You don’t need all the pieces

Last week, I had the gift of spending time with my dear friend and CC mentor, Daniel Elliott of Stz’uminus First Nation. Dan is very special to me, and he carries so many gifts. He is an incredible artist, writer, poet, storyteller, cultural worker and medicine person. He carries an exuberance and excitement for life, and has endless ideas he wishes to dream into being.

I have been to Dan’s sweats. I have seen how he bundles medicines to brush people off, and how he smudges, choosing what to burn with such intention. I have gone for walks with him and watched in amazement as he points out all the medicines growing around us. He sees what most of us walk past.

Dan carries both a Scottish and a Coast Salish background. He grew up separated from community, and for the past two decades he has been learning about his Coast Salish identity.

On the drive home, we got talking about what that journey has been like. Dan told me that he used to feel a sense of lack. He doesn’t carry the teachings of the longhouse, and he doesn’t have a hwulmuhw (First Nations) name. There is a lot he doesn’t know. But in recent years, he has come to realize, and to embrace, that he has many gifts to share, even without all the pieces.

As we talked, I remembered a film I watched this spring called Now Is the Time. It is a short documentary about the day in 1969 when Haida carver Robert Davidson, then only 22, raised the first new totem pole on Haida Gwaii in nearly a century.

What I keep thinking about is where Robert started. He had only been carving small argillite poles. “I didn’t know how to work on that scale,” he says. But he understood what was at stake. He asks us to think of how bland life would be if we didn’t know how to dance, or sing, or carve poles, and he calls them gifts to everybody. So he went home and knocked on every door in Masset to see if anyone had anything left from the classical period.

The community answered. Some of the old people showed up to the pole raising with a toy drum and paper headpieces, bringing what they had. Three generations worked together to make it happen. Robert is honest about how fragile it all felt. He calls that day one of the highlights of his life, and he also speaks of the sorrow of knowing it might be gone for good, with maybe not enough left to hold on to.

He did not think of it as the start of anything. He thought it was a celebration for the old people, and he was a young kid who thought he was going to teach the Elders something. Then, in his words, “it was the other way around.”

I think that is what Dan was telling me in the car. You do not have to know everything at once to make a big impact. Dan has stood in that place of not feeling like he had enough to hold onto, and he keeps showing up with what he has: the medicines, the care, the stories. Others fill in some gaps, he fills in some for them, and the circle is stronger for it.

So many of us carry some version of that sense of lack. Maybe you grew up away from your community, or your language was not passed down to you, or you are learning this history for the first time as an adult, and you worry you do not know enough to take part.

Robert started with something small and took on something large. Dan showed up for every teaching that was shared with him, and learned and learned and learned, and we are all richer for the chance to sit in ceremony with him. Culture comes back through people like this: people who start with what they have, who let others help fill in the gaps, and who trust that a small beginning can bring healing to more people than they will ever know.

You do not need to have all the pieces. You only need to be willing to bring what you carry, and to let others bring theirs.

I invite you to watch the film. It is 16 minutes long, directed by Christopher Auchter and produced by the National Film Board of Canada: https://vimeo.com/427071024

I would love to hear from you. What feels like a missing piece in your own story, and what might you already be carrying? Just hit reply.

In learning,

Kim