Fighting for everyone

With Cultural Awareness Month (CAM) wrapping up next week, it’s a good time to ask ourselves, personally and as a community, just how aware we are.

Aware of our history, aware of our language and culture, but also just how aware we are of who we are.

We must be aware of our present and aware of our future as well. Being born Kanien’kehá:ka means there’s a lot on our shoulders from birth, and it comes with both pressure and immense responsibility.

Many of us embrace the pressure by doing what we can through learning our language; by fighting for our rights, land, and water; and understanding we are all part of a larger collective.

We must become historians, linguists, teachers, protectors, and so many other important roles, both to fight colonialism and make things better for our children, but also just to keep our heads above water as Indigenous people.

It’s tiring, to say the least, but if we don’t pull together more and keep doing what we’re doing, there won’t be an “us” to fight for in the future.

What CAM does every April is it brings it all to the forefront – from language promotion to cultural and historical connections, and learning what it means to be us.

Sharing Our Stories (SOS) is one of those success stories that does multiple things to fight for our language and culture. A small project that started out of The Eastern Door (TED) has now grown into a non-profit organization with almost 10 employees, complete with its own social media and website.

And what Sharing Our Stories does, every single week, is take historical tales from our elders and post them online and print them in TED, in English and Kanien’kéha.

It’s a huge undertaking and it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to pull it all off. But it’s part of our resistance to those who hold power over our heads every day, and the promotion and celebration of our beautiful language and history.

It follows what TED has always done – fight for the language and culture while simultaneously fighting for the community.

We jumped aboard Cultural Awareness Month when it started close to 15 years ago, with a front page all in Kanien’kéha, and stories in the paper that were also translated for the month of April. We continue to do that today, and we will never stop.

We made that promise many years ago and it carries more and more weight as our elders pass away and we lose integral words, nuances and recountings of how we came to be what we are today.

Our plans are to spread the word and help other communities. We launched The Pines Reporter as a nonprofit in January 2024 and it’s both a section in The Eastern Door and its own online media as well.

We did it because Kanesatake needed a media to project its voice, one that fully understands the realities of the community.

It also posts Sharing Our Stories content related to Kanesatake elders and storytellers, as SOS expands, and our media brand branches out to new horizons.

It all costs money, of course, and we constantly need help to cover salary costs, overhead, rent, and other hefty considerations to continue to fight the way we do, for everyone to benefit from the results.

Cultural Awareness Month’s main goal is to ensure we have a culture to be aware of in the future, as more and more youth turn to handheld electronics, to TikTok and Snapchat, and other ways of communicating and consuming news that will only evolve and become more addicting, which will make it harder for them to focus on what’s most important.

If you had the chance to make a difference in this uphill battle we are all fighting, by donating a dollar or volunteering for an hour, would you?

Many have but so many more are needed. We’re doing the heavy lifting now, but please, come join the fight in preserving what we have left.

Before it’s too late.

Ted Staff