New Festival du Voyageur executive director prioritizing diverse francophone perspectives

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This article was published 20/06/2023 (889 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Festival du Voyageur has hired a new executive director to start work next month, as a safety investigation continues into a footbridge collapse at Fort Gibraltar three weeks ago.

Starting July 4, Breanne Lavallée-Heckert is taking over as executive director for the non-profit francophone organization, which runs the annual 10-day winter event of the same name and maintains the Fort Gibraltar site.

Lavallée-Heckert succeeds former executive director Darrel Nadeau, who stepped down in February.

The Métis Winnipegger and graduate of McGill law school said she wants to build on the organization’s work to bring in diverse voices and provide opportunities for Indigenous women and LGBTTQ+ folks who are francophone.

“Those perspectives have not necessarily had the same amount of space as other perspectives, and so (I’m) really wanting to continue to create spaces for that,” she said.

With her background in law, Lavallée-Heckert said she hopes to incorporate existing Indigenous legal orders into Festival Du Voyageur’s governance.

She is from a French and Michif-speaking family and grew up attending the festival — “always a time where our culture was represented in a way that you don’t normally see in Winnipeg, especially when I was growing up in the ’90s,” she said.

“The tone and understanding of Indigenous identity was not where it is today.”

She said she hopes to work to combat the systemic erasure of French-speaking Indigenous people, not just in celebrating the past, but to “think about how we can move forward together as a community.”

Lavallée-Heckert said she hasn’t yet been briefed on the situation at Fort Gibraltar, but said Festival du Voyageur would like to continue to maintain and offer programming at the site, which remains closed until further notice following the collapse of a raised walkway during a school field trip May 31.

A group of Grade 5 students from St. John’s Ravenscourt school and one teacher fell from a height of between four and six metres when the platform collapsed, and 18 people were sent to hospital.

Festival du Voyageur leases the land from the city and is responsible for maintaining the site, a replica of an early 1800s fur trade post.

City of Winnipeg spokesman David Driedger previously told the Free Press Festival du Voyageur would be required to hire an engineer to conduct a safety assessment of the site and document repairs. The fort is to remain closed until that happens.

The provincial Workplace Safety and Health department began an investigation into the cause of the collapse. The Free Press sought an update on the investigations from Festival du Voyageur board of directors president Eric Plamondon and from Manitoba Workplace Safety and Health Tuesday.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca