I am the eldest of three daughters, and we are all quite close in age (my Dad is one lucky guy).  At the age of six my parents decided to move our family back to my Dad’s reserve of Gitlaxt’aamix (formally known as New Aiyansh, B.C.) and I remember being so completely excited that we were making a big move. Now as an adult and a mother myself I now know that I had every reason to be excited.  I had visited Gitlaxt’aamix many times as a young girl because it’s where most of my father’s family lived and continue to live to this day.  Once we arrived my six-year-old self embraced the gravel roads, the quiet mountain tops, and the fact that I was the new specimen in Ms. West’s first grade class. And for the next eight years the tiny community of 500 people or so was our home.

My parents made the decision to split our family for a year or so while my Mom pursued an education in the nearest town of Terrace, B.C.  She moved to Terrace with my sisters, and I stayed behind with my Dad in Aiyansh. I can’t really remember how I felt about us being separated, I’m sure I was sad, but from the time my sisters entered my life I remember feeling a sense of independence for myself, and responsibility to my sisters. So I believe I just felt that it was my duty to take care of my Dad.  In that time I became quite close to my paternal grandmother, and she cared for me with a stern but gentle love.  Granny.  My Granny raised an army of kids with one paralyzed arm.  She was constantly in the kitchen prepping, whether it was rising at 4 in the morning to start a batch of bread, frying some breakfast for my Ye’e(grandpa), making sure lunch was ready before noon, or that dinner was on the table at 5 pm sharp, she was more active than anyone I know with two functioning arms.  I loved to help my Granny, she was the one who welcomed me into her kitchen, to chop veggies, knead bread, or bust out the super old school washing machine that we had to drag into the kitchen and hook up to the kitchen sink.  She was the first one, other than my mother, to shape and mold me.  Anyone who knows my Granny Elizabeth knows she loves to talk, so she would yap my ear off while we would stand side by side at the counter top, all the while keeping a close eye on me, “don’t chop the celery too small, they’ll disappear in the stew”, “don’t punch the bread too thin, it won’t expand properly”…and she would go on and on eventually giving me the daily updates for ‘Young & The Restless’, ‘Days of our Lives’, ‘General Hospital’…you get the idea.  No matter what Granny was talking about she’d always somehow get back to the lessons she’d learned from her Grandmother.

My Nisga’a and Gitxsan cultures are ones that are based around the feast hall, everything happens in the feast hall.  Whether its a marriage, a death, or someone is receiving a traditional name, that is where it all goes down.  As a young child, you don’t quite understand and it just becomes a way of life.  All you know is that you’re going to another feast and you really don’t want to because you know you have to sit still for hours and hours, listen to people make speeches and you can’t make a peep.  But on the upside you know you’re going to get an awesome traditionally prepped meal, with dessert, maybe some candy, and if it’s a tribal feast a small gift(it was so rewarding being handed a face cloth!).   The feast hall is where everyone is welcome, where everyone has a place to sit and everyone shares the wealth.

All cultures are based around food, around survival.  This is what the feast hall is, survival.  It is an entire community and surrounding communities coming together and making sure that everyone is taken care of and that protocol is the way it has been for thousands of years.  Only as a young adult have I been able to really understand the importance of my culture and truly accept it, and that is another story with a whole wack of complexities that I will share another time.  My point here is that my culture, my Granny, my parents, have woven such a wonderful picture already and my life isn’t but half over(so I hope).  I’ve spent most of my life in the kitchen, as a small girl, as a teenager, in culinary school and as a professional certified chef.  I realize the importance of food and the part it plays in bringing people together.

I can’t wait to share my story with you, the soap opera of a life living in between two worlds: the rez and the “real world”.