Facebook | Greg Robinson

TChilah(X)koons Lives

The Legend of TChilah(X)koons lives and walks among us. The frog dances beneath chairs of leadership.The chant...the dirge...grows louder in the forest, flows in through doors left ajar, in through questioning windows to reverberate off stoic walls, down along convoluted corridors, into our midst. The people wail in dreams of turmoil. Fires smoulder in shadows of recess. Winds of winter, the whisperings of a cold journey, follow, as we meander along by ways of modern cultural reality. We watch as scrolls of history unfold, billow across our skies; a brush of uncertainty. The leader is gone. Hail to the question mark. Hail to distance. The brush driven by a fragile hand of imitation power. Greg Robinson,May 29, 2009

Facebook | Greg Robinson

Visitor

This work refers to the haunting nature of a large portion of present day first nations spirituality as it relates to the present state of our traditional language, the essence of our historic identity. As a result of noxious lessons learned during their internment within the confines of the now notorious, federal ‘Indian Residential Schools’ of Canada, many first nations people do not speak their mother tongue. Although they may have heard the language being spoken by older people in their communities, in many cases, they themselves were not personally addressed, or expected to verbally respond, in the language. As a result they did not get the verbal practice required to become a fluent speaker of the language.
Directly associated to natural socially imbued fluency in the language, is the culturally turned perspective that is inescapably linked to the language. A perspective that is intrinsic to understanding the community and the traditional mode of conscious and unconscious communication, i.e. intonation, inference and verve that ‘is’ much of the language. Such nuances set any one language apart from another, and lend vivid presentation of the uniqueness of the culture that gave birth to that language.
Those of us who have spent enough time around our community members, listening as they spoke the language but did not part take in speaking the language ourselves, to varying extents, came to possess a limited, though intuitive, insight and grasp of the psycho-textural nature of our culture, and the traditionally acclimatized perspective of our people. So that while we are not able to verbalize our personal expressions through use of our traditional language, we are never the less, haunted by the desire to vocalize such deeply rooted, traditionally styled personal expression.
As a result, when I find myself in the midst of discussion by members of my community, people who are fluent in the Haisla language, I feel like a visitor among my own people.

We AreThe Land

We AreThe Land

This picture consists of a background photo with an overlay. The background picture is a view of the area of the northern Douglas Channel, directly south of Kitamaat Village, looking in a westerly direction. The overlay is a photo of the late Haisla Elder, Esther Gray.
Esther was a member of the multi-generational Indigenous grouping that presently inhabits the social landscape spanning the 'pre-contact' era and the future era where Indigenous Peoples will stand and be recognized as equals with all Peoples of the world, including Canadians, and in particular, British Columbians.
As Indigenous Peoples, we have historically, and continue to have, a connection to the land that conflicts with the mind-set of so-called 'Western Rationale'. Rather, the mind-set of 'Western Thinking' conflicts with ' norms' of West Coast Indigenous Peoples; 'Norms' that have been developed through an ongoing social, political, and spiritual process over a period of more than ten thousand years.
In one sense, our connection to this land is of a highly practical nature. The laws of genetics connect us directly to this land. Throughout the thousands of years that our people have inhabited this land, we have 'lived off the land'. We have consumed the foodstuffs provided to us by our efforts at hunting and gathering across the width and the breadth of this land. As such, we have assumed the genetic 'mass', provided to us through our diet, from this land. The lifestyle of our forbearers included the heavy physical effort necessary for survival on this land. That effort determined the nature of the development of the physical bodies of our ancestors. After living out their lives on this land, the bodies of our ancestors went back to the land through their burial process. This process ultimately involved the body 'Going back to' nature and the land.
You might say that, essentially, we are the land.