Sarain Fox and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling.

My name is Serene Fox, artist and ambassador for the Treadwright Foundation. At Treadwright, we believe that every land we touch has a story and that travel is a vital tool for education, compassion, and for communities to be heard. I'm walking on the shores of the Ottawa River in the capital of Canada. My people call this place Odawa. It was a place of trade for hundreds of indigenous nations and is currently unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin territory. My ancestors, the original travelers, met here and paddled up this river to exchange necessities like hides, tools, food, and clothing like moccasins, the traditional footwear of indigenous people in my homelands, and we still wear them today. I'm meeting with Roberta Anderson a Cree elder who lives here in Ottawa. She's an incredible artist who makes moccasins and teaches at the Manitoba Muckluck Storyboot School, a project that shares the art of muckluck making with students from across the globe and a longtime partner of the Treadwright Foundation. I know you as a moccasin and muckluck maker but that's not what you started with. No, I started with the beadwork. How did you fall in love with making moccasins and mucklucks? When somebody would buy one and they would look at it and they couldn't get over the fact that I made it and I would say, I made that. You made shoes. Yeah, yeah. You love teaching? Oh, I love teaching. What do you, what do you love about it? Just all the people that I teach and then watching them, how excited they get. Why is it important for you to teach your own kids, your own family, your granddaughters, grandkids? It actually makes me really proud. Way after I'm gone, I want them to know that this is what I did for a living and I want them to know how to do it. That way they can show their kids. It's important that we keep our traditions and our culture alive but also indigenizing the new modern times that we're going into. You know, even through our own moccasins, these tell so many stories about where we've been and the tops are always very beautiful, these different vamps that are on here. They tell us a lot of stories about our own people. My moccasins were gifted to me and I wear those when I dance and they offer me healing and they protect my feet when I'm dancing. You can always tell the stories from the bottoms because on the bottoms, they look like that. That means they've been worn very well. It's, it's who we are. It's what we represent. Roberta is working to keep her culture alive so our communities can stay connected to their traditions. I encourage travelers to seek the truth about the lands they visit and engage with genuine experiences that respect and nurture the cultures that exist there. Try to find the history of the place you call home. Perhaps there's a story that's been erased or a thriving culture pulsing just under the surface.