“That everywhere I go there is people everywhere that I have a connection to solely because I’m part of the United Houma Nation.” RJ came speak to the class and I found out that we’re related and then we started talking after and we were talking about some things in our past and we didn’t even know, and then like I went meet with Greyhawk today and we were talking about stuff that like we just automatically connected about things we shared in our culture.

“Without even knowing each other prior to meeting, we just automatically got along, and like he was like just give me your number and if you ever are interested in talking about anything just give me a call or a text and we can talk about it. I’m a very open book. I feel like our community is very open, and I feel like we support each other really well. If you’re every going through something you have so many people to back you in whatever you’re going through.”

“I really loved growing up. I’m still growing up in South Louisiana. I learned something new about my culture and this area every day. I feel like one of the biggest things is when I was a kid, I didn’t realize how important living here was, specifically with my connection to the land, because whenever I was a kid I didn’t realize how different I was than other kids based on how my family treated the land and how important we held it. My great grandmother, she taught us so much about plants and how you can use them for different things like food and you can use them for medicines and how each plant has a bunch of different uses. Like when I was a kid, and I’d get sick, she would just pray over us and we’d use some sort of plant. She would make it, we just trusted her. It was just one of those things, and that’s how she treated us. We never went to a doctor or anything, and all of my friends always went to doctors and stuff, so like when they’d get sick I’d say why don’t y’all just use this, and they were like what are you talking about how does that even work. I didn’t realize until I get older that was a UHN thing. That was a Native American way. That was our culture, and that was how we treated ourselves through what was provided to us through the land because we weren’t provided with access to medical care before recently. So, we had to make our own medicine and stuff and that’s just what we’ve always been accustomed to. Using the land for crops, for medicine, for anything really. Growing up down here, we were able to utilize a lot of things that grow down here and that was really important.”