The Recliner
Uy skweyul siiye'yu (Good day friends),
Over the next few months I am going to be weaving through Teachings Tuesday's that feature one of our incredible Mentors: who they are, how they came to share in this work, and a few of the reasons we love them so much. This week I'd like to introduce you to my dear friend, Daniel Elliott of Stz'uminus First Nation. And to do that, I have to go back quite a few years.
In 2017 I had the amazing good fortune to meet an incredible man who would end up changing the trajectory of my life forever. It was at this time that Daniel Raymond Elliott began working as the Native Drug and Alcohol Counsellor at Stz'uminus First Nation. Despite the imposing shadow he cast, Dan has a heart so gentle, and a way about him that makes people feel safe about sharing their deepest vulnerabilities.
Over the years, Dan and I grew a close friendship. He would come and sit in my dental room to visit when I didn't have patients, and would seek me out when he was making something delicious in the kitchen. (His clam patties are LEGENDARY). Some days he would invite me down to gatherings on the beach, and would grill fresh oysters over a fire. He is a kind, generous man.
That friendship held me long before I knew how much I'd need it. Working in dental rooms in First Nations communities, I began to see, again and again, how strained the relationship was between the healthcare system and the people it was meant to serve. I recognized that the change needed to start with dialogue and relationship. Still, I resisted the idea of creating a space to address the gaps I was witnessing because I felt terrified that, as a non-Indigenous person, it wasn’t my place.
On the first of October 2020, I found myself in Dan's office. He saw I was distraught and invited me to sit in his comfy recliner. I shared with him what I had been witnessing in my practice, and my own turmoil. I had an idea, but I didn’t know what to do with it.
Dan told me I was being called to do something, and that it was my responsibility to listen to that call. He catalyzed me. He gave me the safety to pick up this work. Culturally Committed would never have started without Dan sitting with me that day.
So who is Dan.
Dan is a husband, a father, and a grandfather. Before he was a counsellor, he spent years working as a commercial fisherman, out on the water making his living the way so many from his community have. That time on the water shaped him. It is where a lot of his patience and his steadiness come from, I think. He eventually trained as a counsellor and has spent decades since supporting his community through the hardest parts of healing, from addiction, from trauma, from all the ways colonization has tried to break relationship.
Dan is also an artist and an author. His book, Winds of Change: Truth, Art & Reconciliation, walks through the impacts of colonization and his own vision for how reconciliation can happen. His paintings carry the same story, moving from pre-contact beauty through to harm to healing. He is a sweat lodge keeper and a medicine man too, someone who holds space for other people's healing in the most literal sense.
And then there is Dan the cook. Anyone who has been lucky enough to eat with him knows this side of him well. He makes traditional foods with a kind of care that turns a meal into a teaching. Sharing food with Dan is its own kind of relationship building. It is not separate from his other work. It is the same work, just served on a plate.
All of these pieces, the husband, the father, the grandfather, the fisherman, the counsellor, the artist, the cook, the sweat lodge keeper, the medicine man, add up to who Dan is.
Dan has been one of our Founding Mentors from the very beginning. He shows up for CC in the same way he showed up for me in that recliner. Steady. Direct. Willing to tell me the truth I needed to hear.
Huy ch q'u, Dan.
For all you do to support me and us. Love you lots. <3
🧡 Kim + the CC Team
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