My Grandmother's Hands Taught Me More Than School Ever Could

My great-grandmother Alliss Miller, and I, the one who taught me most of what I know about being a sqilx'w woman on the land and in the kitchen.

I learned to read before most kids because my dad believed in me with that quiet, steady kind of faith. He brought home Hooked on Phonics tapes he bought from an infomercial when I was five, sitting with me every night as I sounded out words that felt like small victories when I finally got them. That same man would never say no when I called him after school, "Dad, can you grab pomegranates on your way home? I'm trying something," even though we both knew he'd have to drive an extra 15 kilometres to find them. He'd walk through the door, hand me the bag, and later eat whatever creation I'd made with genuine happiness, never once suggesting my ambitions were too big or my experiments too odd.

My grandmothers taught me something deeper than recipes. They taught me that food is ceremony. Not in the performative way, but in what I call the "sacred ordinary," like how you never let a guest leave hungry, how you always cook a little extra for the relatives who might stop by, how the act of feeding becomes a language when words aren't enough. They showed me that storytelling happens between sips of coffee and the passing of mismatched plates, that the most important lessons aren't taught but lived through shared meals.

This is why I've always bristled at the well-meaning but hollow advice given to Indigenous kids to "Dream bigger!" As if dreaming exists in a vacuum. As if our Ancestors hadn't dreamed before us, only to have those dreams outlawed, buried, or twisted into something unrecognizable.

The same government commodities that replaced our traditional foods now try to replace our children's natural gifts with colonial expectations. I've seen it too many times, the child who can recite our oral stories perfectly gets labelled with "ADHD" because they won't sit still at a desk. The young artist creating beautiful designs gets told to focus on math instead. We must recognize these are forms of starvation, too, just as dangerous as empty bellies. When we sever children from their innate ways of knowing, we're taking more than their attention; we're taking their birthright.

I was lucky. My family saw me, really saw me, long before any institution did. When teachers pushed me toward paths that didn't fit, my grandmothers' kitchens reminded me that stirring a pot could be as holy as writing a thesis. When report cards suggested I wasn't "applying myself," my dad's willingness to chase down obscure ingredients reminded me, your curiosity is worth the detour.

But not every Indigenous child has that. Too many are told to aspire without being given the tools to get there, or worse, are steered away from the dreams that come most naturally because they don't align with colonial measures of success. We praise the doctor but overlook the fact that the best healers in our communities often carry medicine in their glove box, not stethoscopes.

Real dreaming, the kind that sustains rather than abandons, requires roots. It needs Elders who say, I see what's already in you, not just, 'What do you want to be?' It needs systems that don't force our Youth to amputate parts of themselves to "succeed." Most of all, it needs spaces where the act of feeding, whether bodies, minds, or spirits, is recognized as the sacred work it truly is.

That's what my grandmothers understood. That's what my dad instinctively knew when he drove those extra miles. And that's what gets lost when we reduce Indigenous dreaming to glossy motivational posters instead of the slow, necessary work of nurturing what's already there.

The smoke rising from our home fires carries memory. The stories we tell between bites are the real lifelines. And the dreams we plant in our children must be fed as carefully as any seedling, with the knowledge that what we're really tending is the future itself.