Reconciliation with Kade Ferris

Well yeah it’s all a reconciliation but not in the sense of reconciliation for comfort like I said of the colonial powers but its reconciliation for our benefit it’s being able to have our storytellers our community leaders our traditional people and our youth to take that power I love when I see a young person step up and say I want to do this and they do it and people get out of the way and say yeah let’s let this guy do this it’s young artists that I know who has been traveling all over trying to you know learn new techniques and you know come to me and say I’m think about this new headdress and I don’t people laugh at me I said then you do it you own it when we worry about what people think when we worry about the comfort of others we start to lose our power to tell that story and I think that’s where it comes down to as anybody I mean from the youngest child to the oldest person they have to have a voice they have to feel that they can speak that what’s in them so that’s what I’ve really been you know personal myself is trying to get those stories that I’ve been collecting from books from fur trade journals from elders and collect them and get them into a method or into a vehicle of media that people can actually digest we’ve created a web page Facebook page and people who could be 80 years old I’ve seen those on Facebook and said I remember that and then people who are you know young saying I didn’t know that’s where we start to see healing that’s where we start to see growth because now sudden they own that story and I don’t want to take credit for these things so when I write them I don’t put my name on him or my wife voices take credit for it ago but I don’t want to be about me I want it to be about them the people who are reading the story who learning it I know it’s like I know I wrote it and you know that’s enough for me because you know I don’t need that my hat’s already big enough it doesn’t have to be any bigger [Laughter]