On the morning of June 8, 2023 the U of A community celebrated the academic achievements of its 2023 spring graduates from the Alberta School of Business.
During the ceremony, Bert Crowfoot, Siksika/Saulteaux photographer, award-winning coach, founder and CEO of the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society (AMMSA) and the general manager of Windspeaker Media, received an honorary doctor of laws degree. His full speech is below.
Oki, Tansi, Umbawaste, Annini, Edlanate!
These are greetings in the languages of the Indigenous Peoples of Alberta.
First of all, I want to thank my family, Lydia, Sandra, Brad, Cheyanna, my beautiful granddaughter Annashay, my late parents, my extended family and all the people who have worked with me in the past, especially Carol Russ, who has been our financial person since day one.
If not for all of you, none of this would be possible.
This honorary degree is dedicated to my late, eldest sister Amelia and my family. She believed in education and how it would be the answer to our people’s needs. She often said, “Education is the New Buffalo or Inni!”
Education was important to our family. My parents believed that so much, that they sent us away to live with non-Indigenous families for the school year. I was twelve-years-old.
We weren’t allowed to go home or see our family for 10 months. They wanted to break the cycle of what happened on the reserve and at residential schools.
It must have worked because there are 22 university degrees amongst my nine siblings and I’m so proud of them.
My sister, Deanna, told me a story about how my late mother told [my sister] Amelia that our family was like a dog team. She told her to be the lead dog and the others would follow.
Amelia was such a powerful motivator, she had me enrolled at BYU in Provo, Utah, and secured funding and housing for me. She picked me up at the bus depot in January of 1972 and drove me to the student residence I was staying at.
She was so motivating. I went to BYU and still hadn’t graduated from high school. I was three credits short of graduating. But that was my sister.
My first year at BYU, I was in pre-med, I wanted to be a doctor. Dr. Bert.
But life had other plans for me. I switched to physical education/recreation for year two. I wanted to teach and coach high school students.
In 1977, I was one semester short of graduating, before I decided to take a year off to pay off some bills.
I was working as a silversmith, when I was offered a job as a sports writer/photographer for an Indigenous newspaper, The Native People. That’s how I got into media.
I worked my way up to publisher and started a couple of other publications in my basement. The Nation’s Ensign and in 1981 Powwow Trail magazine.
In 1983, we started the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta. We started publishing the Windspeaker newspaper and in 1985 we developed a radio side to the society.
Like most societies, we started off with government funding, but I learned that funding wasn’t always guaranteed, and it could end at any time.
I learned that you had to diversify your revenue streams in order to become financially stable. If you lost one, you could survive on the others.
I’m most proud of the fact that we are an independent Indigenous media which is unbiased, objective and adheres to the ethics of journalistic principles.
Another life changing event happened in the mid 1980’s.
I was coaching softball and women’s basketball at a high level and noticed that all the good teams were equal in physical and technical talent, but the biggest difference was mental talent.
I started studying as many sport psychologists as I could and what they believed in.
My brother, Strater, gifted me a copy of cassette tapes called Psychology of Winning by Dr. Denis Waitley.
I would put one cassette in my vehicle’s radio and listen to that lesson for a week. The next week I would flip it over and listen to the other side. Twelve weeks later, what I had been listening to, changed my life.
There were 10 traits of a winner. One of these traits was, "Look for the positive in a negative experience."
When something negative happens, find the lesson or the positive in it. In 1990, the federal government cut all funding to 11 native newspapers across Canada.
Nine out of 11 newspapers shut their doors. What was the positive to this? There was a void in Indigenous print media across Canada and Windspeaker went national.
One of the other traits was to surround yourself with positive people. Teach or coach them what their role in the success of the organization is and then get out of their way.
Goals are another important part of being a winner.
In 1987 we set a couple goals of having a one million watt radio transmitter and another was to have one million dollars in radio bingo sales.
Later this year, we will have nine, one million watt transmitters for the networks of our three Indigenous radio stations. They cover most of Alberta.
My goal now is to have one million watts of Indigenous powerWe are at 960,000 watts from approximately 28 transmitters.
Two years ago, we had 6.7 million dollars in annual radio bingo sales.
We still receive about $300,000 in funding from the federal government, but our annual budget is just over $10,000,000.
Another thing I’m most proud of is our language programming on our radio networks. We broadcast in five different languages and three Dene dialects.
In this era of reconciliation, language is a powerful tool. We share our language, culture and stories with all people of Alberta. We are inclusive.
I once heard of a gentleman who everyone said was racist. He owned a small convenience store in the country and I stopped by to see for myself.
I went into the store and he sat quietly, watching me and didn’t say a word. I went up to the till, he checked my items, put them in a bag and still not a word.
I could see why people called him a racist, watching my every move and not saying a thing.
I took my items and said to him, gamsahamnida, or thank you in the Korean language. His head shot up and he looked at me and said, “You’re not Korean!” I said “No, but I was there in 1975.”
We talked for 30 minutes about Korea and the places I visited. We parted as friends. That is the power of two words, “Thank you” in his language.
Our programming shares our language with non-Indigenous and non-speaking Indigenous people. How to say hello, thank you, etc. That is the power of language to build bridges for reconciliation!
I’ve coached women’s softball and basketball for over 30 years and have been very successful. I co-coached Team Alberta Women’s Softball at the 1983 Canada Summer Games in Kamloops, British Columbia. I’ve been to Nationals a few times.
I used that same philosophy of mental toughness with my athletes. We used to run pitching camps in the winter and had as many as 120 young athletes at these camps. I coached my competitor’s athletes so that it would make my teams stronger.
I always wanted to have the best mentors and brought in guest coaches like Ralph Weekly, who coached at the NCAA Division One level. Ralph went on to be the hitting coach of the USA Women’s Softball Team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
I received a letter from a young lady I coached, telling me that she was taking management courses to advance her career. She added that she had heard all of these management concepts before, when she was 12 years old, playing for me.
Another young lady I coached, Cara Curry Hall, was recently inducted into the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame as a Multi Sports Builder for 2023. She mentioned the influence of my coaching in her acceptance speech.
One of the many other hats I wear is that I am a professional photographer. I am a digital storyteller with an intuitive eye that I developed over the past 46 years.
My cultural roots give me the inspiration to record and to preserve many spiritual practices with different nations throughout North America.
My images are taken with a highly respectful and sacred awareness of the protocols, sanctity and supernatural forces that are present in Indigenous spiritual rituals, nature and life.
As part of this awareness, I believe these spiritual images are gifts to be shared with present and future generations, to bear witness of the power of the Indigenous ways of life.
In closing, I first went to school, to become a doctor. Then life got in the way. Now I guess I want to go back and get my high school diploma and maybe that last semester of university.
I am very proud to be the fifth Doctor Crowfoot in my family, brother Dr. Deb, sister Dr. Becky, nephews Dr. Redmond and Dr. Nathan – all dentists.
I guess I’ll just be Dr. Bert!
