The Secwepemc – No Refrigerators But A Good Mindset

It is hard to imagine today what the old Secwepemc people of Williams Lake would make of North American society today.  We have a come long way from the Native American tradition of living in harmony with the land. These days we take from the land everything we can get and more.

The nations that were here before European colonization took their food from the land, but did so in a sustainable manner.  They respected the animals they culled, and would utilize as much as possible of what they hunted.  Wastage was almost unheard of, something quite remarkable given that the best refrigerator they had available at the time was immersion in cold running water.

In industrial societies like ours, food production is separated from those who eat.  There are many people who have never seen a sheep, cow or chicken alive – either in a field, or in a factory farm. A lot of us just think of meat as something that comes from the refrigerated section of the supermarket.

This distance from our food encourages us not to think about the animals we are getting our protein from. I believe that the old Native Americans would be horrified by this concept, and find it deeply disturbing.

Honoring of the animals that give their lives so that we may live is a common thread in many so called primitive societies.  Even more ‘sophisticated’ groups – such as certain First Nations who engaged in agriculture – still recognized the debt they owed to the land and the products it yielded.

While there are many benefits to living in a so called modern society – including technologies such as refrigeration – I think our loss of kinship with the lands we live on is a significant downside.  In my mind, societies that do not put appropriate value on the underlying source of their wealth – the places that they live and feed themselves from – seem destined to strip that land and thus destroy themselves from within.  There is a lot we can learn from the traditional thinking of the original inhabitants of our lands.