The Waverley Pickers

Dear Callie Ann Thank you for the memories we have and we can't wait for the ones to come during our new adventure together. Your talent is astounding and your spirit is legendary. We wish you the happiest of birthdays Keep on walking that bass #birthdaygirl #birthdayqueen

You’ve got mail @littlejackfilms . . .... #canadapost #firmountain #wheresannette #levis #vintageclothing #vintagelevis #music #country #vintagejersey #countryliving #prairies #lomochrome #recordingartist #photography #spinsters #blondeinabralette #highrisejeans #inappropriate #witcheswithPOboxes #bitcheswithmail See more

Red rover, red rover, we call @littlejackfilms over! #handholdingstronglyencouraged

My Nights: Quiet Cry Lullabies. I wake up at dawn now, no matter what time I go to sleep, no matter how long I cried onto my pillow and feared for the hundreds... I know who are at risk meaning they’ve been abandoned by the people around them who should be filling them up with hope instead of chipping away at their identities and belief in themselves. I wake up at 5:30 now, no matter how many hours or steps I walked the night before or the night before or the night before... ready to move, ready for distance, ready to bring forth this change we’ve all been hopefully dreaming of. There have been nights on my walk to Pile Of Bones when I’ve shaken myself asleep, nervous about the journey I’ve embarked on and the confident goal of a long hunger strike beyond the four days I’ve done in the past: will it hurt? There have been nights I cried myself to sleep because of all of the photos I’ve seen from families across the North sending me the smiling faces of the beloveds they buried - they echo through my mind and those faces won’t leave because those smiles were so damn beautiful and so I can only imagine the profound grief of loving and knowing them only to lose them. There have been nights when I feel such rage because of the ineptitude of the politicians who had a responsibility to do something about this issue, beyond the Saskatchewan Party: even our own people, The Metis National Council and the Chiefs of Canada: FSIN and the AFN. What have they been doing this whole time we’ve been burying children in unprecedented numbers? Flying all over Canada like millionaires being docile tokens and getting nothing done. Of all the chiefs in Saskatchewan where I’m trying to do work to benefit all of our children, during this walk only one took the time to walk down the highway for an hour with me. Where were the rest? Vacationing in Banff? Flying to Vegas to gamble? Overseeing the construction on their luxury homes? I haven’t spent a summer at home with my family uninterrupted by travels and calls to go share my photography and music since I was 9 years old. I thought with COVID cancelling everything I would finally have a chance to spend an entire summer at our family cabin; instead of resting for a summer for the first time in 15 years, I’m walking 635km and doing a hunger strike well idiots inbox and post on my online writings you’re making this all about yourself! When it’s their children I’m trying to save. The depth of their ignorance makes me sick when they’re the protection of the children in our North, blind to pedophiles swooning them with gifts and taking their young ones on trips hiding hungry wolves behind the masks of angels. There are nights when I cry remembering the hundreds of faces I know across the north of beautiful and promising children and youth who are in the demographic ages 10-46 years old: the demographic in northern Saskatchewan where suicide is the leading cause of death. In a country rich like Canada, so called peace-keeping and welcoming this is unacceptable and the depth of our state indifference is criminally negligent and when combined with the pathetic states we live in should be considered a human rights violation. There are nights on my trip to Pile Of Bones when I’m horrified that the hunger and starvation I’ll feel during my strike on the Legislative Assembly Lawn in Regina is a familiar friend to too many children around the world, and too many of our own people here in Canada where we call unacceptable poverty and state abandonment home underneath a pile of broken treaties and the broken hearts of our youth and their mothers and families and friends who’ve buried them. There are nights I’m horrified by the racist western Canadian media who won’t give this story the respect it deserves or the attention it deserves, who waste my time making me stop my walking so they can ask all the wrong questions aimed to get a rise out of me and make me feel like I’m wasting my time. When if it was their children meaning white and from the cities in the south dying in our numbers with a similar population to death rates ratio, Canada would stop dead in its colonial train tracks and the world would listen and the solutions would be bipartisan. But KIYAM. My music holds my grieving heart in the palm of its hands. My poetry is the sweet release of generations of too much being bottled in. The women and friends who love me and join me on this journey down to our blood stained political capital keep me walking, focused, grounded and hopeful because I walk in the strong embrace of their profound resilience. My walk is a call to action to the racist politicians who vote down suicide prevention legislation, to the young people reaching for the bottle instead of a hurting child’s hand, to the parents who abandoned, to the politicians who are just consultation selling bureaucratic bullshit fake leaders: Let’s take a break from waiting patiently in prayer for saints and angels to save us: we are all our children have got. Hasn’t this been made clear already? So move, enough talk, together let’s walk. Actions save and empty words are just annoyingly deafening. We have the future and present that thousands of children who went to residential schools and never came home could only dream of; We have the future and present that a long long list of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls could only dream of; We have a future and present that all of our people who’ve given up and reached for the bottle, the drugs, the guns, the violence, and died because of it could only dream of; We have a future that all of our babies who’ve taken their own lives and made their families bury them before their time because the weight of all our grief was just too much, could only dream of. What will we do with this chance in the sun we’ve been giving to depression and long days in bed with the feeling that it’s time to give up... this chance that was only dream and distant hope for far too many? We hold the power to do something in the palm of our hands. Will we spend it drunk, indifferent, hopeless while our self serving indigenous governments of funding cannibalizing bureaucracy talk talk talk and sell our land to the highest bidder? What will we do about our neglected drug, gang, violence infested communities full of our sad children who are giving up and leaving us? Will we stand together and say no more, with a burning anger at all that hasn’t been done for this long? I’m walking to Regina to find out if we really have all just given up; feel a shock of terror if I go there to sit alone.

Happy belated birthday to the Picker’s rockin’ drummer genius. Thank you for providing such a solid structure to our spontaneous group. Lace up those boots, Brendawg! You’re in a for a wild year!! @ Rural Municipality of Waverley No. 44

Throwback to some beautiful winter days, playing in the snow