"Sharing one skin" Okanagan Community  

Jeannette Armstrong 

The author Jeannette Armstrong  talks about where she is from and she includes her identity and her community. She combines both her mother and father's "cultures", and that is what makes her who she is, and she truly believes that these two cultures make her who she is. She identifies who she is on both her mom and her dad's side. Her mom is 'The Kettle River people" and her dad is 'The Hunters'. As she mentions where she is from, she doesn't just say the name of the area, instead she describes it. "The sun is very warm. Bluebirds and canaries darted and chirped in the nearby bushes."  She also mentions the four capacities of self, which is, the physical self, the emotional self, the thinking intellectual self, and the spiritual self. "Sharing one skin, this means that we share more than a place, we share a physical tie that is uniquely human. We are tied together by those who brought us here and gave us blood and gave us a place." Language is one of the most important parts of our native culture. "The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us at it's teachings. We are this one part of the Earth. Without this self and this bond, we are not human."   

How place names impact the way we see landscape

B. Toastie 

Our land as Native People is one the most important things that we have, because of all our resources that are around us. This ties with the story because the story describes that there is a resort that is using recycled sewage to produce fake snow and it disrespects the mountain. I agree with this because if it was my community doing the same thing, it wouldn't make sense because all of the surrounding mountains are sacred to us. Also this situation seems very unfair to the community members because the resort doesn't seem to care about their opinions.  

Human beings have been drinking. since the beginning of time. Also about where all this began. According to historians, they found evidence of alcoholic drinks, and the earliest sample goes to around 7000 BC, and this drink was found in China, which was made of all natural ingredients. But going to what matters, the beginning of healing (sobering) began with a group of Native Americans as early as 1750’s. Apparently this was a society and called it “sobriety circles”, and in these circles, people would gather together to support each other in their sobriety. And this is when the process of sobriety started to begin. The first actual "treatment centers" were called inebriate homes. These homes provided voluntary stays that included non-medical detoxification, isolating from drinking culture, moral reframing, and immersion in newly sobriety fellowships. Unfortunately the homes had closed and these people were sent to different places such as city drunk tanks, public hospitals, and insane asylums.     

When a person is sobering or has been sober, their peers around them who are not sober put peer pressure on them. Most of the time this tends to work, and peer pressure is a big problem, it is found more in teens than any other age group. At the same time it isn’t just people who put peer pressure on others, but social media, advertisements, billboards, and commercials can have such an impact on a person. A SFIS community member also talked to me about this and he brought it up to me and he said, “ever since my journey started, everytime I see something like that, it made me “taste” the alcohol”. He explained that he could feel the quench of his thirst and the bubbly fizz in his mouth. In my opinion, they shouldn’t be posting these alcohol advertisements anywhere because of recovering alcoholics, also children or teens to give them an idea of what they wanna drink or take as they get older. Family as well, there could be an alcoholic member in the family and a child could be looking up to them or living with them, and as they see what the person is doing, it would make the child think it is okay for them to do the same. 

For my very first action plan, I had a little presentation to show my audience. Anyone was welcomed but there was a total of 8 students, pictures were asked to be taken but three denied. The presentation was to show why staying sober is important in the first place. The presentation included the effects that different kinds of drugs and alcohol can do to your body. Slowly but surely it can affect your physical health and your mental health. It also included a video on how alcohol itself effects the physical body.