DOROTHY SANVIDGE
Mowachaht

When I was a little girl I lived in Friendly Cove most of the time. When we were going to get the fish we lived in Sand Point. There's a reserve there. Or in a place called Hisnitt - that's where we went for our fish. It's on your left hand as you're going into Head Bay, on a reserve there. We actually have twenty-three reserves to our name - the Nootka Band. That's a lot of reserves they're not using.

In the summer Friendly Cove is nice but in the winter it's wicked. There were daisies there every springtime and summer. Oh, it was very nice when I was a little girl because those flowers used to come out every springtime and there was a man who kept everything blooming and clean. No, there were no berry bushes there. The berries were in the gardens each one had and weren't allowed to grow outside. That's the way it was. And the ball field was nothing but bushes and they cleared that off by hand. They did it all by hand - real big trees they felled. They uprooted the roots. And now it's nothing. And all those totem poles fell down. They just let them go. My sister Terry says she'll never move from there.

Children then were like any others only they didn't wear what we wear today. They wore cedar bark capes and things. It would be nice to show them. I know how to make those capes, but I haven't been doing it for some time now. I've been busy knitting and I've started this bead work. I need grasses to do my shopping baskets, too.

But it seems sometimes that they were happier than some children are now. They were running free, not held back from anything. And they learned quick. I learned how to do things when I was five years old. I could do the work my grandmother taught me. Today girls can't learn until they're teenagers. I'd like somebody to learn the basket work because I'm about the last one from our reserve - I'm the last one doing basket work.

I learned how to help with the fish, smoking fish. I learned early to fix fish, smoke meat, everything. I'd be about nine or ten when I started helping with the fish. That was young. These kids don't know how yet.

The children had a ball game they used to play, and games with arrows and spears. Even little girls played. Boys and girls all played together. The older people played indoor games. The played with bones - whale bones with markings on them, like dice - the white people call them dice. When I was about twelve I couldn't understand what they were playing. But they really enjoyed that game. There used to be all kinds of games. The men were in one place, the women were