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)