SANCTUARY Series Trailer
Introducing “Sanctuary”, a 10 part video series about healing mind, body, spirit and relationships from the effects of colonialism:
S – Sacred Place, Healing Pathway (Sanctuary)
A – Access (Gate)
N – Need (Altar of Sacrifice)
C – Cleansing (Washbasin)
T – Teachings (Table of Shewbread)
U – Unity (Lampstand)
A – Abiding (Altar of Incense)
R – Reliance (Ark of the Covenant – 10 Commandments)
Y – Yoked (Ark of the Covenant – Budded Almond Branch)
+ – the cross-our calling (Ark of the Covenant – Manna)
Sacred Place, Healing Pathway: Introduction
Episode 1
In this video program, our family and friends will share with you how we experience sanctuary on the “pathway for keeping”, as we decolonize our full human experience of mind (healing from the generational impact of trauma, addictions, and lifestyle imbalance), body (reviving physical wellness into daily living progressively), spirit (growing in a restorative and developmental relationship with our triune Creator God) and our social/environmental relationships (living in harmonious relationship with nature and others in God’s Kingdom). Please join us on the Journey Home!
Access: Gate
Episode 2
Accessing a restorative relationship with our Creator God through knowing and following Jesus involves our whole human experience. We access, or come to an understanding of our Creator by healing our mind. We give our Creator access to our heart through how we care for our bodies. We access reconciliation with our Creator through a spiritually intimate relationship with Him. And we can create access for others to desire their Creator when the Holy Spirit works through our relationships.
Our family and friends will share by our life stories how to access a restorative relationship with God through mind, body, spirit and relationship to nature and others.
Need: Altar of Sacrifice
Episode 2: Gate
Episode 3
I am the son of the late Clarence Dennis. My father was heavily involved in working for the civil rights of Indigenous People in Canada. He spent the later years of his life advocating for the housing rights of Indigenous People who were homeless in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I’ve met so many people across Canada who have stories of working with my dad to advocate for our right to be treated as full human beings. So many people sacrificed their lives investing in something they believed in so that my generation could have a better life experience than theirs. My dad’s elder sister, my Auntie Marjorie White, collaborated with her fellow First Nation University students to create the first of the Friendship Center Societies that began in BC and has since spread across Canada. She was the lead founder of the Circle of Young Eagles Society, a halfway home for people leaving incarceration to transition back into their community. She was also instrumental in developing better housing for low-income Indigenous families living in Vancouver, BC. I come from a legacy of strong leaders who have invested their lives sacrificing to help our Indigenous People experience freedom and hope. Fueled by their passion and concern for our people, my journey took a similar path of getting my Master’s degree in Social Work, through which I’ve had the privilege of serving Indigenous Communities. Our Indigenous experience was made difficult through colonial trauma which has had a painful ripple effect in every generation since. Still, we are healing as a people, we are resilient, and we are strong.
Cleansing: Washbasin
Episode 4
A practice that Huu-ay-aht has done for millennia is the practice of ʔuusimč. Our elders tell us that when we cleanse our bodies, our minds can be made clean, making us aware of ourselves. Spiritual bathing, ʔuusimč, pronounced Oosimch in English, is done in many ways, but the central characteristics of ʔuusimč include the daily practice of getting up early before the sun comes up and going to a place that is secluded where no one except the Creator can hear your prayers.
The ʔuusimč process includes alternating between prayer and submerging our entire body in the water to cleanse our whole selves daily. This process has been described as a regeneration, a new birth, a renewing, cleansing, and washing away of defilement through our spiritual communion with our Creator. Robert Dennis, a Huu-ay-aht elder, describes ʔuusimč as a type of baptism that our people have always practiced.
Baptism in the Bible is a washing away of sins to be saved. The Bible says in Titus 3:5, “He saved us through the washing of the Holy Spirit whom he poured on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior.” Our Creator taught us these ways from our beginning.
Teachings: Table of Bread
Episode 5
During the colonial christian European land expansion, so-called “christian churches” joined efforts with government powers to do whatever it took to control the People’s of the Americas, Africa, New Zealand and Australia, all for the purpose of taking the homeland that our Creator had given to us.
But in the reading the Bible for ourselves, we come to understand that it is severely distorted and misrepresented by the very people who brought it over and who have professed to follow it. In the Bible, we can also see many ways God was already teaching our People for generations before the printed book ever came to us.
Unity: Lampstand
Episode 6
Upholding our ancestral name is important to my family because much time and consideration was invested by our elders and cultural leaders in choosing these names for each one of us. I am grateful to my family for investing in this Name Giving Potlatch to ensure that so many of us were given our Huu-ay-aht names, connecting us so deeply to the roots from where we come.
Many ancient people name their children after characteristics of who they are or will become. It’s the same with the ancient People who wrote the Bible. They understood the hayupa of a name because this teaching was given to them by Creator God.
The Bible has some important things to say about names, especially the name of God. We hear in Exodus 34: 5-7 that God proclaims His name to be His character, which is described as “merciful, gracious, patient, abounding in goodness and truth, merciful, forgiving, and just.”
Abiding: Altar of Incense
Episode 7
As indigenous people, our prayers often include singing, drumming, dancing, yaxšiƛin (the Huu-ay-aht word for cedar bough brushing), smudging with the smoke of burning cedar boughs, or bathing in the river. We pray at meal times, meeting times, ceremonies, funerals, and times of healing and cleansing. We have always understood that a constant connection with our Creator was paramount to living the best life we were intended to live. Prayer provides us with the opportunity to feel Creator’s presence. It is only by Creator’s presence that we have survived oppression and are overcoming all that has been done against us.
This episode is focused on the Altar of Incense, which teaches us about the importance of abiding in the presence of Creator through regular prayer. The people were taught to keep the incense burning in the Sanctuary at all times, and it was tended both morning and night. This constancy of keeping the incense burning is explained when the Bible tells us to pray continually. In another place it says, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, and faithful in prayer.” By drawing into the intimacy of honest communication with our Creator continually, we will find ourselves abiding in His presence more fully.
The Cross: Ark of the Covenant – Manna
Episode 8
Our ways have always been as sacred as our homeland because both were given to us by our Creator. Our ways are rooted in our principles and cultural values. Our language and the way we communicate that language reflects our principles and values.
ʔiisaak means respect with caring for our Creator (Naas), respect for our elders and their life experience and wisdom, respect for our community of all living beings within our territory and beyond, respect for our traditional knowledge, respect for our protocols based on our Ha’w̓ił (chieftainship) and our Ha-houlthee (traditional territory).
ʔuuʔałuk is taking careful responsibility of the natural resources of our Ha-houlthee, as well as taking care of our identity as Huu-ay-aht People, care of our language, our culture, our stories our ceremonies and traditions ALL given to us by our Creator to remember His haahuupač’ak.
Hišuk c̕awak means everything is one, interconnected, interdependent, sharing a reciprocal relationship between mind, body, spirit and our relationship with nature and others, between Creator and all created life.
The haahuupač’ak of the Creator documented in the Biblical record resembles these same our same traditional values, but very soon after He returned to the skies, some who were called by His name stopped representing His way and when they arrived on our shores. We received a misrepresentation of His name that was given in the Biblical record. We did not see a clear witness of the principles and values that were taught by Jesus Christ, and as a result we did not see that Jesus Christ was the very same Creator that our people had always known through the principles and values He gave us.
The Cross: Ark of the Covenant – Manna
Episode 9 (COMING SOON!)
The Huu-ay-aht community was once governed by a system of Ha-wiih (hereditary chieftians). There was a council of 7 Ha-wiih, which were all the heads of their house or family line. The Tyee Ha-wilth was the Head Hereditary Chief and that role belonged to one particular house. The house I belong to carries that role of Tyee Ha-wilth. Ha-wiih was typcially passed down generationally from one son to another but in my community it can also be passed down from a grandmother to a grandson skipping a generation.
When a Ha-wilth is chose to care for the wellbeing of everything within their ha-hoolth-le including family members, care of the forest, plant life, animals, rivers, lakes and ocean. The interest of the family or community outweighed personal interest.
It was tough that Ha-wilth was never to have more than the poorest member of our family, that the Ha-wilth and their family were considered the servants of community. Being chosen for the role required intensive ha-huu-pa (important teachings) about the responsibilities of leadership for the well-being of the community.
Jesus came to this earth to fulfill the intended role of High Priest, which was very similar to the role of a Tyee Ha-wilth. He was chosen for this role, and in this role He was responsible for securing the well-being of the community He was serving. In this way, he was also reclaiming His ha-hoolth-le (traditional territory).
The Cross: Ark of the Covenant – Manna
Episode 10 (Coming SOON!)
Family brings a feeling of strength when parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles come together for a common purpose. It reminds us that we are not alone in this world, that we are part of something bigger, a community of people who are invested in each other. That togetherness is comforting for a family during times of loss, struggle, and pain.
In many first nation communities, there is a formal gathering for this purpose. It is called a potlatch. A potlatch is used for various ceremonies, such as the coming of age for girls and boys, celebrations of life, naming ceremonies, the passing down of a leadership role, weddings, anniversaries, and wealth distribution. Potlatch means “to give”.
There is value among community for generosity, and the more someone gives, the more honorable they were.
In 1885, the Canadian government banned potlatches. Despite the potlatch ban, there are indications that we continued to meet in so-called underground potlatches. People continued meeting despite a law threatening a 2–6-month jail sentence for anyone attending a potlatch because it was so critical that the the community was strengthened, provided for, and encouraged by these gatherings, especially during the mass threat of colonial expansion. The ban, which lasted for 66 years, was finally removed in 1951. The prohibition was part of a policy aimed at forcing Indigenous assimilation to colonial ways. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide categorizes the potlatch ban as cultural genocide.
Sadly, some Christian churches supported this racist and genocidal policy, believing that our people needed to be saved from our cultural traditions. Little did they know that their colonial worldview of imperialism, capitalism, and forced cultural assimilation were more drastically in contradiction to our Creator’s ways as described in the Bible than our relational worldview.
The counterfeit “christianity” that was influenced by colonial worldview originated with the Roman Government, and although protestants had begun to see elements of its deceptiveness, they were still very much entangled in its empire-building distortions. Our cultural traditions like the potlatch system were embedded in our principle of taking care of the whole community, ensuring that everyone had enough, so that there was no poverty and excessive wealth. This value is in perfect alignment with the principle of our Creator’s Kingdom of Love, as described in the Bible.