To imagine all the thinks you could say...

I had the oppertunity this last week to participate in a 4 day long planning process that the city of whitehorse organized, inspired by the future of whitehorse as a sustainable city, and I was also invited to speak for a brief moment as a first nation's youth, and needless to say that the oppertunity got ahead of me. The speech/presentation was alright, but this is something I wrote and would have like to say alternativly, and this being the power of blogging and in the spirit of Doing It Yourself publishing, this is a bit of what I would have said in an alternate universe:

"I suppose that I exist in between very differing realities, partly as the child of a woman who's dedicated all her passion in life to advocating the rights of first nations, and specifically women and there children. She had been abducted and fostered out as a child by the same hands that built the soul crushing "Residential Schools". My mother being born Indian in a time when "sustainability" was a term likely used only in reference to the cutting and digging industrial machines "discovering" the hidden potential of Canada. The woman who would grow from this girl had struggled to bring back into remembering all the memories that hadn't been good enough to be human less then 50 years ago.
Another part of my being is a composition of inflicted youth culture, muddy Occidental pigments, and a generic liberal/socialist feelings. In short another illegitimate son of the "New Age". A next generation youth, able to sit in with elders and hear, identify with, and tell the old stories about living in the before time, when people lived "on the land" where now we live "in doors", and when people could identify plants, animals, weather and winds as easily as I can now recall catch phrases, logos or slogans.
They would tell stories about depressions on the land and they would talk about depressions on the mind, and I learned how they equally take casualties. I would learn how the mind is like sky, in essence empty though full of light, and the body like earth, dense and fertile. I would be told how the earth was as the first mother, and the sun the father, and I was informed of the repercussions of taking their power. And instructed how to learn, and bring memories from the past through the land, because everything that is has always been.
I was told to watch all my little brothers and sisters now who walk in the forgetting of all these things. It's because so many children are walking in this forgetting, nowhere land, that the elders have moved away and left us without a testament, because their only will is in the cycles and traditions that reveal nature through the being and all we can care about is saturated commercialism, profit and development, that we are fated to drudge through this existence, future in tow and forever wonder why we struggle the way we do.
It seems clear to me now that we are not recognizing the ability of our communities, in Whitehorse as in any other place. The youth are often being overlooked and reprimanded for expressing themselves with the scant means supplied by our education system. For example, it has taken me years to build a body of vocabulary and references that I may use to be understood by the "dominating" population. It also seems that the city will go out of there way to repress the youths choices of artistic expressions that do not conform into the classical techniques approved by past generations done in the "appropriate" places. I'm talking about street art as a functioning tool for expression and community aesthetic. These two things equally need neutering in the different segments of our community, be it youth, seniors, first nations or any other citizens. This can be conjoined with building beautification and incorporating human elements into architecture that seem to be missing in the majority of our public spaces. Perhaps we could look to the traditional coastal people and there big houses paintings and their use of art as functional aesthetic.
It seems to me as a "new generation" youth that we need to be bringing the old knowledge and traditions into the new world, and it seems as though there are a lot of others who feel the same way. One of the first things I remember learning as a child was that you never take more than you can carry, you never bring in what you can't bring out. This seems to be a good principle of sustainability, especially for the Yukon. And what other ways can the old knowledge be adapted to our new sustainability design? Perhaps more inclusive and integrating education, we might start by reevaluating the curriculum and including history of residential schools and Canada's colonial roots, and showing kids how to make the things that interest and relate to them. We might follow the examples of all the education programs that look to empowering students and recognizing that they are human beings before anything else, and that going through the education system is not like a cattle farm, children do not need to be herded, but like in the traditional societies of canada, they need to be encouraged to discover within natural contexts how the world functions. We are discovering now that book learning and standardized curriculum is not benefiting the majority of children, and we only need to see the recognize how Waldorf or Montessori and other schools are really leading the way to new systems that may bring us out of what I feel to be an educational "dark age". I feel that a reformed education system will also ,in time, bridge the cultural gaps that we live with in our communities, and specifically in the cause of whitehorse, invite the first nations communities into a closer relationship with the entire community."