Web Lesson 7 Sample

1700‚s- Death is upon us, and my spirit is lost. My only daughter was taken by the disease the white man call small pox. After a night of torment, she grew weaker and weaker. I held her until she didn‚t stir anymore, taken by the Great Spirit. I know how my people have gotten this curse for I know of no other possible reason. The White men are the ones who have done this, bringing with them their diseases. My heart weeps and mourns, for I do not know what to do. In my village, my friends and family, my people, are dying. I know that I must carry on, for the salmon are starting to come, and soon they will be pulsing through the rivers, like the blood of mother earth. After the death of my daughter, I step out into the sun the smell of cedar wafts around me, and I can hear the powerful hum of the falls, where we must start hunting our brother salmon. The strength of mother earth brings me strength, and I feel the strong fresh air in my chest. The heavy sadness of death lifts slightly and I walk on to the falls, where we will have the ceremony respecting the salmon people. The bones will be tossed in of the first fish caught, to pay our respect to them. We want them to know our gratefulness to them so that they may come back to sacrifice themselves to us next season. The harvest was good, the rivers so packed with salmon, that you could not see the water, but only salmon, creating a carpet of fins and red backs. Those of us, who are still healthy and well, bring back many fish, to maybe help our ailing, but I feel that there is nothing that we can do.   1800‚s- The white man break promises. They had us sign a treaty to guarantee us our rivers with our precious salmon. Then when the salmon come, and we go to our fishing grounds, we find the white man there, taking more salmon than him and his family can eat in a whole year. The white men are greedy. They go to great lengths to get a silly useless yellow medal out of the ground, what they call gold. Now that more of them are encroaching on our fishing grounds, the salmon people do not want to return to the disrespectful white man, and I am struggling to feed my family. They cut down our one-legged brothers: the cedars and the firs to build their permanent houses. They farm the land, like it belongs to them when really it is we that belong to the land. Why can‚t the white man see it this way? My people are growing more and more fragile and weak. With the salmon people not returning, and the white man's sickness still killing us, we are half of what we used to be.   Today- We are barely a people anymore. The fishing ground that once belonged to our ancestors now has no more salmon. We have had to resort to other places to fish, and the white man still over fishes, greedy and wasting his catch. The roads that they build along the rivers for logging cloud the streams with the sediment that they release. They make the salmon wither and die with the toxic chemicals they release from the big fancy factories. What angers me the most is the impassable cement dams that they put to harvest the very water of the rivers. They are a sore to mother earth, protruding from the landscape unnatural and out of place. The salmon try their hardest to get by, only to get caught in the deadly turbines. This pains me, and makes my heart weep, for I know that without the salmon my people will suffer. Sometimes I think of maybe how it was for my ancestors, when times were still good, and the white man still not here to disturb our precious mother earth. Now that the Salmon are almost extinct, and the white man is trying to make up for all that he has done, nothing will ever make it the same, the destruction will never be completely healed.

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