00:00:00:17 – 00:00:07:12

Singing (Tla-o-qui-aht Master Carver and Historian Joseph Tutakwisnapšiƛ Martin, Board Director, IISAAK OLAM Foundation)

Woah woah woo oh ho yeah 

Eli Enns (Tla-o-qui-aht Nation Citizen, Co-Founder and CEO, IISAAK OLAM Foundation)

čukʷaa haʔuk! 

Singing (Tla-o-qui-aht Master Carver and Historian Joseph Tutakwisnapšiƛ Martin, Board Director, IISAAK OLAM Foundation)

Whoa whoa ho! 

Whoa ho ho yeah

(Drumming)

00:00:21:15 – 00:00:42:20

Eli Enns (Tla-o-qui-aht Nation Citizen, Co-Founder and CEO, IISAAK OLAM Foundation)

Kinda channeling Joe Martin a little bit here, you know, he talks about how our art wasn’t just pretty things to look at, that it was actually quite intentional – what he calls our constitution. Particularly the totem poles, he refers to as our constitution as legal documents.

00:00:42:22 – 00:01:19:00

And I’ve referred, so in my, as I think everyone on the call knows, my background in university is in political science. And I particularly was interested in Canadian constitutional law and the evolution of constitutional law in Canada. Because, of course, the Constitution is the highest law of the country. And it actually supersedes federal, provincial, municipal law.

00:01:19:02 – 00:01:25:06

And so I wanted to understand the constitution of this nation-state that we call Canada.

00:01:25:06 – 00:02:00:07

Canada’s constitution is very convoluted and multifaceted. And that is because the nature of our geopolitical evolution as a nation-state. In the United States of America, there was the War of Independence, the, you know, the revolution against the king. And there was the, you know, the, the Constitution, which there was a clean separation from, the United Kingdom. And, but it wasn’t the same for Canada.

00:02:00:09 – 00:02:17:16

We had a lingering relationship. In fact, our first constitution was called the British North American Act of 1867, which included the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments.

00:02:17:16 – 00:02:37:09

Speaker 2

And that was our constitution until 1982. Where, finally and prior to 1982, all, any amendments to the Constitution had to go to the Privy Council in London for ultimate ratification.

00:02:37:11 – 00:03:08:10

So, in a way, we weren’t truly sovereign until 1982. And when I say ‘we’ – we as Canada, as a nation-state. There was this umbilical cord that bound us to the United Kingdom. And, but, in 1982 a domestic amending formula was created. In other words, the federal and provincial governments agreed upon a remedy for domesticating their constitution.

00:03:08:12 – 00:03:14:17

And the British North American Act was added to with the Canada Act of 1982.

00:03:14:17 – 00:03:35:19

And but, you know, it’s not, and it’s not even that simple, like, you know, when you get into constitutional law, constitutional scholars point back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 as the earliest semblance of constitutional law. And that still has consequence today.

00:03:35:21 – 00:03:39:19

And the Canadian courts.

00:03:39:19 – 00:04:06:12

And so, and you know that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was received in wampum at the Treaty of Fort Niagara in 1764. And so this complex geopolitical story of Canada is intertwined with international relations between Indigenous Nations and the Crown.

00:04:06:12 – 00:04:13:04

There’s a different use of the English language in the courts, in the law.

00:04:13:06 – 00:04:42:17

And it’s very complex, such that the average Canadian with the, with sort of the, the average education, most Canadians can’t cognitively access the social contract that we’re all bound to. So, some of you may have heard me talk about social contract, and social contract theory before. This is rooted in modern times for Crown law.

00:04:42:19 – 00:04:50:21

It’s rooted in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which was the resolution of the Thirty Years’ War.

00:04:50:21 – 00:05:06:12

But generally speaking, the social contract in Canada is encoded in complex legal jargon that is not accessible to the average Canadian. And to me, this is more about control rather than creating social cohesion.

00:05:06:19 – 00:05:32:08

And whereas in Nuu-chah-nulth, it was the opposite. So the social contract was on display everywhere in the built environment. You know, it, like, you wake up in the morning and you look at your family wall. It used to be physical carvings in the house that were the laws of the house of the society.

00:05:32:08 – 00:05:42:02

Speaker 2

You walk out your front door, and there’s a totem pole reminding everyone, reminding everyone of the social contract.

00:05:42:04 – 00:05:57:21

And so I came to understand our totem poles beyond being legal documents in our Constitution. They were what I call an active participation in a social contract.

00:05:57:21 – 00:06:02:00

Very similar, very similar with the totem poles.

00:06:02:02 – 00:06:20:04

Most people, when they look at the totem pole at the Naa’waya’sum Gardens as an example, they might, just they might be moved. They might, you know, feel a powerful sense from the art. But they may not be able to understand it if they’re not provided the teachings that come with each of the crests.

00:06:20:04 – 00:06:29:06

Popular use of language was malleable to the current day, to the present day.

00:06:29:08 – 00:06:57:09

But ha’hopa was kind of a fixed knowledge system that had emerged out of thousands of years of refinement, and teachings, and learnings from natural law from, to observe, appreciate, and act accordingly, which is, of course ʔiisaak  which is represented by the Sun Moon crest, which we have as our logo as an organization.

00:06:57:15 – 00:07:19:03

Now, it’s been said that to get the full teachings of ʔiisaak, the Moon crest would take a full lunar cycle. So you would start with the new moon, and you would go all the way to the full moon and back. And that 28-day cycle is the basic curriculum of that particular crest.

00:07:19:03 – 00:07:26:02

And these – ha’hopa wasn’t passed on as a curriculum per se.

00:07:26:04 – 00:07:43:22

It was passed down through story. And there’s some ingenious thinking behind that because the stories would start – Joe always talks about how the teachings of ʔiisaak would begin the moment our lives were conceived.

00:07:43:22 – 00:07:54:13

And so an Elder would start to ha’hopa the growing baby inside the womb while the fetus is developing.

00:07:54:13 – 00:08:06:11

And these teachings of ʔiisaak would continue until our death. And stories were used to pass on these teachings.

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And the genius of that is that, when a child is hearing a story like…

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…if you’ve grown up your whole life hearing stories about a certain crest, when you see that crest, it will be a reminder of something from one of those stories.

00:08:28:16 – 00:08:45:18

And I often think about, like, you know, when you’re listening to a radio, like when you’re listening to a song on the radio and you turn off the car halfway through the song, sometimes it gets stuck in your head, right? And all day long, you can’t get the song out of your head.

00:08:45:18 – 00:09:01:05

So when you – because we didn’t have music back then, in the sense that we have it today, like we didn’t have radios and whatnot. So these totem poles in these crests were literally broadcasting stories.

00:09:01:05 – 00:09:15:20

What it is, is half of what the story you hear, the teaching that you get from the totem pole is different every time depending on what’s happening in your life, what’s happening in your inner world.

00:09:15:22 – 00:09:21:02

So, for example, if you’re in conflict…

00:09:21:02 – 00:09:38:24

If you’re in conflict with, say, your mother-in-law or something, I don’t know, whatever, your partner, and you walk out of your longhouse and you see that totem pole, what will come to you from the crest will be relevant to what’s going on in your inner emotional world.

00:09:39:01 – 00:09:42:17

And it’ll be different each time.

00:09:42:17 – 00:09:47:09

And so in that way, I call it an active participation in the social contract.

00:09:47:09 – 00:10:04:05

Half of the knowledge that we created came from your question. So he says, the questions you asked me reminded me of things that I had been taught as a young person, or things I had learned along the life journey that I’ve been on.

00:10:05:00 – 00:10:23:13

And he says, and then he thanked me. And classic, classic humble Elder stuff. And the metaphor that emerged from that exchange was the phenomenal relationship that we have with the Sun.

00:10:23:13 – 00:10:36:08

And this is a Nuu-chah-nulth worldview of hišukʔiš c̓awaak and quay-qwiik-suup.We often hear hišukʔiš c̓awaak… 

00:10:36:10 – 00:10:49:19

Because it’s kind of like the most often broadcast teaching. And it means ‘everything is one and everything is interconnected’, essentially. But we don’t hear about quay-qwiik-suup very often.

00:10:49:19 – 00:10:56:20

Quay-qwiik-suup is a dual process of transformation.

00:10:56:22 – 00:11:04:07

So it’s a transformation in the physical world, but it’s also a transformation in the spiritual world. In the energetic world.

00:11:04:07 – 00:11:17:24

Everything’s transforming. We are transforming, as we go. And so the intersectionality of hišukʔiš c̓awaak and quay-qwiik-suup is the moment.

00:11:17:24 – 00:11:20:01

Every single moment.

00:11:20:03 – 00:11:38:06

And that’s why there’s this really cool song and dance. Song and dance, of the Hinkitsum and the Sea Serpent. Maybe you’ve seen these things like, the logo of our Nation is the sea serpent crest, right? 

00:11:38:06 – 00:11:43:10

It kind of looks like a wolf kind of head. And it’s got a body of a serpent.

00:11:43:12 – 00:11:48:19

These things are real creatures. They’ve been cited even up until recently…

00:11:48:19 – 00:11:51:14

…when the fishing industry was in full bloom.

00:11:51:14 – 00:12:22:19

And, anyhow, there’s this cool dance and it goes, whoa, ho, wii-tsikiki-ach-chuu. And in that moment, when the two dancers, who are wearing hinkitsums, they’re spinning rapidly in a circle. And then when the song pauses, the drumming stops, and the dancers pause and they kind of look back and forth very, very intentionally.

00:12:22:21 – 00:12:50:07

Speaker 2

They look back and forth, and the song goes,  whoa, ho, wii-tsikiki-ach-chuu.           Wii-tsikiki-ach-chuu is the coming together of hišukʔiš c̓awaak and quay-qwiik-suup in the intersectionality of the interconnection of all things that is currently in existence. And then the transformation that’s happening temporally through time and space.

00:12:50:07 – 00:13:05:02

nd the way that I came to understand it through the ha’hopa is wii-tsikiki-ach-chuu, simply put, Ron Martin described to me how it’s like, should I go this way or should I go that way?

00:13:05:04 – 00:13:27:07

They’re contemplating. Whoa, ho, wii-tsikiki-ach-chuu.  Should I go this way? Should I go that way? And, but more profoundly, rather than just – I got to make a decision and I’m trying to, I’m weighing up all my options here. I’m actually empowering myself with choice.

00:13:27:07 – 00:13:46:15

And the way that I came to understand it through the ha’hopa is that every single moment of time is like four or eight nuclear explosions that are happening all the time, every single moment.

00:13:46:17 – 00:14:06:19

And we can’t really, truly sense it because we are limited in our abilities to sense the universe. The Eagle, for example, can see much better than we can. Various creatures have access to stimulus that we do not have direct access to.

00:14:06:19 – 00:14:21:08

It happens subconsciously. And this is the power of dreaming and ceremony, gaining access to this profound and violent experience, which is life in every single moment.

00:14:21:13 – 00:14:40:24

Not violent in the negative sense, but just, it’s incredible. And so pausing in the middle of that and contemplating, should I go this way or should I go that way, is feeling the sheer power of the moment and then deciding how to act, and then being decisive.

00:14:40:24 – 00:14:53:07

You know, this sea serpent, the sea serpent is we, is thought to be one of the most ʔiisaak creatures ever to exist.

00:14:53:07 – 00:15:17:03

And so the sea serpent is thought to be a very ʔiisaak creature. And we strive to be like the serpent in that regard. We – to observe, appreciate, and act accordingly, to take stock of all information that we have access to, pause and empower ourselves to make decisive action.

00:15:17:03 – 00:15:21:13

And what I’ve been told is that nobody is above the law, not even our Ha’wiih. 

00:15:21:13 – 00:15:37:20

Speaker 2

In fact, the Ha’wiih are held to the highest standards of law because they have to be emulating good behaviour and being ʔiisaak for the rest of society to follow.

00:15:37:20 – 15:43:23

Maybe I’ll start to wind down with a brief explanation of Naa’wa’sum

00:15:43:23 – 00:15:54:04

So the way it was described to me is it’s a meeting place of Eagles very, very high in the mountain tops. They gather and they socialize there.

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And they share information with one another.

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And, it’s Naa’waya’sum, and that’s the name of the Gardens. And, I would I would say that the Fern crest in our totem pole is relational to being Naa’waya’sum.

00:16:19:00 – 00:16:27:15

And, to being observant, like the eagle, and to transfer knowledge through the generations.

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So if we look after the Land appropriately, we can relearn from the Land itself.

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And of course, it’s not going to be an overnight scenario, but it is possible.

00:16:40:20 – 00:16:49:15

And if we believe in ourselves and we have no fear, then we can learn anything, and we can relearn things that have been forgotten.

00:16:49:17 – 00:16:55:16

So that is, some teachings on the totem pole.

00:16:55:16 – 00:17:17:17

It’s pretty fascinating to me that so much of the ha’hopa has survived, given the great depopulation that we’ve experienced and the residential schools, which, of course, literally was trying to erase this language and culture from the planet.

00:17:17:17 – 00:17:19:24

And then it would continue…

00:17:20:01 – 00:17:40:20

It would continue to live in our minds. As long as people keep the stories and the teachings alive of those various totem poles, they continue to live in our memories and can be re-manifested in curtains and future totem poles and whatnot.

00:17:40:20 – 00:17:46:15

So klecko klecko. Chu

00:17:46:15 – 00:17:47:13

Singing (Tla-o-qui-aht Master Carver and Historian Joseph Tutakwisnapšiƛ Martin, Board Director, IISAAK OLAM Foundation)

Woah woah woo oh ho yeah 

00:17:47:20 – 00:17:57:24

Eli Enns (Tla-o-qui-aht Nation Citizen, Co-Founder and CEO, IISAAK OLAM Foundation)

čukʷaa haʔuk!