Aboriginal Day: a model for Matariki?

Greetings from Rocky Lane,

As well as being the longest day, Saturday was also Aboriginal day. Rocky lane held its event on Friday at the school and I was excited to go along. The school has about 160 children from Grades 1 – 12. On Aboriginal day many elders and people from the community came to the school to share their knowledge and tell their stories. The children spent the whole day rotating between classrooms learning skills from the elders. These included things like beadcraft, storytelling, language, dreamcatcher making, traditional games, hunting, trapping, curing meat and traditional use of plants.

Moose and duck meat

Burning Sweetgrass

In addition to the rotation through the classrooms there was a classroom that had been set up as a museum. Apparently it is only like that for two weeks a year and the children from the school usually show visitors around. The artifacts are all related to local history and all of the information about the artifacts is written up by the school students.

 

Beadwork in the Museum Room

Wolf Pelt

There was also a lot of music drumming and dancing. In fact there was so much excitement for round dancing that at one stage there was pretty much a stampede.

I really liked the sharing of knowledge that took place on aboriginal day. The school has a mixture of aboriginal and non-aboriginal children but they were all excited to learn from the elders who were teaching and to get involved in the activities and dancing.

I am not naive enough to expect that the wonderful experience I had at Rocky Lane is repeated everywhere in Canada on Aboriginal day, but nevertheless it was very exciting to be involved, and the excitement in the Rocky Lane students was infectious.

Coming from New Zealand there is not really an occasion that creates these sorts of opportunities for exchanging of knowledge. Waitangi day (our national day) tends to be very political and often quite divisive. I think the closest we have is probably Matariki (Maori New Year). It would be really cool to see Matariki become a bigger event in New Zealand and be used to have a more positive dialog about the dynamic between indigenous and settler cultures.

On Aboriginal day itself I spent some time with Kenzie (an Engage North Fellow in Dene Tha) and some friend of hers who live near me at Rocky Lane. In the evening we went to fireworks in Fort Vermilion. The prospect of fireworks on the longest day was pretty preposterous. The fireworks were set off at 10.30 pm with the sun still above the horizon. After that we went down to the Peace River in Fort Vermilion to watch the sunset. Hopefully the following photos give an idea of how long the days are this far north.

Fireworks (10.30pm)

Peace River (11pm)

Field at Midnight

2.30am (Still not dark)

The Best Touch Rugby Team in Northern Alberta…

Greetings from Rocky Lane,

So much has happened in the last couple of weeks. One thing about being so far north is that people really appreciate the long summer days and the warmth. I think I will break this post into two parts, one more general and one about aboriginal day.

Band Meeting – Everyone was there

Firstly on the work front, we have been moving forward. Nisha and I attended a Band meeting where we introduced ourselves to a lot of the members of the nation. Meeting with the whole band are not that common, and band members really engaged with the discussions even though the meeting lasted over 4 hours on a hot summer day.

One of the challenges with our work has been that the Band Manager was replaced at around the time we started our fellowship. The new manager is just getting started and finding his feet. In the last few days he has asked for my help in getting his office sorted. This has been unbelievably useful as in sorting through his files I have got access to a lot of information on the companies that have been run through Beaver in the past as well as some community planning that has already been done. I am yet to sort through it in detail but I think it will be very useful for both Nisha and I.

The Forks, where the fishing competition took place.

Nisha and I also attended the father’s day celebrations at a nearby river. There was a fishing competition, Barbecue, and sports and games. I got invited to join a team for horseshoes (which I unsurprisingly I did not excel at). I was also asked to call the Bingo which lead to some teasing from a few of the elders (including one who jokingly tried to run me over with her vehicle and then called concerned the next day because she was worried she had injured me!) Apparently my Bingo calling skills will be in high demand throughout the summer.

I also got to share a little bit of Kiwi culture with some of the local kids. There is a program up here called Alberta Future Leaders which is a summer program run by university students to encourage kids in artistic and sporting pursuits and also to attend various camps and youth events. They invited me to come and do a touch rugby program. Because the older kids were getting ready for their end of year exams it was mostly the younger ones who came to try and play. Most of them had never seen rugby played so we did some passing drills to begin with (to get rid of the American football quarterback style passing). It was really neat to see how quickly they picked up the game and were starting to develop all sorts of tactics (though I had to say that putting one person with the ball in the middle of a huddle so they couldn’t be touched and moving down the field was probably not within the rules). Hopefully I will get invited back to do some more sessions later in the summer. As it stands I am pretty sure the Rocky Lane touch rugby team is the best in Northern Alberta.

In wildlife news I finally saw my first Beaver, it was swimming in the river one night while we were playing baseball, I also saw another young bear when I was out for a drive. Apparently there have been bears seen in the last few days in a few spots within a few hundred metres from where I live. It is one thing to generally know that there are bears around, it is another thing to specifically have members of the community tell you where they have seen them and that I should go out walking.  With that in mind I hope I can follow Nisha’s advice.

Advice from Nisha

 

 

Baseball (ok softball), Bingo and Bugs…

Greetings from Rocky Lane!

Over the last week or so we have continued to get more involved in the community and community events.

Firstly I have been  involved in the regular weekly softball game. There weren’t enough people for two full teams so we played a version that resembled non-stop cricket (a reference that will help my New Zealand readers and confuse my Canadian ones). The game alternates between the two communities, last week we played at Childs Lake in a beautiful spot near the river. This week we are playing at the school here in Rocky Lane.

The other big event that we went to last week was lunch and bingo with the elders. While not all of the community elders were there it was nice to meet and talk with about 10 of the elders in the community. Apparently I look like a trustworthy sort of person because I also got asked to call the bingo.

Calling the Bingo

We have also been starting to research some of the business opportunities the community would like us to look at. Nisha has been very patient in teaching me business planning techniques. For Nisha this sort of planning is very obvious and mundane but I appreciate the clarity that having a good business framework gives us in our research and discussions we have with people in the community.

For myself as much as for the community I have been doing some research into the history of Treaty 8 and the treaty claims process in this part of Canada. I will likely write a bit more about this in the future once I have had a chance to develop my thoughts a little further and talk to some of the community members up here.

I have been enjoying the long evenings and doing some weeding in the community gardens behind the community centre. There are some lovely raised beds and I am hoping to get some plants growing over the summer and give some food to the elders later in the summer. The downside of gardening up here in the evenings (or doing pretty much anything outside)  is that you get swarmed by mosquitos. I have tried a few repellents but am still working on finding one that is really effective. Maybe next year Engage North can get an insect repellent company as a sponsor.

Nisha and I have also had a chance to catch up with Kenzie and Rachel who are doing summer projects in Dene Tha First Nation. The four of us are hoping to go out to the Rodeo on Saturday. If you are interested in what the other fellows are getting up to the link to all our blogs is here: http://engagenorth.ualberta.ca/en/FellowshipProgram/FellowsBlogs.aspx