Day 12

July 20, 2017

Today we were going to go take a shower in the morning. Aww it was a gym. I wish we could have could work out. Since there were only 4 showers and we were about 8 girls not including people who walked in to shower I decided to go into the Sauna while a bathroom was available. It felt so good to sweat a bit. I don’t know what it was about the showers but suddenly everyone was getting ready combing themselves, putting on a little makeup. We came back and we had missed breakfast so we had to make our own.

Now we were off to the Casino to meet Monet’s Grandfather and Uncle. First we met Quanah Matheson, the Director of Public Affairs. He expressed how important Mother Earth is and how we a lot of people are not taking care of it. We as humans need oxygen, water, and food but we are killing the plants, we are poisoning the water, and putting a lot of chemicals into our foods. Natives only eat one third of what they gather and the rest is put away for winter. They don’t waste anything. They have ceremonies to honor mother earth and animal’s life because they are what give us life. And once we destroy everything what is going to become of us? It is crazy how much technology we have now a day. I mean most of it is very helpful but before some of it was done without it. Indians would be able to tell when it was going to rain, when it was going to snow by watching nature and what animals eat. Dave Matheson, the CEO of Coeur d’Alene, spoke almost the same way. He encouraged everyone to learn as much as we can and not just go home and continue living our same daily lives but to educate others. It is our generations job to make a difference and try to save our environment. If we don’t do anything about it, we will be leaving it to our children and grandchildren to try to fix. And by then it might be too late for them to restore all the damage we have done to the environment.

Afterwards, we came back to the tent site and we were going to mammalogy 101, basically we were going to make our own traps. Brenda and I decided to grab different sticks and tie them together to make two ramps. We went up to the middle and hid our bucket as much as we could.

Then the CRAZIEST thing happened! Around 3:00 am we heard rocks falling and all of a sudden there was a deer running right through our tent. It went on top of Brenda. She screamed. I screamed. Robin screamed. I was making sure that Brenda was ok since the deer was on her side. Thankfully nothing happened to us. We could hear the deer running and a wolf or a cayote. After that it was almost impossible to go back to sleep.