There is a very longterm tradition of giving back in North America. Some of the Indigenous teachings include the values relating to “self and others.”

---

That is, you have a responsibility to your community and to do so, you need to be strong, thus keeping yourself balanced in spirit, intellect, emotion, and physically to serve yourself and others.

There are also teachings regarding decision-making and one’s actions that take into account “Seven Generations.” I sometimes understand that concept as having known my mother, grand.mother, and great-grandmother; if I am lucky, I will be able to know my daughters’ grandchildren. My mother was able to witness 7 generations in her 100-year life.

Another way to interpret the concept of 7 generations is to ensure one’s actions will not tarnish the future for at least the next 150 years—7 generations.

Who I Am?

I believe we are unique compilations of all we have experienced in life—transforming almost daily with the information we consume, the environ.ment we inhabit, the heavens and hells we’ve witnessed, and the technology that shapes us. All that data builds on what we have studied, sights we have seen, and other people we have known, in one way or another.

I don’t know exactly when I first became aware of the thousands of others who came before me, literally passing on the DNA I have enjoyed for many decades. I am just appreciative of their survival ability and how they educated themselves in their own times, how they provided for themselves and their families, and for many like me who followed.

In countless ways, I think of them as having given back to me in their past lives, even their concepts of their pasts, their transformation, and their continuation to this moment.

I have read many books, been changed by films and other art, moved by music stretching back centuries, stories drifting back even further, millennia? Those influencers might not be direct kin, but, in many ways, I consider them my ancestors.

I tell myself and my daughters that in adversity, and even in more gentle times, to stand strong “knowing that your ancestors stand with you.” That, I believe, is another Indigenous teaching worth practising. It is one I have carried in absolute splendor, in glorious land.scapes I’ve longed to share, as well as in conflict environments, knowing that what I was witnessing had been witnessed many times before.

Nobel ideas are worth giving back, invisibly carried like unfurled banners waving brightly, signalling the best of our values and ideals, then passed forward. There are many of those banners that I consider and pass on. Some represent democracy, others the rule of law, justice, freedom, and responsibility. Even fair play has a banner worth passing on.

Being an immigrant a few times, I have always liked Thomas Paine’s idea of “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” That to me is banner worthy. There are many more—a banner each for free enter.prise, another for charity. Many values are well noted in the world’s great books, from my parents' teachings. Yet, I carry no banners for greed, inhumanity, torture, and other sins.

Giving Back

How do I pass those banners forward to willing others, mostly youth, to carry forth? Knowing that history repeats, I am confident the values and ideals I share in different ways will ensure they will evolve and wave in the future. The goal is that they are not suppressed by darker times or distracted neglect.

As time goes by, I still teach, and have done so for more than 30 years, about the “battle space of ideas,” about “understanding vested interest and consequence,” the importance of research, analysis, critical thinking, and discernment.

Intentional communication has been a dominant subject in me, along with a few other things, like history and psychology, all relevant to “effecting change by murdering assumptions, so there’s room for growth.”

I also carve wooden art that ripples out and perhaps heals as art is wont to do. The sale of those objects funds my “donor advised” philanthropy administered through the Victoria Foundation—in a small fund I created 15 years ago to serve Elders and Youth Tribal Governance, mostly for student bursaries, cultural support, carving, and grants supporting small family events.

I encourage reading widely, and writing of all kinds, in myself and others. I tell students that words are like pebbles tossed in water that ripples to distant shores, sometimes with unfore.seen but mostly positive results. I also tell them that Blaise Pascal said that “to write without love is only paperwork.”

I consider myself someone who has carried numerous banners forward in my own history supported by my real and literary ancestors who carried them long before me.

Andrei Sakharov

As a messenger today, consciously passing the banners forward, I quietly hope that somewhere in the far, distant future someone in a different age recognizes, as I do now, that it is their duty to pass those and other banners forward, ones they are passionate about, that they carry and forward, in their own way.

I recently came across quotes by Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet physicist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for championing human rights around the world. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society” and “the only guarantee against an infection by mass myths, that in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and dema.gogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.”

In my writing this, and in your reading it now, we honour the banner he gave back, forward.

• Posted June 18, 2025