‘From here, my heart’

Wally Chartrand is a spry man with salt-and-pepper hair and kind eyes that glimmer from behind his glasses.

Holding his red drawstring medicine bag with white, yellow and black ribbon sewn onto it — the colours of the medicine wheel — and an intricately carved talking stick, he leads us into a small room on the third floor of the Swan Lake First Nation office in Headingley.

He begins to lay out seven smooth stones, which have been painted red, in a turtle formation.

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