Salish Wolf Dear Prime Minister: Joan Morris on Surviving a Genocide, Finding Her Voice, and Wisdom of Elders
This episode, like many others, is about the power and beauty of the human spirit. Yet this episode is not like any other.
Joan Morris is an elder of the Songhees Nation of the Lekwungen People on Vancouver Island in British Columbia . As with many of her people, she has suffered greatly in the name of colonialization, and now she advocates for survivors of the draconian system that included residential schools and Indian hospitals.
Joan is the last surviving person to have lived on T’ches Island, known in English as Chatham Island, part of a small archipelago located a few kilometres off the southern coast of Vancouver Island, near Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia. This is the same archipelago where the namesake of this podcast, the Salish Wolf, known as Stakaya to Joan’s people, lived and thrived.
This conversation with Joan is a low velocity, high intensity journey through some of the severe hardships indigenous people of Canada, and certainly other places, have faced due to European migration. This is undoubtedly the hardest episode I have recorded and will likely be challenging for you, the listener. And yet the facts are simply too brutal and omnipresent, even today, for us to simply turn a blind eye or a deaf ear. For healing, there must be forgiveness and compassion; for compassion to be widespread, so too must the stories of incomprehensible suffering.
This episode contains graphic material and may not be suitable for young children. But I urge you to listen. Our collective path forward will be built on the knowledge of where we have come. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Joan Morris on Salish Wolf.
Episode Links:
Medicine Unbundled by Gary Geddes
Plants, People, and Places by Nancy Turner