Kitselas Treaty Motto by Mel Bevan Wi n s t o n Churchi l l during WW II used the term KBO, an acronym for “ keep buggering on”, to keep going regardless of the obstacles and

hardships. A personality trait that drives many of us from that time, a personality trait shaped not by an event but the recovery from the event. The Kitselas people have an ancient belief that the personality of the adult is shaped as a child. In the ancient culture, shaping is teaching. A catastrophic event when I was six years old and thetwenty years of recovery had a major influence on shaping the KBO trait in my personality. The shaping of my personality began with the influenza epidemicin the winter of 1946-47. The influenza pseudo pandemic in 1947 was deadly to a part of the population of Kitselas having little resistance to the strain. About forty of a 300 member community died that winter. The largest group affected were the people in the higher age group, the hunters, the fishermen, the trappers who were the providers along with most of the wage earners. Most of the people relied onas political, spiritual, and cultural leaders no longer existed in Kitselas. The loss of these people left a knowledge vacuum from which the Kitselas people never recovered. The majority of those who died were men. The women of the community for the next twenty years along with the children were left the task ofkeeping the community alive. Forty funerals in one winter cost the people everything they had in wealth and the means of survival. For the next twenty years before the children were old enough to begin the task of rebuilding, survival meant work, not chores but work. With neither wealth nor earning power, food had to beraised, harvested and preserved. Women and children turned the soil by hand, planted and harvested all that can be stored in root

cellars. Without freezers fruits and vegetable had to be jarred. May to October was fish harvest time. Eachfamily needed no less than one thousand pieces of fish to carry them through to the beginning of the next fishing season. My grandfather’s brother the only survivingleader was my teacher, he taught me to work the long days of summer fishing, packing, and finding and hauling home the right wood for smoking fish, to keep going even when my hands were bleeding. He died when I was thirteen, the job then became mine. For example at thirteen years old, starting at five in the morning to Edgars Point, home on the last trip of the after dark, and starting again the next morning, I had no choice but to keep going. We were not forced to work as children, we were made to understand to have enough to eat and survive we had to get it done, and we did it willingly. The lessons of that time in our history stay with me to this day, my mother and the elders that remained after the winter of 1946/47 shaped my mind and others like me, to carry on and never see failure as defeat, but see it as a failed attempt and try something else. The people who understood the art of shaping the child have long gone and the art has gone with them. I owe much to those people who saw us through those terrible times and I owe them the promise to keep going.

Article printed in Kitselas Treaty Office newsletter Canyon Current (January 2015)