Episode 8: I Am the Water

On a cold night in 2002, Chrissy Isaacs watched yet another logging truck loaded with old growth trees hurtle past her home in the Grassy Narrows First Nation, down the only road into the reserve: built by and for the logging industry.

Enough was enough. That night, she dropped a tree in the road to block the loggers, and changed her community forever.

This is the story of land back, and the fight to correct the long, long history of colonizers claiming indigenous territories as their own for economic benefit. But for millions of Indigenous people around the world, land back is about a lot more than ownership. It’s about relating to the land as more than just a resource, a commodity extracted, traded, owned, and controlled. Land back is about relationships, and what happens when we reconnect to the lands and waters that shape us.

Please take care when listening: this episode discusses suicide and self harm.

Learn more about how mercury poisoning has affected Grassy Narrows, support the community as they fight logging and mining claims in their traditional territories, and get to know Indigenous Climate Action here.

Read Episode 8 Full Transcript Below

[AMBIENT: WATER LAPPING GENTLY AGAINST A SHORELINE. BIRD SONG.]

ASHLEY [VO]: This is Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative. I’m Ashley C. Ford.

[AMBIENT: BIRD SONG INCREASES.]

ASHLEY [VO]:Grassy Narrows.

[MUSIC IN: GENTLE PIANO WITH MINIMAL SYNTH.]

ASHLEY [VO]: When you look it up on a map of Canada – tucked into the western reaches of Ontario – it’s easy to mistake for an island.

You zoom out, and out, and out…. watching green disintegrate into blue.

Just as much water as land… where hundred year old spruce and balsam fir roll along shorelines. Endless trees, made double in the placid reflection of all. that. water.

That’s what you find as you pull off the Trans-Canada highway, a few hours east of the longitudinal center of the country.

ASHLEY [VO]: Chrissy Isaacs was born here, in the fifteen-hundred square mile territory of Grassy Narrows. Also known as...

CHRISSY ISAACS: Asubpeeschoseewagong. And it actually just means “grassy narrows.” Laughs. Like, you know, the long grass. Because our people traveled by the river all the time. So when you’re coming into the community, like to the main community, you have to go through these grassy narrows.

[MUSIC RISES, MIXING WITH BIRD SONG.]

So, you know where we are right now? This used to be an old logging camp. So like, it’s just like we reclaimed it. It was like, nope. This is where it ends.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

ASHLEY [VO]: In a wooded clearing not far from the community’s entrance, on one of Grassy’s many shorelines, Chrissy is practically vibrating as she introduces my producers to her home.

Dotting the clearing: a small log cabin, an outhouse, a screened-in kitchen, a fire pit...and a high-tech bear repelling device.

[AMBIENT: CHRISSY SHAKES THE BEAR REPELLER, A PAINT CAN FULL OF ROCKS.]

ASHLEY [VO]: A rusty paint can, full of rocks.

[AMBIENT: CHRISSY LAUGHS]

ASHLEY [VO]: On a cold night in 2002, Chrissy and her sister were driving around Grassy. And their hearts sank as they watched yet another logging truck, loaded with old-growth trees, hurtle past them on Highway 671 — the only road into the reserve. Built by and for the logging industry.

CHRISSY: And I was just like, man, that’s so sickening. You know, like seeing those logging trucks, you know, and just knowing, you know, that every day… a part of who we are is disappearing. Every day.

And you know, who’s gonna teach our kids, you know, to hunt and fish and what’s gonna be here for them? Um, I just said, “we should just stop them.”

[MUSIC: BEGINS WITH A BIG CYMBAL CRASH, BEFORE A LO-FI BEAT BEGINS]

ASHLEY [VO]: They picked up a friend, and his chainsaw, and drove down 671, into the forest.

CHRISSY: We went out a ways up the road there, and we put tobacco at a tree and talked to the tree, you know, and said, “we’re going to use you, you know, to stop the logging.”

And we dropped that tree on the road and then we started making our way this way, you know, dropping logs.

ASHLEY [VO]:That was the first night of what is now a 21-year blockade.

CHRISSY: It felt really, um… awesome! *Laughs*

It was great because, you know, finally, you know that something was being done. But I bet you: little did any of us realize how big and how important what we did, you know, like how important it was. And how it like, was changing the lives of our whole community, you know. And like, even though, you know, we still fight today, there’s still, there’s a lot of goodness that came out of that.

ASHLEY [VO]: The physical act of dropping those trees in the road sent a message to the clear cutters operating in Grassy’s traditional territory: we do not accept this harm.

The blockade wasn’t just where the logging stopped.

[MUSIC REVERBS OUT]

ASHLEY [VO]: It’s where a new chapter for Grassy began.

[AMBIENT: WATER LAPPING AT THE LAKE.]

[MUSIC: THEME IN. ORGAN, SHIMMERING CHIMES, CHEERFUL SYNTH]

ASHLEY [VO]: The logging blockade in Grassy Narrows, the movement to protect water from pipeline expansion in Standing Rock, the call to return Mount Rushmore to the Lakota who call the land sacred – all these actions are part of the land back movement.

For centuries across North America, colonizers have seized ancestral lands, attempting to extinguish entire cultures in pursuit of profit, and devastating generations of indigenous communities in the process.

But the land back movement isn’t about money: it’s about protection. For the land, for future generations, for all of us.

[MUSIC REVERBS OUT]

ASHLEY [VO]: Let’s get into it.

The story of Grassy Narrows – where it’s been, and where it’s going – has everything to do with that relationship to the land, and what happens when it’s destroyed.

There is so much hope and heart and warmth and joy in this story. I want you to know that first. I also want you to know that Chrissy’s story – and the story of Grassy Narrows – include extraordinary challenges, including self harm and suicide.

It’s important to her that you know that. But please… do take care.

[MUSIC IN: SIMPLE ORGAN. TENDER, HOPEFUL.]

ASHLEY [VO]: During that first week of the Grassy Narrows logging blockade 21 years ago, the entire community mobilized.

The school was moved out to blockade headquarters, taking over the freshly-vacated logging structures.

CHRISSY: I remember they just had makeshift shelters and stuff where they were doing their classes. And it wasn’t just like math and all that anymore. It started to be like where they were learning, you know, to filet fish. They were learning to trap. I just remember thinking, wow, this is awesome, you know?

This is the kind of school our people need, you know?

ASHLEY [VO]: The blockade united Grassy Narrows, during a difficult time.

CHRISSY: It felt like it brought our whole community together and like families that were against families, you know, were sitting at the same fire and talking and laughing together. And, our community has just changed so much from that time.

It’s like there’s more love and compassion.

And just like everything that has changed, you know, from when I was a kid, there’s so many things like that I never would’ve imagined, you know, that that would happen. Just from, you know, doing something so simple.

And we all come from the same place. And that’s, you know, a place of love. That’s what we all have in common, you know, that we love the land, we love the water, we love our people. And most of all we all do it for our children.

[MUSIC FADES DOWN]

ERIEL TCHEKWIE DERANGER: This fight for land back is really wrapped up in this love, this love for our communities, this love and reverence for the lands and territories where we come from.

ASHLEY [VO]: Meet Eriel.

ERIEL: [Introduces herself in Dené]

So my name is Eriel, which is a Dënesųłinë́ name and it means “Thunder Woman.” Um, and I am a member of the Deranger family. Our original name was [says name in Dene] and in Dene, Ney means Riverkeeper. But the French Jesuit missionaries gave us a new name, which was Deranger, which means “to disturb.” So my name, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger means “Thunder Woman to disturb,” uh, which is quite hilarious to me.

ASHLEY [VO]: Eriel is a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, in the central southern province of Saskatchewan.

ERIEL: And I’m the Executive Director and founder of Indigenous Climate Action, which is an indigenous social movement vehicle located in so-called Canada.

ASHLEY [VO]: This language is important to Eriel. I’ll let her explain.

ERIEL: We do not call this place Canada.

We are not citizens of Canada. We are citizens to our nations.

I currently live in the territory of Treaty Six, or the territories of the Enoch Cree Nation. And I think it’s really important that we acknowledge not only the history, but the fact that this country is founded on treaty agreements that are supposed to acknowledge these peoples from time immemorial until the grass grows and the sun shines.

[MUSIC IN: ORGAN AND BASS. CONTEMPLATIVE AND SIMPLE]

ASHLEY [VO]: I live in Indiana – presumably meaning, “land of the Indians” – on land seized from Indigenous peoples: this history is present in so much of our culture, on both sides of the US-Canada border.

As the United States expanded steadily westward throughout the first half of the 19th century, snapping up land stewarded by Indigenous communities since time immemorial, Canadian politicians were nervous about being out-conquered.

They set their sights on an enormous swath of land in the middle of the continent that would protect Canadian interests from American encroachment.

Known to the colonizers as “Rupert’s Land,” the British Crown purchased it from a private company, granting the then-new Canadian government power over lands loved, protected, and revered by Indigenous communities for centuries.

[MUSIC RISES AND REVERBS]

ASHLEY [VO]: It now accounts for more than a third of modern Canada.

[MUSIC RETURNS: ORGAN, BASS AND SAXOPHONE.]

ASHLEY [VO]: To exert control over the land it now dubiously owned, between 1871 and 1921, the Canadian government signed 11 treaties with Indigenous communities stretching between the Yukon and Ontario, securing land and industrial interests for the Crown.

In exchange, the First Nations signatories were promised all kinds of things: money, of course. Also supplies, tools, and special rights to the land.

[MUSIC ECHOES OUT]

ASHLEY [VO]: But these agreements were enforced in ways their indigenous signatories never could have predicted.

The people of Grassy Narrows signed Treaty Three, and at their very core, the Numbered Treaties were designed to assimilate indigenous people into white colonial society.

They paved the way for residential schools, which many thousands of indigenous children were subjected to – Chrissy among them.

And as land was stripped from these first nations, provisions were passed to outlaw Indigenous cultural practices and ceremonies.

Land back is about correcting the long, long history of colonizers on this land claiming indigenous territories as their own for economic benefit.

Land as resource; a commodity: extracted, traded, owned, and controlled.

But for millions of indigenous people around the world, it’s about a lot more than ownership.

ERIEL: It is about restoring those relationships that have been severed by colonization. For me as a Dene person, Dene or Dënesųłinë́ means people of the land. When you break down the word Dene, it actually means to flow from the land. And we as indigenous peoples come from these different territories that have been a part of our identity. They’re like kin to us. It is family to us because we have flowed from these river systems, these ecosystems, these mountain ranges, all of these places.

And almost every language, indigenous language, when you look at how they refer to themselves, their sort of namesakes or the tribes where they come from always have a reference to the ecosystems and where they come from. My people are originally K’ái tailé Dënesųłinë́, which means people of the willow, and it’s a reference to the Peace-Athabasca Delta and the willows that grow along the waterways.

And my chief once said, “if they completely destroy the Athabasca Delta, K’ái tailé, Who are we? Who are we when they destroy this?” And when we talk about land back, it is about maintaining that relationship and those identities. For us, it is about restoring relationships.

[MUSIC IN: HAND DRUMS, PIANO, BASS AND SAX. CONTEMPLATIVE, ENERGETIC.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Chrissy describes Grassy as a really hard place to grow up. A place with few surviving elders. And those who did live past fifty, were sick.

Because: logging wasn’t the only thing destroying her home and her culture. Until 1998 most of Grassy’s children were sent to residential schools — infamous institutions of assimilation, meant to wipe the indigeneity out of kids like Chrissy.

And then: there was the mercury.

In the sixties, a paper mill operating in Grassy’s traditional territory dumped mercury waste into the lakes and buried it underground; poisoning the beating heart of Grassy, its groundwater, and its people.

When mercury was inevitably detected in the fish — Grassy’s main source of both food, and income, the government shut down the local fishing industry. Unemployment in Grassy shot to 95% .

[MUSIC REVERBS OUT.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Meanwhile: mercury began to build up in bloodstreams, and lingered.

Once mercury is in the body, it bioaccumulates, building each time you’re exposed.

Mothers also pass it on to their children, in utero.

It’s an intergenerational poison.

A 2022 report found that 90% of Grassy’s community members are affected by mercury poisoning. Chrissy is one of them.

Muscular degeneration, the shakes, loss of balance – mercury poisoning attacks the body viciously.

But it also attacks the brain – and the spirit.

A study released this year found that the young people in Grassy are more than three times more likely to attempt suicide than the youth in any other indigenous community in Canada.

Prior to 1970, when the paper mill was shut down, no suicide had ever been recorded in Grassy Narrows. Now, over 40% of Grassy’s teenage girls make attempts to end their lives.

This landmark study emphatically underlines what Indigenous people across the world know to be true: that Indigenous identity is inseparable from the lands and waters.

And that when the land is poisoned, so are we.

[MUSIC IN: SYNTH WITH ACOUSTIC GUITAR.]

On the night that Chrissy and her sister hopped in the car with a chainsaw, she said a prayer for that first tree, and cut it down for her eldest daughter.

[AMBIENT IN: BIRD SONG, WIND IN THE TREES]

CHRISSY: So she basically grew up here, you know, and so did my other daughter. This is like a part of their home. You know, like even when they’re having a hard time in life, this is where they want to come. They say, let’s go to the blockade.

MARTHA [OFF-MIC]: Why do you think that is?

CHRISSY: I think it’s because maybe this is like literally where good things started to happen. Like for everybody in our community. Yeah. And now this is like a place of healing. This is, you know, a place of ceremony. A place to gather and… yeah. So it just became like our place, I guess.

[MUSIC OUT]

[AMBIENT: BIRD SONG SWIRLS THEN REVERBS OUT]

ASHLEY [VO]:This is the power of land back.

“Land back” as a movement got its name in 2018.

ERIEL: Land back isn’t new. It’s just that we, we talk about it now in this like more sort of common language – land back. And land back isn’t just about giving, like selling the land back to indigenous people. So we’ve seen land back sort of come in these waves of like, you know, big funders give money to an indigenous tribe or community and then they buy it back from some white colonial settler.

And that is, definitely sort of a form towards land back, but land back actually requires settlers to release their power and control over their lands and territories and put it back into the hands of indigenous communities.

ASHLEY [VO]: Eriel started Indigenous Climate Action after a trip home to Treaty Four territory for the first time in a decade.

ERIEL: I am 44 years old. And I’ve seen how much climate change and industrialization has completely altered those spaces. To entire river systems that just don’t exist anymore to massive forests that I once knew was a child completely cut down for industrial development and tar sands extraction.

And I knew that the tar sands had grown extensively during that time period. I had heard about it and like this was when my cousin called me and said, “we need your help. You gotta come.”

And I just remember being like, I wonder how bad it is. Cause I remember seeing those big like refineries when I was younger, but there were only two of them.

ASHLEY [VO]: She was not prepared for what she saw.

ERIEL: And I remember coming over this ridge.

And you come in and all you see is expansive extraction, massive tailings ponds, sand dunes, and cannons going off to stop the birds from landing. And I remember that. Coming over that ridge for the first time after not being there for 10 years.

And I had this moment of this memory of driving that same road as a child with my dad. And he pulled over. And we were in the ditch and there was like a little rainbow of oil in the water in the ditch.

And my dad said, “This is oil and this oil poisons the land. And this is what the white man does when he doesn’t understand the relationship of this land. They poison it and they destroy it.” And he’s like, “And we’ve been trying to stop these guys. For years. When you get older, it will be your responsibility to stop them when you’re older.”

And in that moment, literally fast forward 11 years later, as I’m coming over that ridge and the expansiveness of remembering just a streak in a puddle to what I saw… my breath literally was taken away. My breath was taken away.

I could not breathe. I, my ears began to ring and they began to get like cloudy as my auntie was just telling me about the expansion that had happened over the last 11 years. And I just started sobbing.

*Eriel becomes emotional, then takes a deep breath.*

And every time I tell that story, it’s like I’m pulled back into that moment because it was like seeing a family member just dead on the side of the road. Just with no care. As if it didn’t matter that this mutilation was there. these places that were sacred to me and my people…. just gone. And I knew. I knew in that moment that this could not be the reality that we live in.

This could not be the reality that we are accepting, not only for my people, but for the planet! How had we become so disconnected from the fact that we are Dene? We flow from the Earth, every single last one of us, and we have lost that relationship. We have lost that ability to understand what it means.

[MUSIC IN: PIANO WITH SHAKERS. CONTEMPLATIVE AND DRIVING.]

ASHLEY [VO]: When we come back... climate, culture, and the future that land back promises.

[MIDROLL]

ASHLEY [VO]: In April of 2023, the government in Ontario announced a ten year logging ban in Grassy Narrows, enshrining into law a de-facto moratorium that logging companies had observed since 2008 – a direct result of the community’s stand against clear cutting.

For the next decade, Grassy has assurance that no logging will happen in their 10,000 acre territory.

The province has also pledged 85 million dollars towards cleaning up the river, and a mercury clinic is in the works, for residents affected by poisoning.

While Chrissy’s community waits for those promises to come true, they’re also wary: What happens when that 10 year logging ban expires?

This lingering question is exactly why Eriel, and Chrissy, are hesitant to call the ban a flat-out land back victory.

ERIEL: Since colonization, since the signing of treaty, colonial settlers have been setting the terms for how we operate within their structures. Even the treaties and the way that we utilize and uphold treaties is purely through the interpretive lens of colonial settler Canada.

They have no desire to uphold tenets of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that we have the right to our own governance and legal structures and systems, which would require them to acknowledge legal pluralism.

ASHLEY [VO]: Legal pluralism describes systems where more than one government exists in the same geographical area. Basically: the coexistence of different governments, in one place.

ERIEL: It’s not impossible.

We have treaty agreements, and we have traditional and hereditary governance systems that our communities have used for millennia that the governments say they respect unless it impedes in their jurisdiction of colonial laws. That is not actually respecting, that is paying lip service to the fact that they say that they acknowledge that we live here, and that’s simply it.

Canada only upholds the respect for our sovereignty and self-determination when it serves their agenda. And we do not have any form of legal pluralism in this country, but that is what is necessary for our communities to truly assert our sovereignty and self-determination.

ASHLEY [VO]: Real land back – I’m talking about no term limits, no exceptions – is powerful for generations to come.

ERIEL: When we give the lands and territories back to indigenous communities where they get to govern by their own set of standards and rules and you know, governance and laws and structures around sustainability and practices and relationships… there’s a really interesting thing that starts to happen.

[MUSIC IN: PIANO AND PROPULSIVE UPRIGHT BASS.]

ERIEL: When indigenous culture, language, and value systems begin to thrive and come back into homeostasis with those ecosystems, those ecosystems begin to increase their biodiversity. And when they increase their biodiversity, they increase their abilities to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and lead us towards more stable ecosystems that are critical to climate stabilization at this point.

[MUSIC IN: A SAXOPHONE JOINS POWERFUL UPRIGHT BASS.]

ASHLEY [VO]:Climate justice is a core component of land back.

ERIEL: Some people have said that we are not asking the land to be given back to us, but the land being given back to itself so that it can continue to provide natural law and order to our communities and the balance that we so desperately need in order to achieve climate justice.

[MUSIC RISES AND REVERBS OUT.]

ERIEL: One of the most critical things that we need to do in order to, um, mitigate the impacts of climate change is protect biodiversity on this planet. And where is 80% of the world’s biodiversity? It’s in existing indigenous lands and territories, and particularly in territories where indigenous people still maintain control and governance over their lands and territories.

ASHLEY [VO]: Not too far north of Grassy is Pimachiowin Aki, the largest protected section of boreal forest in North America.

For seven thousand years, the land has been stewarded by Anishnaabeg protectors – and has been beautifully preserved. It’s the first UNESCO World Heritage site in Canada selected for both its cultural and natural value.

Here, at-risk species like woodland caribou and the Canadian warbler thrive alongside traditional culture, in harmony.

ERIEL: Climate justice is not just about stabilizing the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. It is about restoring our relationships with the land. It’s about restoring our relationships with each other, it’s about creating pathways to address the long history of harms caused by colonial systems, and it allows us to move towards something that has justice in the framework.

[MUSIC IN: SYNTH PIANO AND ORGAN. TENDER AND SIMPLE.]

ASHLEY [VO]:Before Chrissy was born, Indigenous practices were outlawed in Canada. Until 1951, dances and other essential ceremonies were banned.

Growing up, she felt the weight of this erasure. The way she puts it, people were afraid to revive their spirituality.

But slowly, they’re reclaiming it – starting with their relationship with the land.

[MUSIC RISES THEN FADES DOWN SLOWLY.]

CHRISSY: My grandson, you know, this year, he surprised me. He’s seven. And he was watching the trees all like since the snow started melting.

ASHLEY [VO]: I caught up with Chrissy while she was in her office at the Grassy Narrows Youth Center. It was a little loud while we talked. You know the youths.

CHRISSY: And he kept saying, “Oh, I see, I see the buds now” he’s like, “you know, that means the grass is going to be coming soon.” I just, I was surprised like how aware he was, you know, just to keep an eye on, you know, something so simple.

I think that was like two weeks ago, like the leaves were flipped over. And he’s like, “look, Kokum.” He’s like, “the trees want water.” He says, “it’s going to rain,” you know, like, so he’s starting to see that connection. And he has that respect, you know, even if he picks up a rock, you know, he’ll come ask for tobacco.

He’ll, like, if he wants to take that rock, he’ll offer, you know, tobacco for that rock.

ASHLEY [VO]: Today, Chrissy practices traditional medicine. She’s raising her family to embrace their indigeneity, to live with the land, not in opposition to it.

She’s also a sun dance chief for Grassy Narrows. The sun dance is a sacred ceremony of renewal and cleansing. For the community. For the earth. And for the families still healing from generations of colonial trauma.

CHRISSY: For me to find my healing, I had to look back. I had to, um, forgive my parents and forgive my grandparents. And I said, it was just like scratching through this nasty surface.

When I broke through that nasty part, there was something so beautiful, you know. The beauty is where we came from and the history of our people, you know, before mercury poisoning, before residential schools, you know…. there was something really beautiful. And that was that connection to the land and the water, and most of all love. Like the love that our people had, you know, for everything and everyone.

So when the mercury came, that just stripped, you know, all that away from people that were trying to provide for their families. And it ended up creating, you know, social issues.

I think it almost made us disconnected, you know, from the water and the land. And then so with the poisoning, you know, it, uh, it at the time, well, we’re just recently finding out, you know, what the effects of mercury is. There’s just like… I feel like we were just robbed, you know of uh, of a way of life, robbed of our own health and robbed of everything.

[MUSIC IN: SYNTH ORGAN AND PIANO. WARM, HOPEFUL.]

ASHLEY: For people who want to change their relationship with their environment, reclaim their relationship with the land, what advice would you give them about fostering that reconnection?

CHRISSY: Go home. *Laughs* Yeah, go home. Sit on your land, you know, and just really, really feel the life that it has to give us.

You know, and, and to live it, like to truly live it. To find out the history. People always say don’t look back, but sometimes you do have to look back to understand.

ASHLEY [VO]: In a world that has displaced, restrained, and devastated them, where “home” can be a place of both harm and healing, “going home” is a deeply complicated project for so many indigenous people.

There’s a lot of work to do, and a lot of hope. Eriel sees a bright horizon ahead.

ERIEL: I just think that it’s such an incredible time to be indigenous.

[MUSIC FADES DOWN SLOWLY]

ERIEL: There’s been a renaissance of indigeneity that we are seeing unfold within the environmental movement and within the climate justice movement that forces us to really reevaluate how we are talking about environmentalism and climate justice.

We’re the ones that are pushing the envelope and we are using a rights-based framework that is upheld off of our intergenerational knowledge and our capacities to live in symbiotic relationships with the natural world that have led to the development of so many incredible governance systems, economic systems, education systems, health systems that have allowed our communities to be who they are since time immemorial.

[MUSIC IN: SYNTH ORGAN AND ACOUSTIC GUITAR. TENDER AND THOUGHTFUL.]

[AMBIENT: FOOTSTEPS CRUNCHING IN GRAVEL AS CHRISSY AND THE PRODUCTION TEAM WALK TOWARDS THE WATER IN GRASSY NARROWS. BIRDS SWIRL OVERHEAD.]

MARTHA: What do you like, feel when you walk up to the water?

CHRISSY: Like grateful. Yeah, like grateful. I feel love. I feel…I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It’s just like respect.

ASHLEY [VO]: Today, Chrissy can look at this water gently lapping the shoreline and feel love. But that isn’t how she always felt about it.

[MUSIC FADES DOWN.]

CHRISSY: So at 11 years old, I tried to unlive myself. And I have to share that part because it was like, I guess just to let people know how hard life can be, as an indigenous person, you know, in a small community.

ASHLEY [VO]: While she was recovering, Chrissy’s dad gave her a choice: go home to Grassy, or go live with her aunt in Winnipeg for a little while.

CHRISSY: And I chose to go to Winnipeg because I didn’t wanna be here anymore. And that would’ve been like, you know, the best choice I ever made in my life, being at 11 years old.

ASHLEY [VO]:It was the summer of 1990. On the other side of the country, members of the Mohawk nation were standing up to the development of a golf course on their ancestral burial grounds… a pivotal moment remembered as the Oka Crisis.

CHRISSY: And there was protests and rallies going on across Canada like in support of our Mohawk brothers and sisters.

ASHLEY [VO]: At one of these rallies, Chrissy absorbed drum songs and watched pipe ceremonies for the first time. And a warrior in attendance took notice of this wide-eyed girl, soaking it all up.

CHRISSY: And I remember this warrior teaching me a song and I still like… I’ll just add, you know, that I actually made that song into a lullaby for my kids. *Laughs* But I remember, um, you know, him telling me, you know, “take my hand.”

ASHLEY [VO]: He led Chrissy on stage, and they started to sing. Louder and louder and louder.

CHRISSY: So, it goes um…*Singing a wordless chant*

[AMBIENT: PRODUCERS CLAP AND CHRISSY LAUGHS.]

CHRISSY: There’s words that go to the song. So like the words change over time. But I remember at the time the words were like, “Jean Chrétien is not our leader.” And then repeating again, “Jean Chrétien is not our leader. Our true leaders are our children.”

[AMBIENT: “CHILDREN” ECHOES OUT AND THE LAPPING WATER RUSHES IN.]

CHRISSY: I just remember like that rush, like I felt. Like I just went and kicked this door open, you know? And there’s like this big light. And I wanted to keep feeling like that.

ASHLEY [VO]: The long return toward love – love for Grassy, her ancestry, herself – began on that stage.

MARTHA: Who do you understand yourself to be today?

CHRISSY: Today, I am carried by the stars. That’s my Anishnaabe name. Anungook Kaapaamawnigwa. And today I’m a mother, a grandmother, a wife.

I’m a strong, indigenous Anishnaabe Quay. And I’m the land. The water. Yep.

[MUSIC IN: THEME SONG WITH ORGAN, SYNTH, AND SHIMMERING CHIMES. HOPEFUL AND GENTLE.]

ASHLEY [VO]: Land back calls on each of us to recognize ourselves as a fluid part of a larger whole: to dissolve into land and lake and dirt, like all these trees brushing against the shoreline… reaching down into perpetual reflection, and skyward until the horizon claims us. Part of, not apart from.

It calls on us, too, to be brave in our imagination of the future. To be expansive in our reckoning with legal pluralism, to recognize that land back is not land lost: but possibility gained.

CHRISSY: So if people wanna learn more about Grassy and the actions that we do, or you know, the announcements that come out about our community, then you could go to freegrassy.net.

Miigwetch! [“Thank you!”]

[MUSIC FADES OUT.]

[AMBIENT: LAKESIDE AT GRASSY, WITH BIRDS, WIND AND WATER.]

CREDITS

Into the Mix is a Ben & Jerry’s Podcast produced by Vox Creative.

This episode was written by Martha D. Salley.

The Vox Creative team includes Lead Producer Bethany Denton, Production Manager Taylor Henry, and Production Coordinator Jessica Bae. Martha D. Salley is our supervising producer. Annu Subramanian is our executive producer.

The team also includes Ariana Jiffo, senior manager of creative services, Design Director Brittany Falussy, and post-production stars Greg Russ and Andrew Hammond.

Kyle Neal engineered this episode. Original music by Israel Tutson.

A special thank you to Suzanne Methot for her expertise, and to Arianne Young for her support.

The Ben & Jerry’s team includes Jay Tandon, Jay Curley, Sanjana Mahesh, Chris Miller, Palika Makam, and Maryam Adrangi.

Next month, we’re introducing you to a tenacious medical student, as she navigates the uncertain future of reproductive justice.

I’m Ashley C. Ford. Thank you for listening.