The Cultural Conservancy - “Traditional Foodways of Native America – Oral Histories of Native Food Revitalization” Audio Recording Project
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Jeannette Armstrong and Marlowe Sam
Biographies:
Jeannette Armstrong is an award-winning Okanagan-Canadian author and artist whose works include children’s books, novels, poetry, video and TV productions, and a collaboration with architect Douglas Cardinal on a book entitled Native Creative Pro-
cess. A renowned leader in Indigenous and environmental education, she is the executive director of the En’owkin International School of Writing and Arts, a council member of the Okanagan Nation, and an advocate of Indigenous rights, serving on many international councils. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Ecotrust, Howard and Peter Buffet Award for Indigenous Leadership.
Marlowe Sam, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribe, is a co-facilitator of the Four Societies Process Method, an Okanagan traditional form of community conflict resolution and collective transformation that he has helped lead with a variety of social change organizations. Marlowe has served as an advisory board member for the Pacific Cultural Conservancy and has acted as a primary mediator in several tribal conflicts. Over the past three decades, Marlowe has been a frontline activist against social injustices against the Indigenous Peoples of North America. He is currently completing a Master of Arts degree at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan.
Interview Transcript – Marlow Sam (MS) and Jeannette Armstrong (JA):
MS: Hi, My name’s Marlow Sam. I’m Wenatchee, which is on a southern part of the Okanogan Nation.
JA: I’m Jeanette Armstrong and I’m Okanogan on the Canadian side of the Okanogan Nation, which, spans Washington State and into British Columbia.
MS: The men and the women, took active roles in hunting, and we had quite a large variety of game animals, such as elk, moose, deer, mountain goats, mountain sheep, I guess even in the upper northern regions would be the caribou also, you know, which is there. And a lot of smaller game like ground hogs and the winged animals like grouse and I guess the geese and whatever. But as colonization and settlement occurred in our area, there was real depletion of the game animals, especially the larger ones, and they were hunted out pretty heavily. You know, the populations were really decimated and things such as the policies that were implemented in the mid-1850s you know, just further, depleted resources, and the Hudson Bay trading, of course, decimated a lot of the things like beaver and whatever.
But.. and then, later on the dammings of the river really essentially, for the most part wiped out all the traditional fishing that our people used to do with the salmon. And it really impacted the way our people interacted with the land and the resources, impacted the culture because when the salmon were taken away the gathering sites, essentially were deserted, because you can’t go down to the fishing sites because there’s no salmon there, you know. So then that impacted the people gathering at these sites, all the social activities that happened during the times that they would gather there, so then it just further impacted because there was ceremonies, and there was songs and.. that occurred there at the time of the salmon. So essentially, those songs.. they didn’t die out, but it’s kind of like how can you have a ceremony, a salmon ceremony, if there’s no salmon?
So it really impacted our people pretty severely. And the same could be said for the big game animals. There are stories about the abundance of elk and moose and deer. The populations were really impacted severely, so the methods of gathering really were impacted severely when there was.. at some times I think there were stories about where they had to go for days and days and days just tracking one animal. So there was some real severe shortages of game animals at some point. But there’s been a little rebound, but I don’t think it’s ever reached, or probably will ever reach the numbers that were once there.
I look back at when I was a young boy and I remember my dad and them teaching me how to shoot a gun and I was.. I remember I was really little. And, of course, the guns were so big that my uncle sawed off the barrel of a 22 and then they re-carved the stock so that it would fit me. And I don’t remember how old I was, but I was pretty little. And they taught me how to shoot and they always bought ammunition for me so I could practice and I never ever wanted for shells. If I wanted to shoot I could go out and shoot and if I wanted to pretend hunt, I’d remember I used to go out and just a little ways from the house and make believe I was hunting and whatever. And I remember my grandmother, when I actually did start to get capable of taking game or whatever, she had fixed my gun, she’d wash it with medicine and she told me that my gun was the most deadly weapon in the world, that anything that I shot with it, whether I wounded it, it would die. And so I always remembered that. And so I started thinking about that when my grandson, he was nine years old, and I guess mentally he was ready for.. to be trained or whatever. So I bought him a rifle and start training him to shoot and his dad kind of gave that responsibility over to me.
We’d just walk away from the house and there’d be light snow on the ground. So we’d come across deer tracks and I’d tell him, “Well, which way are these tracks going? Why are they going that way?
JA: Everybody was sitting down below at our center and he’d come running up and as soon as I looked at him I was like, “Oh, what’s.. what’s going on?” He just came running up and he said, “Grandma! I got a moose!” (laughs) and like of course everybody could hear it, you know. So I introduced him to everybody and said to them, “You know, that’s what food sovereignty is about, that our grandchildren, can say, ‘Grandma, I got a moose,’ you know, ‘I got a deer,’ or ‘I got a rabbit,’ or ‘I got a grouse and we can eat good food, we can eat healthy food, what our bodies need.”
Related Websites:
En'owkin Centre: www.enowkincentre.ca
Penticton Indian Band: www.pib.ca
Theytus Books Ltd: www.theytusbooks.ca
Native American Authors: www.ipl.org/div/natam/bin/browse.pl/A9
Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation: www.colvilletribes.com
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