On June 5, B.C. writer, researcher, and consultant Sae Hoon (Stan) Chung received the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Award for Voluntarism in the Performing Arts from then Governor General Mary Simon. Chung then delivered the following speech at Rideau Hall in which he reminded audience members of the struggles facing Ktunaxa people in the territory that he calls home.
Your excellency, honoured guests, ladies, and gentlemen, I am the son of Sook Ja and Ji Wong Chung. I was born in Seoul, Korea, and because of people like Mary Simon, today I feel 100 percent Canadian. As a newcomer to this nation, many of us arrive wanting a place in the sun. We work hard. We sacrifice. We build lives. And then almost without noticing, we learn a particular lesson.
Your rise belongs to you—your success, your own—your future and individual achievement.
Your country rewards this lesson. It calls it merit. It calls it excellence. Some even call it success. I learned it, too.
But the Ktunaxa people in the area that I am a guest have shown me another way to understand “rising”. I have watched it up close. Friends, colleagues, people I work beside—for many of them, the climb is never clean. The hunger pulls against community. Every step up is weighed. Did this lift my people or only me?
Often, to rise can mean the price of leaving and the price of staying. So, hunger gets recalibrated again and again against uplift, against the price, against rising itself. That is a weight the settler does not often carry.
It is also a knowledge many settlers have lost—that a rise is supposed to cost you something and answer to someone. Because eventually, every society must answer a question much larger than achievement.
What is success for? Is it for securing a place for ourselves? Or is it strengthening the relationships that make our place possible?
The older I get, the less interested I am in how high someone climbs. I am more interested in whether they remember the land beneath the climb. Who carried it? Who paid for it? Who is still carrying it now?
My work had been less about certainty than responsibility. Less about proving goodness, more about changing our relationships. Less about standing in the right place, more about asking who we stand with. Perhaps we begin there. Thank you.
Thank you. Ki’su’k kyukyit from the homelands of the Ktunaxa. Annyeonghaseyo (안-녕-하-세-요). Vive le Québec.
Watch Sae Hoon Chung’s speech (above) after receiving a 2026 Governor General’s Award for the Performing Arts. Learn more about Sae Hoon (Stan) Chung by visiting his website. Find out about the other 2026 Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards on this website.
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