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Confederacy meets with Suzuki (Continued from page 5) one else.'" He said he was astounded. "What he told me in that simple sentence was that to be Haida means to be connected to the land, to the trees, fish, and animals." He said, "I have learned that indigenous people look at the world in a different way and it opened up a whole new window for me. A window that was connected to the land." He said "people don't understand you may have undeveloped land worth $90 million but the people understand there are things more important than the money." He said environmentalists began fighting against logging, against the building of a dam and when "we stopped the dam we stopped fighting only to learn now B.C. is looking at building the dam again so we didn't stop it. We didn't change anything. We have to make Canadians understand what you do to the environment you do to yourself." He said the dominant society is made of immigrants "who came here to the land of opportunity." Immigrants, he said, with no connection to the land they were coming to live on. "My grandparents were immigrants, my parents were rootless here but your history goes back thousands of years. You are profoundly connected to the land. But immigrants, all they saw was an opportunity, no connection to the land just dig up the minerals and sell them. Cut the trees and sell them. It was the ethos of my parents to work hard and get ahead but the underlying way of seeing the world that we have in the dominant society is that everything is an opportunity but there is no roots. How we see the world is a deterrence. He said while some see the river as sacred, others see the river as an opportunity to generate power. "Some see the soil as a community of organisms others as dirt." He said there has been an unbelievable shift in the way we live. In the 1900s we were in rural village communities. Now we are in big cities where the most important thing in the city is to have a job to earn the money to buy the things we want. Our economy has become the dominate priority." He said enriching the economy has come at the expense of the earth. He said Canadians need to demand the right to a healthy environment. He asked Confederacy for their support. "I thank you for hanging on to your traditions and your way of looking at the world." Confederacy Council was not in session Saturday due to a death in a family. The request will be taken to the next council session.