Carrying Cultural Responsibility Forward

What Is Lived Cultural Experience?

From one extent to another, in big or small ways-- as Indigenous people we are all in the process of reclaiming what was taken from us. From language, land, ceremony, identity, and connection. For my family, it has been lived through responsibility — through participation, restoration, and the ongoing work of carrying teachings forward that colonial systems attempted to sever.

This is our lived experience.

Disruption and Reclamation

Like many families of her generation, my grandmother Evelyn’s life was shaped by colonial religious pressures. Her mother, our Matriarch Edna Crosby-Roberts (née Jones), lived through Residential School from age 6 until she returned home in her late teens, an experience that forcibly disconnected her from cultural practice and ceremony.

Before this, our clan faced near extinction. Population loss decimated our people and cultural continuity. Our Nanaay Edna’s mother Elizabeth and grandmother Jeannie shown below (our direct matrilineal line) returned home to Haida Gwaii from Tacoma in the late 1800s as the last lineage holders of our clan.

Despite generations separated from cultural life, we eventually found our way back.

My mother, Edna Elizabeth Brillon — named after her grandmothers, the previous matriarchs — along with my uncles Kenny and Leonard and my brother Jesse, grew up on the waters of Haida Gwaii as commercial fishermen for much of their lives. Fishing sustained our relationship to territory, seasonal cycles, and place-based identity. Jesse continues this work today and sits on the CHN Marine Stewardship Council.

Cultural Participation in Practice

Through relationships with Haida knowledge holders, artists, and cultural leaders, our immediate family reclaimed cultural grounding. During the cultural resurgence in Vancouver throughout the 1980s and 1990s, we were involved as it was unfolding.

We attended our first Haida feast with our Nanaay Evelyn in Vancouver in 1986, when I was eleven. In 2001, at one of the many feasts generously hosted by Robert Davidson, our Nanaay, the Matriarch, formally recognized the Haida names of grandchildren she held relationships with. To our knowledge, this was the first time anyone in our clan had their Haida names acknowledged at a feast.

Our mother worked professionally as an art broker, a profession that grew from her close relationships with a ton of Northwest Coast artists. From the age of fourteen, I worked alongside her, which made up much of my early work experience. Together we operated a gift shop in Skidegate the same year I graduated high school 1992 and later went on to open Kinsalang Fine Art in Vancouver in 1995, supporting Native artists and contributing to the cultural economy. From there I worked at Canoe Pass Gallery in Steveston.

Throughout our lives, we remained present in cultural spaces — attending feasts, pole raisings, ceremonies, gallery openings, and gatherings that sustained community connection.

Healing Work and Community Leadership

Since the 1990s, our mother Edna coordinated and also facilitated Residential School healing workshops for survivors, families, and communities across British Columbia, including nearly a decade of work in Skidegate. This work centered on addressing the deep intergenerational wounds created by colonial systems and the lasting impacts carried within families.

My mother Edna proved to be a real forerunner in the area of healing from the impacts of colonial harms and the resulting intergenerational trauma. This work contributed to the formation of the Nislinaay Healing Group in Skidegate through the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

Both of our grandparents, Evelyn and Wylie, participated alongside family and community members at different times. Being able to do multi-generational healing work together was profoundly bonding for our family-- work that was way ahead of its time. For Jesse and me, we developed a unique bond with our grandparents shaped through shared healing and quality time spent together. As the eldest grandchildren, it influenced how we related to them, how we carry their teachings, and how we step into our roles today, leading by their example. 

Jesse worked as a cultural worker at a Halfway House in Gitxsan Territory for incarcerated Indigenous youth. There he shared his spiritual teachings, led sweat lodges and gave guidance to offer the youth grounded teachings before they were sent back to their home communities.

For over a decade, I developed and facilitated cultural empowerment programs for Indigenous youth and families through the Wachiay Friendship Centre. I also led cultural groups focused on strengthening identity, belonging, and pride for urban Indigenous families who were often disconnected from their home communities.

Erin's Cultural Group 'Little Feathers' with Cultural Group from Alert Bay 2007

Restoring Responsibility

In 2022, I hosted our clan’s first feast in over 150 years, restoring ceremonial responsibility to our Clan: Laana Ts'aadas.

Leonard & Edna the Eldest of the Laana Ts'aadas Clan (2022)

In 2024, my husband and I hosted a potlatch in K’ómoks to uphold clan responsibilities by restoring elements of traditional marriage ceremony that had not been practiced in living memory by Haida or Kwakwaka'wakw families. We intentionally chose not to incorporate Western or Christian traditions. Instead, Andy undertook extensive study of both Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw marriage protocols to ensure cultural integrity in both lineages.

Carrying Responsibility Through Storytelling and Public Education

Another way I carry this responsibility is through Next Ancestors podcast. This work is about preserving cultural knowledge from Indigenous elders and cultural leaders who speak directly about culture, responsibility, history, and the work of carrying teachings forward.

William Wasden Jr. Guest on Next Ancestors with Erin Hosting

The podcast exists to support cultural continuity through conversation, education, and intergenerational dialogue. It allows teachings that were once limited to small circles to reach wider audiences.

For me, this is part of the same responsibility I carry in ceremony, business, and community work. Culture is not only practiced privately. It is also important to carry it forward by sharing cultural knowledge for those who may not have easy access to cultural knowledge keepers.

I carry this work because I believe culture survives through action, not intention.

Cultural Responsibility Through Business and Community Infrastructure

For me, this responsibility has strengthened through building Totem Design House, a social enterprise rooted in cultural integrity, ethical production, and economic sovereignty. The work has always extended beyond product. It has been about showcasing our illustrious art form, combating the commodification of our culture by non-Indigenous people, disseminating cultural education through design, and proving that businesses can operate with Indigenous values as a foundation.

Through Copper Legacy Indigenous Empowerment Society, I have worked to directly support grassroots cultural leaders, artists, and community initiatives that often fall outside conventional funding systems. This has included redistributing resources to those doing on-the-ground cultural revitalization work, ceremony, language, and youth programming.

Cultural Exchange and Global Sharing

Over the years, we have also carried this responsibility into international spaces through cultural exchange and relationship-building with other Indigenous nations and communities around the world.

This has included traveling to Japan as part of a Haida delegation to engage in cultural exchange with the Ainu people, hosting and visiting our Māori family in Aotearoa (New Zealand), building relationships with Hawaiian cultural leaders through gatherings such as the Rise Indigenous Climate Gatherings, and sharing our culture and art in international spaces including Germany as well as APTN show Pulse- featuring Indigenous dancers.

Cultural Exchange with Ainu in Hokkaido Japan 2023

These experiences are rooted in mutual learning, and the ability to inspire one another to continue the work of investing in our culture for the next generations.

Alongside this, we have had countless opportunities to study our ancestral cultural objects held in museums and collections around the world. These experiences have been deeply important for reconnecting with design knowledge, formline principles, carving and weaving techniques, and ceremonial objects that were removed from our communities during earlier periods of colonial collecting. Being able to stand in front of our ancestors’ work and learn directly from those pieces has been a powerful part of cultural continuity.

Erin & Marlo Studying their Ancestor George Young's Carving (Frog Flute) @ NMAI in New York City

For me, this work reflects another layer -that culture is not only carried within community, but through the relationships we build across nations and the care we take in learning from what was nearly lost--and all of this influences the way we show up in the world.

Continuity Through the Next Generation

Jesse and my daughter Marlo are respected Haida artists known for their cultural integrity and mastery of formline. Their work continues our visual language, stories, and memory today.

The two are about to embark on their very first totem pole- as we are driven by our commitment to honoring our Nanaay, the Matriarch of our Laana Ts'aadas Clan, and the legacy of love and kindness that she embodied. 

Marlo with Masks she has carved for our ceremonies

In my mind, the most challenging task of all is being undertaken by Marlo who has dedicated years to learning Haida language. She is currently working full time in Xad Kil language immersion in Masset.

Living Within the Potlatch System

By marrying into Andy’s family, I entered a lineage that never stopped potlatching. Living within the potlatch system carries responsibility. It means showing up for others, not only when it is convenient, but because reciprocity is how community is sustained.

Andy and I attend 5-10 feasts and potlatches each year-- minimum. This requires significant time, travel, and financial commitment. It means rearranging schedules, traveling long distances, and prioritizing community obligations alongside family and work responsibilities.

This is a level of cultural participation that is rarely visible from the outside. It is not occasional ceremony. It is ongoing presence. It is relationship maintained through showing up.

Now that Andy has established his potlatch seat, this responsibility cannot be shirked. As his Granny Audie used to say, you must "keep the glass full". When you stop feasting and potlatching, when you stop showing up for others, the glass becomes empty. Carrying a potlatch seat means a lifelong commitment to continue hosting, attending, and upholding these responsibilities so that the glass remains full.

Responsibility Is Lived

Anyone who knows us recognizes and appreciates the time and effort that has gone into the work we have done and continue to do. Yet others who do not know us- or see all that we do- call us performative or self-interested, to that... all we can do is laugh.

For us, cultural responsibility has always been carried through action, presence, and long-term commitment. It has been shaped across generations and rooted in relationships, ceremony, healing, language, and community.

This work has never been about recognition. It is about doing our absolute best to ensure that what was nearly lost is carried forward with care so that future generations inherit stronger cultural grounding and deeper belonging.

This is what lived cultural experience looks like...Andy, Erin,  her children from oldest to youngest: Marlo, Kaiah, & Kobe         Regalia made by Erin, Andy, Marlo & Jesse

Photos in this series by John Kelcey