Summer Solstice Indigenous Festival wraps up with colourful powwow

The almost week-long Summer Solstice Indigenous Festival came to a terminate on Sunday with a drum-fueled aggressive powwow that became once long on colourful regalia and ceremonial dance and drumming, and featured extra than 140 dancers from diverse First Nation communities.

“I became once born into this,” acknowledged dancer John McComber, who goes by the spirit name Sawatis Karonhiakeson, or He Walks in the Sky. “I’ve been doing this since I became once two years faded. It’s in my blood.”

McComber, a 64-year-faded Mohawk from Kahnawake, became once taking segment in his first powwow since the pandemic struck.

“For me, it’s a non secular and bodily pleasure. I delight in a reward — I will look and talk with the spirits, and I dance with the spirits. However what’s good is to trek out to the varied communities in Turtle Island and look what they’re doing, and fragment who I am with them, and vice versa.”

Another powwow dancer, Sandy Benson, a 68-year-faded Ojibway from the Rama reserve start air Orillia, equally felt that the pull of neighborhood helped pressure the festival.

“This is our blessing, our event,” he acknowledged. “We diagram to thrill in enjoyable and meet of us. Since COVID two years ago, right here’s an trusty event of assembly up again.”

That sense of gathering infused no longer appropriate the powwow, nonetheless your entire festival, which became once held at Mādahòkì Farm on Hunt Club Boulevard West and featured diverse aspects of Indigenous culture, together with a marketplace with jewellery, artwork, coffee, chocolate, dreamcatchers and diverse crafts by Indigenous artisans. Files booths and historical displays additionally abounded, whereas teenagers loved theatre, storytelling, face-picture, a petting farm and bungee.

In accordance with organizers, an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 of us visited the festival over the weekend, whereas instructional enviornment trips final week saw about 15,000 college students and lecturers on-web explain online. Approximately 75,000 of us took segment in the festival’s twice-weekly on-line training workshops throughout June.

Over the weekend, a gargantuan want of fingers-on workshops had been additionally supplied, together with for quillwork, making beaded sealskin keychains, and instructing birch bark biting, which instructor and artist Simon Brascoupé, who has one such fragment of his in the National Gallery’s collection, says is even handed one of many oldest artwork sorts in Canada.

The diagram entails folding a small square fragment of white or paper birch three times to create eight layers, and biting a pattern into them, just like how one makes a paper snowflake. A participant at one workshop Sunday created a turtle create.

“However the artwork isn’t the birch bark,” acknowledged Brascoupé, an Algonquin from Kitigan Zibi. “The artwork is the verbal change and the collaboration you’ll want to delight in whenever you’re doing it. None of those of us right here (at the workshop) delight in met earlier than, nonetheless it completely’s turn out to be like a collaborative family.”

Nearby, some family participants had been busy reconnecting with their roots, or making that bond for the first time. Greg Cox and his 20-year-faded daughter, Jamie, attended the festival on Sunday with the hope of strengthening their relationship with their Métis heritage.

“My grandfather and his brother founded the Alberta Métis Affiliation, nonetheless I’ve been a small removed from my native culture, so I’m seeking to set extra exposure,” Greg acknowledged. “This is Jamie’s first pow wow, and it’s my first in decades. And it’s been inconceivable; a plentiful event and a plentiful system to reconnect. And it’s miles about neighborhood.”

Jamie, in the meantime, became once taking home a starter beading equipment so she could start making her dangle jewellery.

“I’ve persistently puzzled who my ancestors are and what the culture is there,” she acknowledged. “I’ve persistently known I became once Métis nonetheless never did considerable about it in the previous. However over the previous couple of years I’ve started hearing extra about the political complications that had been coming up, and I needed to study extra about it and catch alive to.”

bdeachman@postmedia.com