lifetime or our children's lifetime.

Sure, we need electricity.

We're not going to turn our lights on.

But there's a way to have electricity.

There's a way to have our salmon runs.

There's a way to have our trees. There's a way to harvest them trees. There's

the right way.

and there's the wrong way and we in this country have been doing it the wrong

way far too long we have to start doing it the right way

in the

northwest

economy we really had a different sense of material wealth material wealth was

the least important thing in the world What was important was your name, maybe

family songs,

vision sites.

And even if you owned a site amongst the tribes here at Fish, that site was only

yours until you got too much. And then if you had excess, you had to help the

elders or help the people without family and make sure the community had it.

Because we're so wealthy with famine, we're able to spend many months

accumulating wealth.

Baskets, canoes, masks.

rattles. Many things were accumulated.

But we didn't accumulate the wealth in order to keep it. We accumulate it to

give it all away.

And then when you give it all away, then your name is something.

That's when your name has value.

The redistribution of wealth by tribes, clans, and families occurred each year

during lavish ceremonies called potlatches.

Underlying these elaborate events were the announcements, agreements and

decisions at the heart of our societies.

The potlatch bound the people into a network where giving, giving

and giving was the most important thing in the whole world.

It never piled just that you yourself only owned it.

You only owned it long enough to redistribute it amongst all the people.

Because when we think about the accumulation of that type of wealth,

also their prayers that went with it. You just didn't go to the beaver or the

bear or the deer and take their hide or their horns or their antlers or their

teeth or their meat.

There's prayers.

And so you paid your respect first. That's what made them valuable.

And when you received these gifts, you knew that somebody wasn't hurt.

In the process, some person was inert.

And then he distributed all this wealth, material things, to all the people.

He then filled up their supplies of material things and then redistributed

all the people again.

In the eyes of the Canadian government, potlatches were seen

only as wasteful giveaways.

Four months of winter celebrations kept valuable laborers from the canneries and

students from the schools.

In 1884, the potlatch was outlawed.

Arrests persisted well into the 1930s, but the ceremonies continued, often held

in remote and inaccessible locations or simply disguised as Christmas

celebrations.

Not until the 1950s would we again be permitted to publicly participate in

vital ancestral ceremony.

We recognize that the potlatch today is probably the glue that

binds everybody together.

It was a complete and total constitution for them. It governed their lives every

day.

It determined their law, their spiritualities, their religion.

And so all of the dances are repeated down through the millennium, from father

to son to grandson, on and on and on and on.

I know it's awfully exciting to see colorful blankets with buttons on there

interesting dancing forms and stuff, but we've got to relearn the meanings.

We can preach these same values, these same principles to our children, to the

world. And that's why it's important for us to maintain dances, singing, for

that purpose, as well as for trying to revive our own personal spirits.

We will dance when our laws command us to dance.

We will feast when our hearts command us to feast.

Do we ask the white man, do as the Indian does?

No. We do not.

Then why do you ask us, do as the white man does?

Quack, you little chief.

These Nahuami and Suquamish canoes traveled with other tribes over 600

celebrate their ties to the sea and to each other.

Weeks later, when they arrived in Bella Bella, British Columbia, the spirit of

their ancestors was with them.

This canoeing ceremony ensures the continuance of the people, of their

their dances, their spirit, and of all that is beautiful.

Truth flows down through time, in the retelling and the retelling as our

societies grew.

Life took on its meaning for us as it applied to us in our environment and in

our communities and through our own eyes and through our own experience.

We have to remember to tell the stories that we live through and we create and

we see other people doing. And that's the continuation of the history. And it

can't be told on the pages of a book.

It means something to us.

It's not just a ritual.

It's a ceremony.

It's a prayer.

It's us reaching across the invisible walls and touching our ancestors.

Like all living creatures, we're here for a life to be something

beautiful for so long.

And then we are returned to the earth.

The mountains, the trees, the stars, the moon, the sun, they are our elders.

They have been here a long time.

Tribe follows tribe.

A nation follows nation.

Like the waves of the sea.

It is the order of nature.

And regret is useless.

Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come.

For even the white man whose God walked and talked with him as friend with

friend cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

We may be brothers after all.

We will see.

Chief Seattle.