- 2 days ago
Still Standing (2015) - Season 11 Episode 1 -
Osoyoos Indian Band, B.C
Osoyoos Indian Band, B.C
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00:00very quickly just to clarify for people watching at home because this confused
00:05me a little bit Osuia's Indian band that can refer to the people but also to the
00:12place the land also I should say the word Indian I'm told that that's what
00:17people here prefer so that's what I'm going with I was told specifically by
00:24one of your elders who's very opinionated about an elder who will get
00:29to know in the episode you guys already know her Jane Stalkia these are Indians
00:39that's who we are so just in case there's anybody watching at home who might take
00:44exception to seeing me say the word Indian I'm more afraid of Jane than I am of them
00:50so when you grow up in a small town in Newfoundland you see the people have a
00:57sense of humor about hard times I turned that into a career and hit the road
01:02now I'm on a mission to find the funny in the places you least expected Canada's
01:09struggling small towns towns that are against the ropes but hanging in there
01:13still laughing in the face of adversity this is Osuia's Indian band
01:18we are in the desert I feel like a lot of Canadians don't know that there's full-on deserts here
01:35Canada's only desert although despite the fact that you guys can get less than 25 centimeters of
01:44precipitation a year it's not technically desert desert although that's typical of
01:51course a Canadian desert would be like that you're like who me a desert no I
01:55wouldn't call myself a desert oh no I'm a semi-arid shrubland me a few decades ago
02:12this place was in hard times now you look around there's a golf course a cultural
02:18center a resort a racetrack it's incredible but to understand the boom I needed to know
02:29the bust and I spoke to mother and son ranchers Jane and Aaron Stalkaya
02:34and they are still doing it the way the Osuia's Indian band have been doing it for generations
02:43on horseback all the Indians on this reserve were good ranchers the Indians and the horses
02:52go together and back in the day you didn't buy your horses you caught wild ones right here where
02:59we're sitting in those days this was all covered with horses they told me there was wild horses all
03:07up and down the valley I mean there's still aren't not as many and Aaron was telling me it was tricky
03:11for instance that mountain up there if you seen a herd up there you'd have to sneak around them
03:17once you're below the wild horse they can out climb you and also you can't lure them you can't bait
03:24them in any way you can't put some hay down because it's a wild horse a real wild horse doesn't even
03:30know what hay is I thought that was kind of that a wild horse wouldn't recognize hay in fact I'm going
03:35to put that into a song I wrote I wrote a song about wild horses lots of people have but I think mine
03:41mine mine's going to be a bit more authentic now and no I'm not going to sing it for you here
03:47now wild horses wild horses couldn't drag me away they can't even recognize hay
04:09the other thing Yosuya's Indian band is known for is a successful winery and vineyard in the late 60s
04:23Jane was a counselor and she told me the community was approached by a winemaker from Ontario to lease
04:30200 acres of banned land to grow grapes they wanted to lease that land for five dollars an acre
04:39we all said no so they left and then I said why don't we have a vineyard that's how it came about
04:48so in 1968 the community planted the first ever indigenous owned Indian owned vineyard in Canada
04:59but starting a vineyard in the desert wasn't easy and I was in charge of that it was really hard work
05:07the post has to be put in and it's all done by hand they had to clear trees and rocks they had no
05:16irrigation there's no water just think 200 acres everything was watered by buckets and yes yes oh
05:24gee my hand they had to water 200 acres of land with buckets that's incredible I think that's beyond
05:30incredible in fact the only other thing I can think of where a guy went into the desert and used water to
05:35make wine some people said it was a miracle but it worked Aaron said that getting the vineyard started
05:43is what brought a lot of people back to the community realistically they wanted to be home
05:48yeah but they couldn't afford to be home a lot of young men had to leave to find work across the
05:55border into Washington state across the line they called it the vineyard created more jobs so they
06:00started coming home and then the more that were coming home it needed more housing and then it just
06:04it started to snowball it started to boom and it all started out with the band deciding to build this
06:11vineyard in a way it's perfect like what could be better than a vineyard to give the people a good
06:17Riesling to get the band back together
06:19I wanted to know more about the winery I heard a bit of it through the grapevine but
06:40I got the finer notes from a state winemaker Justin Hall
06:45the name of this wine is interesting to me but you're gonna have to say it once you gotta say
06:55it once now come on give it to me once I'm gonna go with ink ink in commit in commit yeah perfect
07:01Justin works at ink and beep sellers growing a huge variety of grapes and selling almost a hundred and
07:09fifty thousand bottles of wine every year and in fact they think maybe more this year because more
07:16people are interested in buying Canadian and because my producer Barb is here
07:21the Okanagan Valley is such a huge diverse place I would say what makes Osuja's Indian Man land and
07:30ink and beep sellers special is that it's the only desert in Canada so we have extremely high heat days
07:35which make our reds super ripe and rich but it's ironic Justin told me when the reserve was created
07:42he said the government's idea was to give you this bit of dry dusty desert land because it was no good
07:49for farming thousand acres of desert baby yeah and I always use the oldest saying of all when
07:55life gives you lemons make lemonade so maybe you wouldn't want to grow a tomato in that type of earth
08:01but what can you do he said it is the perfect place to grow grapes they'd like it a little bit
08:07hot they like a little bit of stress they're fine in the desert he said grapes thrive with a little
08:13bit of stress and it almost reminds me of a a girl I used to date she loved the heat always a bit
08:19stressed and when she was pressed turned to wine there's a unique taste to the wines of this area
08:29some wine writers came through and they said there's a sage sweet character that comes through
08:34in the south Okanagan specifically he said it comes from the desert soil we call it sin eat team
08:41hula he said it means sweet smelling earth very specifically sage is kind of comes through in
08:48this sweet smell of greasewood but I was like I never heard of greasewood antelope brush is another name
08:53antelope brush yeah okay also I've never brushed an antelope either
08:57but I asked this and I said so then what are the challenges of growing grapes here
09:03definitely the black bears if they start to find your vineyard or holes in the fence
09:08they can absolutely obliterate a crop so you can lose thousands and thousands of dollars per week
09:14with a couple of bears he said an adult black bear in one week can eat a ton of grapes like a literal
09:22metric ton of like something like five thousand dollars worth of grapes and then he said also
09:27you know this is the desert we have scorpions oh my god and I freaked out this was the first time
09:32anybody mentioned scorpions to me I was oh my god I don't even want to know how many grapes a scorpion
09:37can eat
09:44we got 50 mils of wine we're gonna take 25 phosphoric acid this is gonna help release the sulfur in the wine
09:52he showed me a test for sulfur and another one that measured volatile acids and he said you gotta monitor
09:58the stuff if it gets out of hand at all it can ruin your wine if it sits for too long it becomes a mercaptan
10:04mercaptan mercaptans are particularly nasty uh cabbage burnt rubber you can end up with wine
10:10that smells like burnt rubber and cabbage and I know for a fact that people don't like that combination
10:19burnt rubber and cabbage because I was trying to impress a girl one time in my Camaro and I did a
10:25burnout but I was so nervous I farted
10:27you're looking for 0.5 to 0.8 molecular you know it gets a little nerdy again
10:33and I was starting to get confused and he was using very big words scientific terms and I was like
10:39starting to feel insecure I was like oh I'm dumb I don't know anything about wine but then he brought it
10:44right back down to a human level he said you can have wine when you're crying you can have wine when
10:49you're happy it's all about experiencing emotions and then all my worry and confusion went away and I
10:57realized you know I just had an estate winemaker tell me you can drink wine when you're crying and
11:04and that means I've been doing it right all along
11:07I met a local artist who studies the pictographs ancient rock paintings found in this area and she
11:30creates her own pieces that pay tribute to them which perhaps makes her the best tribute rock artist
11:37in Canada since my cover band Nickelbackman triumph overdrive Taylor Baptiste Sparrow
11:45a pictograph is a rock painting that's been left behind on the land made with ochre pigment paint
11:57she said these pictographs they were done so long ago it's hard to know or impossible to know really
12:04exactly what they mean it's open to interpretation and even if you visit the same pictograph several
12:10times each time you might take something different from it I love that this is right up my alley I did
12:15an art history class in university and we were looking at a symbol the ancient Greek Ouroboros and our
12:22professors that this represents the never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth and I said well
12:29what if the artist just thought it'd be funny to see a snake eating its own butt
12:35we had a lot of conversations to figure out how we can keep these spaces protected because they are so
12:44delicate and historical a couple of years ago one of our most accessible pictograph sites was vandalized
12:51Taylor told me about an incident in 2020 where a local pictograph was spray-painted it was defaced
12:59with racist graffiti it hit me like grief like it felt like losing a loved one and like losing that
13:05connection to our ancestors and she said it was like losing a loved one she said the band looked into the
13:12possibility of laser removing this graffiti we were very lucky to be able to get access to one of two lasers in
13:20the world they were able to microscopically laser off the spray paint without damaging the ochre pigment
13:26left behind no way and I found this very intriguing because I got a tattoo I had a dolphin on my ankle I
13:33had a dolphin on my ankle but then I didn't like it and so I got to cover it up with a dragon but now I
13:38don't like that and I spoke to one place they could laser off the whole thing but I kind of want to go back to
13:44the dolphin but the ancient pictographs were painted with red ochre and Taylor showed me how to make ochre
13:54paint this is ochre the way it's found naturally out on the land so in our language this is called
14:00tulamine tulamine you grind it into a fine powder and then you mix a binding agent and that could be
14:07bear grease or fish oil or berry juice or if you don't have any of that you can use spit to make
14:14the paint so you're gonna fill that with spit for real I'm not gonna fill this with spit you wouldn't
14:20fill the whole thing but you can use a little bit listen I'm an artist too I know what it's like to put
14:25your blood spitting tears into your work and so I spit into this cup and then she mixed some bottled
14:33water in with it and she poured it into the ochre and 50 minutes later sure enough turns out I had
14:39COVID yeah look at that texture and so it's very staining like this will wash off don't worry but
14:50you can see how it leaves behind its trace on the rocks for hundreds of years but another interesting
14:56thing about Taylor's work is that they're inspired by the pictographs but she does sculptures she showed
15:04me one piece she did it's of two eagles so you got an eagle and then like an upside down eagle and
15:09they've their talons are locked I started bending it in different ways to figure out how to illustrate
15:14the mating dance that eagles do so the sculpture will actually spiral yeah it's almost like another
15:21dimension it's like movement becomes part of yeah so it's like the two eagles are actually acting out
15:25the mating dance which I thought was brilliant and then I realized that she is a great ochre artist
15:32but I will only ever be a mediocre artist
15:55when I heard the kids around here say there was a fire party happening I thought they were just
16:02using some Gen Z slang so I tried to fit in and I asked them if the fire party was going to be totally
16:09slay turns out they were talking about fire Fridays so I went over to Senpakchin school and I met up with
16:20Leah Powder and Levi Bent
16:24Fire Friday is our chance to get outdoors but being outdoors it's an indigenous model because our ancestors were outdoors every day all day
16:33and the kids are so into it they're so excited I imagine for my generation it would be
16:39almost like do you remember when your teacher would wheel in the cart with the TV VCR on it
16:45yeah it's best right
16:47you guys know the sumac plant if you use those berries and grind them up it has a lemony flavor
16:54they want to teach the kids the traditional ways of living off the lane that were almost lost
17:00I'm first generation non-residential school so I didn't learn those skills
17:05right
17:05I'm learning it now we're learning it as we go
17:07through things like fire Friday it's slowly coming back
17:11you can walk over here and you can get squina no problem but they got these little pokies
17:16and a big part of fire Friday is trying traditional foods and while I was there
17:21we roasted some prickly pear cactus
17:24did you want to try and roast one yeah I'll give it a go
17:27now when I was told we were going to roast cactus
17:30I guess because I'm in the comedy world I misunderstood I thought we were like making fun of cactus
17:36and I wrote some mean jokes about cactus
17:39they're not even that good it's mostly like uh
17:43oh check out these pricks
17:46no cactus you're not fat you're just retaining water
17:51not even very good
17:55um myself I'm not a fan see all those strands like it's mucusy like just
18:03oyster like
18:05she said the texture is something like mucus and oysters
18:08I was like okay so snot
18:11way to go
18:17yeah I do like it
18:19yeah it's weird texture for sure but
18:22I think I need to have another one
18:24I thought it would be like snot but it's not
18:26it's not and maybe that's how you could market it
18:30like I can't believe it's not snot
18:31what a way I got to see some of the country that you have here
18:44I went on the horseback ride for Jane's 95th birthday
18:4895 years old and she's out there riding a horse
18:56my nan made it to 95 but she wasn't riding any horses
19:00although she could rip through a pack of camels
19:02there was dozens of us and we're all on painted horses
19:08and Aaron was leading the way every now and then we would stop and Jane would tell people about the old ways of the Okanagan people
19:16we're going right right by the pit houses they're way underground they lived underground
19:22and I'm thinking like way back in the day Jane
19:26she was the one who said the Osuia's band should build their own vineyard
19:31and now here she is 50 years later
19:34the community is thriving and she's given history lessons on horseback
19:40and I think it's just more proof that behind every great band is a great woman
19:44this is my last day but if my heart had any say
20:02it would sing a song about how wild horses couldn't drag me away
20:06about ancient earth and growing grapes about thriving in the heat
20:11maybe the drummers from Fire Fridays could come lay down a beat
20:16about Canada's only desert
20:18and how anyone who never knew this should come see the place meet the people
20:24I swear you'll fall a little bit in love with Osuia's
20:27thanks for coming out everybody you've been great thank you
20:30we'll definitely see you again take care guys thank you
20:35Johnny you're way more than mediocre
20:37that is a glare if looks could kill
20:41they say shake rattle and mole but why don't they say snake rattle and mole
20:46I said he's a funny person thank you I'm grateful for that
20:56you have to get rid of this horse
21:02you have to get rid of this horse
21:02and then walk and they might follow you
21:05well they all are
21:06I said that
21:21you
21:21you
21:22you
21:22you
21:24you
21:24you
21:25you
21:25you
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