The I'm going to speak about. I just try to speak with what I'm feeling into the people that I'm speaking to. I'm not a spiritual leader, a

medicine woman, or a political leader of any kind amongst our people. I am merely like a spokesman.

I started in this movement as a spokesman for our fisher people along the Nisquale River who were being beaten up

thrown in jail and it I didn't even know I had the ability to speak.

It's just something, a talent that was drawn out under a stress situation and from that time on I've done speaking for my people in different areas of the struggle, the resistance,

or even working with Thomas, Benyaka, Chief Demon Logan Logan and the Spiritual Unity Movement, which I got involved with in about 1968.

If you had to put me in a role because people say, well, what do you do?

Which your function?

Which your job?

And I suppose I thought about that because people have asked.

So I always say, well, if you had a circle circle like our circles are and the fire are the

spiritual being in the center and then our leaders around there giving the

offerings of prayers the, then the people around them listening

and participating, I would be in the kitchen cooking, which don't bother me at all because there I feel I'm really performing a job for my people that needs to be done and I enjoy cooking I enjoy working with food I respect it and it's a

pleasure to me to do that they don't listen so much to talk the way white people seem to do.

It's kind of strange, you know, you can have a gift of gab,

but you could never rise to be a Hitler amongst our people and get our people moving to that because they hired speakers traditionally in my area,

but each person amongst our tribe and our smokehouses had a different talent, different

ability, a different task to do.

We work together and even today we have in the spiritual unity movement we have the

Hopi who pray for rain who have ceremonies and rituals that are, you know, tied to their land.

We have the Iroquois who also have different prayer ceremonies.

...