Page 27 - 1st Anthology 2011

That’s all I’ve told them. It’s nothing to do with being Catholic or Anglican. It has to do
with your own self. That is the way it is right now.

It doesn’t take much to split people, like giving out money, some more will come and they
would want more money. You will have more on your side because you’ve found money.
People think money is everything. It is not, if you want to survive you have to pray and
ask God for help. That is how I survived all these years. I lived alone all these years with
my children. My husband and I separated because of alcohol.

When I was growing up the Tsuut’ina language was still strong amongst the people. Also

our music has changed too, my children were listening to hard rock music. I bought them
all musical instruments. So they got into that. It was the musical teenage before they
started growing up. We forgot about our church. We hardly see young people in the
church. We older people still carry it on. I haven’t been to church for so long. I don’t
know what’s going on now.

Seeing the language suffer, well I didn’t teach my daughter. I was working in town and I
spoke English all the time. I came home and spoke English to my children. I never taught

Sandra how to speak Tsuut’ina. She asks me why you don’t talk Tsuut’ina to me. I said it
just came natural. I talk English when I get home. I never thought anything of it. If
somebody told me what I was doing, maybe I could have taught my children. If somebody
had pointed that out to me. You have to let people know that they only say we are going
to lose our language and there’s going to be no more Tsuut’ina.

A lot of those have to do with marriages. All my boys are married to girls from other
reserves, like Cardston, Enoch and Blackfoot. My boys had to marry those girls because if

they married girls on the reserve they would be relatives. It’s something we’re really strict
about, no intermarriages because it will hurt the children that will be coming from that
couple. So that was the main thing that we talked about, inter marriages. Even me I was
told, you tell your boy don’t go with that girl that’s his cousin. I said thank you for letting
me know. I didn’t know he was going with her. That was a decent way of telling me, that
my boy was running around with a girl that comes from his family.

That’s how it ended up being so many different languages and now a lot of the young

people are going with white girls and they can’t marry them because we have a
membership code. It says if you marry that white girl than you’re off the band list. Right
now they’ve been having meetings and they’ve hired people to go around and gather
people to talk about the membership code. They want to change it and so it won’t hurt
our future generations. If it keeps up like that we will have no more Tsuut’ina. Just like we
are losing our language.

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