Author: MacKaylapitzer

Well I started my day off with getting up and bringing uncle to work, as soon as the kids heard my voice I heard my little sister say “hey Kayla is home.”😄  I than just sat around and then went down to the beach today, explored home, tomorrow I might go over to Lummi Island and hike there’s a beautiful place there to hike to, I called that my happy place cause I feel great after I come down, it’s as great as being out on the waters.💜  my last pictures are pictures of the top of the hike. It felt so good being home by the water today, I really just wanted to go on an adventure today but it’s going to have to wait until tomorrow.💜 I’m glad to be home, my day went pretty good, also feels good to drink nice cold water😄😂 eat whatever I want whenever I want lol. It’s only 63 here right now it’s suppose to get to 59 degrees tonight so I’m sleeping with my window open😂 it’s suppose to rain here Sunday I’m excited about that 

Well it’s 11:20 pm and I’m just now going to get ready to jump on the plane, today actually wasn’t that bad I mean I waited here for 5 hours at Seatac airport and I just wandered around its actually not that bad here lots to do and wander to. I talked with everyone from home while I was here the whole time. Thought about my dad while I was here I’m just so excited to go home and see everyone, Marla (grandpas fiancé) told me my little sister is trying hard to stay awake to see me when I get home. I also can’t wait to be in my own bed, I actually got emotional sitting here at the airport just the tiniest things can trigger so many memories geez. I ate Chinese food and drank a Coca Cola and that was my dads favorite pop that’s all he ever drank so that brought back memories of just sitting with him drinking a Coke or kool aid😄 I’m just ready to go home I’m excited to finally go home, I’m sorry I left I just wasn’t feeling it this year, maybe I’ll be back to visit sometime though. I just want to thank Pitzer so much for giving me these amazing friends I’ve made along my journey it has definitely been fun and life changing meeting people from all over and hopefully I can keep in touch with all of them. Miss you guys already but I just had to be at home and grieve here by an environment I’m use to and comfortable around, surrounded by family.💜 once again I want to thank pitzer for EVERYTHING they have done for me it was an amazing experience.! Thanks so much.💜 I’m also glad I had the opportunity to meet Pamela and see Saginaw before I left. Really loved those two! They’re real inspirations!!💜🙏🏽

“Life has knocked me down a few times, it showed me things I never wanted to see. I experienced sadness and failures. But one thing for sure, I always get back up.”

An issue I’m passionate about and want to change is stuff on our reservation, it’s not only on our reservation but other reservations around the world, I can’t change it for every reservation but I can try and change it for ours back in Lummi. One that I really think about is how Lummi encourages kids to go do things and  face this big world. Yes I’m going back to this topic again but this one always gets to me because there are somethings they will take credit for they didn’t know about. I want to turn that around and try and make things just a little better for the future generations behind me. That’s all I can really say about today. If your really want to hear about my day I’ll tell you and sorry if you guys get annoyed with me I’m just an annoying person sorry. I honestly had a hard emotional day! Today has been exactly 1 month today since my dad passed away, so it was really emotional for me and this evening wasn’t such a good day. Really emotional and stressful so it’s been a hard day for me.

I just want to go be in a canoe with my cousins LeAnne, Amanda, and Treena and the rest of the gang, it’s something I really need right now! I need my Ultimate Warrior family right now. I need to be in the water and just paddle, sit out there and cry and just let things out so I can get back to myself, after I get off of the water and out of the canoe I feel like a great new person it takes so much away, you may feel a little sore after but I just feel like I need my canoe family right now I need all of them I need to be on the water. Canoe pulling is really eye opening for me honestly, its just something about being out on the water. It’s like you can feel our ancestors with us guiding and watching over us, whenever there is something wrong with me or I feel upset or something I think about the canoe, it’s like the canoe is my happy place and that’s where I need to be right now is my happy place. So yeah that was my day, maybe when I get home I can go out on the water and go out on the canoe with my Ultimate Warrior family.!

My response for Tory Mudd was that when I see things like genocide or boarding schools it makes me feel emotional like mixed emotions you can say. It’s something that has happened along time ago but we still struggle with that today because after our elders and ancestors got out of the boarding schools they would start drinking because of everything they went through there the alcohol kind of numbed that pain away and now we have so much drugs and alcohol on our reservation we can’t get it off. I can go on about this topic but I also really liked Pamela Peters poem! I really loved it, it’s like she’s just letting people know we’re still here as native Americans and that we not what people think we are. We’re strong indigenous Native American women and no matter what we know who we are and what we’ve been through, I really liked her she was kind of an inspiration because I write poems sometimes and I really really loved hers! It was absolutely amazing! With the Museum it was kind of alright I guess I didn’t see as much as last year I didn’t really know what to think cause I had other things going on at the moment but after I gathered myself back up and put myself back together I walked back into the room and looked at everything, I thought it was cool to see some things but also emotional I guess just because when I see things from long ago I think about genocide and just thinking some of those stuff were from babies and those babies might have not had a good life or maybe they didn’t live as long as others but it was also cool to see those things I guess because I don’t see all kinds of stuff like that at home, at home I see cedar baskets, canoes and just stuff like that our ancestors built but I thought it was kind of cool seeing so many different things and learning about other cultures knowing how other cultures work. I watched a few people make traditional baskets and it made me think of our cedar baskets at home and I found it really awesome to watch someone from other cultures make baskets. I really liked going to the science lab today too! I loved that part I love science so much! During lunch I jumped on my phone and texted people telling them I got to look at worms with jellyfish DNA in them and it made them glow in the dark they were called C. Elegans it was really cool that was the highlight of my day.!💜💜 

“The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs… One step at a time.” Joe Girard

My name is MacKayla S. George, I come from the Lummi Nation Tribe located in Bellingham, Washington. I guess I see myself as a leader type of person because my grandpa is trying to teach me to stick up for myself and what I believe in and to be in charge when he’s not home, he’s teaching me to be a leader to take his place when he’s gone and to be a leader for my siblings and community. I go to Lummi Nation School it’s a K-12 tribal school, I’m going to be a senior and I’ve been going to Lummi Nation School since Kindergarten and I’ve never left. I’ve done a work program with an elder at Northwest Indian College where she had us read a book on our Lummi people and I found my Great great great grandma, uncle, and auntie in there and learned a lot about them and learned my uncle was a medicine man, we did our family genealogy. Also during the summer I canoe pull, it’s a tradition we as Lummi people have had for a long time and not only us but other tribes as well, my cousins own a canoe so I get the opportunity to pull with my family and we travel all over and meet new people so it’s a great opportunity. Just in May I got an award called the  American Association Of University Women (AAUW) where they picked girls throughout Whatcom County for achievements they’ve completed in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), I had my award in Science. I hope to accomplish many things in my life, most of all I hope to graduate and go to college,  I want to do it for my grandma and dad, just last month my dad passed away from a car accident so I want to do this for him and my grandma. I’ll be the first in my family to graduate and go to college. I want to go back home and try and turn the place around and make it better for the kids behind me, people always talk about wanting to change the place but never do it. Lummi always talks about wanting the children to leave and go do things in life but they won’t help us to get to where we need to, I want to be able to go back and help children and teens get to where they need to go so they can succeed in life, I don’t want kids to struggle to get an education or be worried about they’re parents because they took the wrong path. That’s the things I did I constantly worried and prayed for my family so I want to change that for the future generations and get the drugs and alcohol off the reservation and help the children get the education they deserve. I’m not saying were going to baby them, we all face struggles people don’t know about. There are kids on my reservation going home to drugs and alcohol and verbal abuse and they need help and I want to be there to help them. They don’t deserve to be treated like. One thing I here on the reservation is that “the children shouldn’t be the parents to the parents” I was one of those kids cause one parent chose the wrong thing to do that left her homeless and she couldn’t see her children and the other parent took the wrong path and went so far into the drugs, he couldn’t escape it and it ended up costing him his life. I was constantly worried about them, I still worry about my mom but I hope for our sake and hers she straightens up and stays clean for us. I just want to make our reservation better for the ones coming up behind me, it will definitely be a challenge to try and change it and I might not be able to but I will try with everything I have to make that place better. I was raised by my grandparents, they are really well respected elders in our community, my grandma passed away a few years ago but she is still respected, my grandpa will stick up for what he believes in even if it means people won’t like him, that’s just the man he is. He’s trying to teach me to be like him but he’s to scary. But i’ll learn, it’ll just take time. 

so this afternoon my sister and I were getting ready to go for a run, we see these people at our store and their shirt says Hope. They come up to us and ask us to join them at the Stommish Grounds and go play or watch basketball, no w these people are from different tribes at different place, there’s Oklahoma, Mexico, New York, these natives came from all over! So we go there and they feed us we watch games and between these games some natives from the groups will talk about their story during the breaks of the game. There was this one girl who told her story I was nearly crying. Me growing up so happy with my grandparents and having the perfect life sometimes makes it hard for me to understand people’s struggle, this girl now to me her story sounded fake but it couldn’t be. She got up in front of everyone and told her story and didn’t cry that takes a lot of courage, something I could never do without crying, she told us all that her mom would drag her around her house by her hair, tell her she was nothing that she wished she was dead, many hurtful things by her mom and step dad, she got into bad things to where she was ready to end her life with a gun, she then turned to god asked the creator, her story was so inspiring! Knowing that she went through so much and when I go through these smallest things I think it’s the end of the world! This girl was going through such a huge struggle she was going to end her life, but she didn’t she turned to God she turned to the creator and he guided her from there! That’s amazing how that works enit. That really opened my eyes on how to see things and I’m glad I get to connect with all these guys for 3 days! Definitely excited for tomorrow and Monday!❤️❤️😁😐 

Today was a really great day, today we had a dinner for my uncle our little family was here not our huge big family because were not that close with all our families, so the job I got is paying me $10 and hour to do my family history I’ll be working with my school principal’s mom, but oh my gosh! my family history that’s going to take forever, I come from really big families. My day went pretty well the canoes landed here today for canoe journey, so Marla’s sister came because she is on canoe journey, so she came and today turned out really great for my uncles dinner, now were all just sitting here watching Netflix. I miss the village so much, Luhui and I talked for a few minutes and she was telling me she’s putting together a slideshow and she would send it to me so I’m excited to see what that’s going to look like! But I really want to FaceTime the ones who have Iphones so if you have an Iphone lets FaceTime. My sister and I are going to watch the canoes pull out and leave tomorrow from the Stommish Grounds so that will be good to go see everyone off as they make their journey to where there landing. It’s been really hot here lately so maybe even tomorrow we’ll go swimming, so I’m really tired today was a fun, long, exhausting day, so goodnight.. — MacKayla Sharon George

Today was an okay day. Today was my auntie’s funeral.. She passed away when I was There was in California.. Hate seeing my families go through this. I think the best thing I,be heard on having a hard day is ” you sound just like your grandma Sharon when you talk, your real grandma”, because my spiritual grandma told me that. Best thing I can hear on having a bad day.❤️💔 the rest of the day after went good, my uncle got a room at the Silver Reef Casino we all just got done swimming.. I just hope tomorrow is better then today.😔😒😴… So the in loving memory picture is my auntie Gina, then I have quotes, then the two pictures of my grandma.. R.I.P grandma Sharon V. Revey- Scott and auntie Regina Ann Charles❤️❤️ rest in paradise!❤️ the future is yet to come, they will hold good and bad memories, let’s hope the good ones come first❤️ 

Well I just got done eating dinner and I looked I was like “Time for blogging!” my auntie looked at me weird wondering what’s wrong with me :D. It feels so good to be home but I miss everyone already. Today I got to sleep in and it felt good, it felt like forever since I’ve got to sleep in, I’ve been thinking they tell us were the leaders of the future, my sister and I she is also 16 we are talking about wanting to start a We R Native group out here in Lummi, we don’t seem to do anything like that around here, their are kids who do just not around here. We wanted to start it and talk about drugs and alcohol, domestic violence, and learning more about our culture, because there are some kids out here who don’t know about or very much about our culture so there are 3 of us, me, my sister, and older cousin. So 3 of us are kind of going to start it post our videos and if kids are interested they can join. This is still just an idea and were hoping it’s going to work. 

1. The commitment I can make is showing our teacher, she let us do a presentation about Pitzer’s program we have and we got more people to go so we can do that and talk to 2 of the councilors who are into helping kids get to college and graduating. But it’s only for any college in Washington, so I’m going to be doing a year maybe two at home then transfer to a different college, there are so many options. But our teachers at Lummi Nation School are so encouraging and always wanting us to succeed, they will even buy raffles from us :D. But we can show everyone back at home, they have big meetings at our community building for many things, we can go there and talk about it. I really want kids to look into college especially back at home there are a lot of kids who drop out at an early age an I don’t want that to happen to any more of my friends/cousins.

2. I will share the information with kids at our school. Try to encourage them if they would do that, but there are so many kids active with our culture, theres canoe pulling, canoe journey, they keep active so I guess that’s a good thing, but it won’t hurt to try something different.