Capital Daily for Tuesday, September 22

Michael Thompson, whose name was Kwiibaalaah, was the only person left who spoke diitiidʔaaʔtx̣ — the Ditidaht dialect — fluently. He died on July 13 in Balaats'adt, Ditidaht's main village on Nitinaht Lake, about 60 km west of Lake Cowichan.

What that means, in plain terms: the roughly 10,000 people the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council serves across 14 nations no longer have anyone to phone when they need to check a word. Some of Thompson's teachings live on FirstVoices.com and at the community school, but the everyday speech — the accent, the body language, the way it actually sounded — is what's gone.

Todd Flaro, who works with the Kuu-uus Crisis Line West Coast We Care Team, spent a couple of years earning Thompson's trust before he would even talk on camera. He captured about three hours of footage, some of it fluent Ditidaht, and says he'll hand the recordings to the family once they hold a Drying of the Tears ceremony next year.

Thompson was a survivor of the Alberni Indian Residential School. His brother Charlie says he was slapped for speaking his language there, and never gave it up.

"Expression just felt like a luxury that I wasn't really entitled to at the time," Fabiola Arias told Capital Daily. When she arrived in Victoria from Mexico 23 years ago, theatre and musicals — a thread through her life since elementary school — went on the back burner behind work, rent, and fitting in.

She's spent years thinking about that trade-off. In January she applied for a small community grant through the Fernwood Neighbourhood House, and this spring she started building a plan. The result is VOICES — Voices of Inclusion, Community Expression, and Storytelling — which held its first session Saturday.

Over 13 weeks, participants try theatre, storytelling, improv, writing, singing, and clowning. No experience required. There's a live production at the end, but nobody has to perform for an audience if they'd rather not.

Arias is still looking for a few more participants and a couple of volunteer facilitators. The sessions run to Dec. 13, and she says the team wants newcomers to reach out even now that classes have begun.