It's not yours to sell

Page 31

Dear Buffalo Spirit:

I have heard that there are buffalo farms. The buffalo are getting sick and dying. This is happening to them, I am told, because it is not in the spirit of the buffalo to be domesticated like the white man's cattle and locked up in a pen, herded up to be slaughtered and then butchered and sent to market where the only difference between it and a plastic wrapped cut of slave-steak is the label on its package.

It is not in the culture of the Cree to domesticate and enslave the animals like the white man does; when this happens it is simply a Cree taking on the behaviors of white culture.

This is the same way that I feel about sweetgrass. I was told that when you want sweetgrass you must either pick it yourself or exchange a gift of tobacco or something similar, but not to buy it and not to sell it like it was a "commodity" in a business.

If you want to have sweetgrass available to Aboriginal people for their traditional use of it then you should make it available only to Aboriginal people. I am worried that by even beginning on this path with our most sacred sweetgrass, selling it like the non-Native culture sells everything, even their sacred things, you are violating the spirit and the deep meaning of our traditional customs. You are making the assumption that it is yours to sell.

Some say that money has become our new tobacco, that there is nothing wrong with exchanging this new tobacco for items such as sweetgrass. Money is not our new tobacco and never will be. It is dead and soulless (except for the tortured spirits of trees captured inside of it). If you want to make the sweetgrass available then it should be a community effort and you should find a way to redistribute the sweetgrass, not sell it.

If people in an urban setting who are Aboriginal are seeking out the sweetgrass then it is our responsibility to seek out these people and to gift them with the sweetgrass, not make it so that their first experience with it is as a purchase, like you can purchase drugs, material possessions, pornography, people, land, food. If we want to preserve our integrity as tribal nations, there are certain things and influences we must avoid adopting from the white man's culture; selling sacred items is one of these things we must avoid doing.

N. Katawasisiw