All Indigenous Ways of Relating Events

“I am someone who, like many of us, is in the process of making history. My people knew that our great grandchildren would talk about the day that their grandparents went and stood in front of the pipeline that never became. And that is the story I want told in museums.”

Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development renewable energy and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two-time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party.

As Program Director of the Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and environmental justice with Indigenous communities. And in her own community, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non-profit organizations in the country and a leader in the issues of culturally based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy, and food systems. In this work, she also continues national and international work to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.

In this video, Master Carver Jewell James (Lummi) presents the House of Tears Carvers’ Totem Pole Journeys as a response to the challenges we face in our struggles for a just and liveable planet for all.

The Lummi Nation’s House of Tears carvers has created a tradition of carving and delivering totem poles to areas struck by disaster or otherwise in need of hope and healing. In 2013 the House of Tears Carvers began a yearly totem pole journey highlighting the impacts of fossil fuels across tribal lands throughout North America. These journeys raise awareness and strengthen and expand cooperation between tribes, intertribal organizations, faith-based communities, environmentalists and community leaders who oppose fossil fuel expansion projects.

“The totem pole journey does not draw a new line as much as it traces over one that already exists, making it visible. This line runs through the rocks, through the trees, through the sky, through the oceans. It is also a line that runs from the past to the present, and into the future.”

Narrated by Phreddie Lane of the Lummi Nation, this video was part of the exhibition Kwel’ Hoy: We Draw the Line, which launched at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 2017.

More information: https://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/events/kwel-hoy-we-draw-the-line/

“Despite the fact that entire nations have been built atop the idea that objects contained within museums represent dead cultures, there is a spirit that lives on in them that can never be extinguished. And this is what ‘Kwel’ Hoy: We Draw the Line’ is all about.”

In this promotional video, the Lummi Nation’s Phreddie Lane and The Natural History Museum’s Jason Jones introduce our first collaboration, Kwel’ Hoy: We Draw the Line, a cross-country totem pole journey and museum exhibition in 2017.

More information here: https://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/events/kwel-hoy-we-draw-the-line/

“Museums should tell the stories we need to learn from: not only the story of the downfall of great societies, the destruction of societies created around greed, but also the story of our culture, our language, our identity—who we are, and the teachings we’ve been governing by for thousands of years.”

Chief Rueben George is a member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN). After serving his nation as Director of Community Development, he shifted his focus to protecting Burrard Inlet, traditional Tsleil-Waututh territory, from the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker project as part of the TWN Sacred Trust Initiative. He is also a spiritual leader and was made a Sun Dance Chief by Chief Leonard Crow Dog in South Dakota, former medicine man for the American Indian movement. Rueben has become one of the best known voices in the media locally and internationally in the conversation about the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline and other related issues.