Lost in Translation

In this episode, Gitxsan host Shaneen Robinson talks with Hereditary Chief Don Ryan (Hanamuuxw) about how the translation of the Gitxsan language into English can cause confusion and the loss of knowledge.

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Transcript

Multiple Speakers [00:00:00] [cheerful electronic music] Sim gigyat, Sigidim Haanak’, K’ubawilxsihlxw. Oki, wishing you good life. Kuei! Kuei! Yo! Wik’sas. Dánet'e, negha dágǫ́ht’e.

Announcer [00:00:14] This is Words and Culture, a series on Indigenous languages funded by SiriusXM through the Community Radio Fund of Canada and distributed by Native Voice One, The Native American Radio Network. [music fades out]

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:00:30] Sim gigyat, Sigidim Haanak’, K’ubawilxsihlxw. Tansi, Kihew Ga Ni Pawit Disinakason, Mahigan Totem. My name is Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais and I am a member of the Gitxsan Nation of Gitanmaax British Columbia on my mother’s side and a member of the Pimicikimak Cree Nation, Cross Lake Band of Indians, Treaty 5 territory in northern Manitoba on my Father’s side.

On my Cree side, my traditional name is Kihew Ga Ni Pawit, Standing Eagle, and was given to me when I was one month old by late elder Joe Douquette. I am Wolf Clan on my Cree side as well.

In the Gitxsan way, names and clans are given differently than the spiritual ways some Nations give names and clans. Ours are given to us by Hereditary Chiefs based on our oral histories known as adaawk, and laws, ayook, within a given house group, wilp, and done so at a feast.

Some people have entry-level names. Some people like my mother and some of my Aunties have higher Chief names depending on what is decided by within the house group. When I was around 21 years old in 2001, our house groups late Hereditary Chief Anda’ap told me I would one day carry the name, “Gil Gul Tsai Dix” which means, Dirty All Over. In May 2019 I was given that name at my late grandmother Dim Digee Bu’s headstone raising feast which we call hel’dinisim lo’op.

Since 2019 I have strengthened that name several times by contributing at feasts. Although, I’ve recently learned about some confusion with the name I was given as it has also been claimed by a different person in another house group. This is a breakdown in communication because of the loss of language within our oral histories and is something our hereditary Chiefs from both house groups now need to decipher based on our collective oral histories.

Things can get complicated when translated into English and our Gitxsan histories can be lost within that translation. I had a chance to speak with Hereditary Chief Don Ryan, Hanamuuxw. He tells us about some of the names he’s carried.

Hanamuuxw [00:02:25] (introduces self in Gitxsanimaax) And my infant name and reincarnation name is Wihl Dim Wayt. And Maas Gak was my coming out name. I remember getting that name and doing the ceremony for that name. And I am now Hanamuuxw. And I took that name when my sister died.

So I'm one of the Chiefs in our wilp. The wilp that I come from is Gyetem Maxmaagay. So I'm using English so that people understand what's happening here. And my divorce name is Lox Maas Gak. So those are the names that I use when I'm here. I also have other names that are used when I am dealing with my wilksi'witxw side. My father's side. 

I wanted to describe the system of government that we've got here. We come from a culture of house groups, and in our language the word for house is wilp. So that's the name – or the word that we use to express that unit. And the plural for wilp is hlwilp. So that's the plural for the house group.

I don't tend to use the terminology that you normally hear for our wilp. Most people would say Wilps Hanamuuxw. I don't do that. I use the real name for our wilp or our house group and that's Gyetem Maxmaagay. “Get-em Mahx-mah-geh.” And Gyetem Maxmaagay means The Rainbow Person. And we come from a history of the time before the rainbow. That's where we come from as a wilp.

We belong to the Fireweed Clan here and we're one of four different clans that are here in this part of the world. And the other clans are – in our language, we would say a G̱aneda for the Frogs or Lax Seel depending on which part of the territory you come from. We also talk about the Lax Gibuu, the Wolf Clan. The real word in our language for the wolves is Gitemdim. That's the ancient word for the Wolf Clan here in our area. And then you've got the Lax Skiik, the Eagle Clan.

So those are the main Clans that we have here. And every clan has a number of different house groups that make up those Clans. The Clan itself doesn't have the authority – the function of government is held by the house, not the Clan.

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:05:50] (narrating) In our matrilineal system, every Gitxsan child born is, automatically, the same clan as their mother. The moment I came into the world, my family knew I was part of the Fireweed Clan, or Giskast, which has many house groups.

I am a part of wilps Guutgiinuuxws, wil’naat’ahl Anda’Ap. Which translates to, “house of the Owl,” and then Anda’Ap is the name of our specific matrilineal connection to that house that roughly translates to, Bees Nest.

I wanted to know what Don, Hannamuukw, thinks about language preservation and if we as Gitxsan have a chance to save our mother tongue.

Hanamuuxw [00:06:25] I think we do. I'm very hopeful about that. So what are the things that we've done and the things I've been doing most of my life is to do research on all of the information that we could gather on the Gitxsan and, in this case, the Wet'suwet'en. And I did a lot of that when we were doing the court case – the title case that was done. But even before we started that court case there were a lot a things that we were already doing to gather the information on our people.

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:07:08] (narrating) Don of course, is speaking of the landmark 1997 Delgamuukx decision. The Supreme Court of Canada trial that put Gitxsan on the map, so to speak, for using our oral histories to prove our rights to our territories. We will also talk more about this later in the series.

Hanamuuxw [00:07:24] The really significant one that I worked on was to look at the whole territory of the holdings of the different house groups. And that was really important for us to do that because you have to capture the mental map – I call it the mental map. And the mental map of being on the land is really important. That mental map is part of the language. The language – you have to understand the language to understand where you are on a given part of a territory.

It's very important for people to understand that. So I spent a lot of time looking at all of that. To take the mental map and the language so that you could put it on the maps.

And we were able to do that when we started doing what I call the different wars. We were dealing with the fish war and it morphed into the water war and then it morphed into the forest wars and then got into the land war. And the land war results in terms of the court case.

So the big effort was to go from mental maps and understanding the language, and recording all of what we could and then having that put into maps. So, we go from mental maps to paper, and then we're now using electronic programs to do different things that have caught up to what we were doing in terms of the mental maps and the language.

So it's really important that we were able to capture that for the court case. We did tons of research across the landscape, a lot of research that was done by outside folks, anthropologists and sociologists and so forth. We did all that research as a result of the wars that we were involved in.

It's about you understanding, you know, where you come from, the ancient history that we've had in the interaction between ourselves and this part of the world that date back to the last ice age. I use a time period of 30,000 years. That's my timeline that I use. That's that's in my head. That’s in my heart. And I tried to get that so that people appreciate that. That ancient history of us interacting with the territory here during the ice age and in the aftermath of the ice age.

That is the story that we're expressing to the rest of the world. And the court case was really instrumental in making sure that that's what we were doing.

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:11:00] (narrating) The work Hanamuuxw has done for many years is important now and will be for generations to come as we continue to try to protect and preserve our land and language.

You may have heard of something called the Potlatch ban. This was a time in Canadian history when the government made it illegal for our Nations to hold our cultural practice known as the potlatch, but it also expanded to anything related to our culture, including language. Don calls this, “The prohibition period.”

Hanamuuxw [00:11:29] So we come out of the prohibition period really encouraging people to preserve the language and to preserve the mental map and the language of our people. That hasn't gone away. That's still going on. We’re – I'm still involved in all of that now. And we're furthering all of the research on the territory and that's basically what I do on a daily basis.

Our wilp is doing a function of government. I encourage people that we're doing a functional government. We reject being legal Indians. That's very clear. When we say we rejected legal Indians, that's the model that's been imposed in Canada in terms of the Indian Act.

And the forerunner of the Indian Act goes back to the 1600s, and it's still here. And we reject that model because, as a wilp, we still do a function of government and that's what we do on a regular basis.

We have monthly meetings and we have a technical working group and other committees that we've set up to do the work that I'm speaking about. And that's the function of government.

We're not interested in hearing anything more from Canada. I'm not interested in Aboriginal rights and title. We were very clear when we went to court, when we went to the Supreme Court of Canada, that we weren't happy with the thinking that comes back from the Crown in terms of Aboriginal rights and title.

And I want to speak about the language. So here's what we did. And it's really important we recognize that we were trying to preserve as much as we could of the language and the knowledge. Because if you take a look at even before the prohibition period, our population collapses. Because of all of the different things that were going on in terms of the epidemics.

And we lose a big part of our population in the 1800s, from 1840 right to – into the 1900s. So we're trying to preserve as much as we could.

And the Chiefs of the day when we started the court case, doing the research on that, the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s, we were trying to set it out so that we would be able to capture the language.

So one of the things that we did for the court case was to have the oral histories come forward and to be brought forward into the courtroom with the language. So we had to do our language, the Gitxsan and the Wet'suwet'en language, and the English.

So those testimonies are really important because that's a recording of what people were saying. And a lot of the leading witnesses that we put forward are – were the women because we're a matrilineal society. The women are the key for this society and we wanted to put that forward and make sure that people understood that.

So that – the court case in itself, you could see that if we were going to just wait for research and other things and look for the good graces of the outside world, we decided to do the court case so that there could be an injection of all of the revenues and different things that we could put together to capture what we were doing.

We were teaching people how to do research, we were teaching people and preparing people for the court case. The evidence that was put together, the countless hours of meetings, of interaction between our people here during this period, it was really amazing work for me.

So there I am, I'm coordinating all of this. “Here's what we're doing with the Gitxsan, here's what were doing with the Wet'suwet'en. Here are what we were doing with the legal team, all of the outside experts that we had to train.”

We had to train the outside expert, plus the lawyers, because none of those people have any idea about us. Most people in their lives will never learn anything about the Gitxsan or the Wet'suwet'en. Most people don't even learn about us until they get to their master's degree at university.

And so, anyway, that whole effort for me was really important. So that whole collection that we've got is kept at UBC. And other universities are able to access that information and what I advocate for every wilp is that they have to be able to access that information. They have to get organized, they have to meet, they have learn about what was said by our people.

That trial took 10 years. It went from ‘87 to ‘97. And it took us a decade to prepare. So when you look at all of that information that was all compiled and put into the court, and then all of what we've been doing since ‘97, all of that is still in motion here. And that's really important for all of us to do that. That's why I'm advocating that the wilp has to stand up and do all of this.

They cannot turn it over to the Indian Bands. We got rid of the tribal council here. That was one of the things that we did. And there's no way that I'd be doing any type of treaty negotiations, because treaty negotiations are only going to establish legal Indians.

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:18:30] (narrating) The Delgamuukx decision proved that we as Gitxsan have rights and title to our ancient territories and have for thousands of years. Our oral histories proved that with our language and culture in court. It has been a stepping stone for many First Nations in the struggle to protect their given territories.

The Gitxsan have never signed treaties which means we are not Treaty Indians signatory to any agreements with Canada nor the Crown. We have every right to speak for the territories we have been living on for thousands of years.

Hanamuuxw [00:18:59] Well, I think the oral histories – the court saw and recognized that. That was one of the things that we were able to establish, is that the oral histories are a legitimate form of information, and it could be used. And I advocate that. And like I said, the story that we've got is really important, the one that we've got. It's about Tx'emlax'amid.

So here's what happens. We look at the glaciation period and there's three different parts of it that I look at. There's a part as the deglaciation takes place, there's an emergence of Tx'emlax'amid and that was a central exercise to centralize the villages. And then and then it decentralizes again.

So here's what we did before Tx'emlax'amid. This is what we do during Tx'emlax'amid. This is what we're doing after Tx'emlax'amid. That's sort of the storyline that I think that people have to appreciate, and people are now catching up to us.

Like the science – the Western science is catching up to the knowledge that we have about this part of the world. And the whole system that we have is a global perspective. That's the other thing that people have to appreciate. We belong to the world and we belong to all other Indigenous peoples around the globe. That's how we're connected.

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:20:34] (narrating) I asked Don, Hanamuuxw, if he had any last thoughts to share about learning the language.

Hanamuuxw [00:20:39] Well, I'm always interested in the language. I think that for us, like, for our wilp, we do language work. And when you look at our agenda, you can see what we're doing. We're actually composing a naxnok song, a spirit song, about Muxwguuawst.

Muxwguuawst is McEachern. He was the chief justice who heard our case. And so we've composed a song about him. And we're teaching that. Those are really important for us to teach our people how to be teachers in the language. There's a whole exercise in that and I don't think you need to go to universities to do that.

I think you could do that here. So I'm really interested in doing stuff for teachers, people who want to learn how to do teaching of a language properly, not one where you go to UVic or UBC or one of the universities.

I don't think that that's the way to go. We need to do things right here and teach people how to be teachers in our own language. And be doing it right here, and experience it, and be it on the land, and see what we're talking about, and what we are doing.

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:22:05] (narrating) This is the first chance I’ve had to chat with Don Ryan, Hanamuuxw, but I have heard his name many times over the years for the hard work he’s done for language and land preservation.

In the next couple of episodes we will delve more into the political ideologies of our Nation and how it has played a role in the past and will also in the future.

I'm Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais, your host for the Gitxsan episodes of Words and Culture.

Remember to follow us on socials for more great content and check out our website at wordsandculture.ca. Hamiyaa, thank you for listening.

Announcer [00:22:36] [cheerful electronic music] Words and Culture is made possible with funding from SiriusXM, through the Community Radio Fund of Canada. It is distributed through Native Voice One, The Native American Radio Network. Words and Culture is produced by Kim Wheeler. Kaylen Belair is our audio engineer and editor.

Multiple Speakers [00:22:55] Hamiyaa. Yammi! K’achu naohdá nǫ́. Halakas'la. Kitakitamaatsinyo’pau, we’ll see you later. [music fades out]