Province’s first Indigenous parenting event draws hundreds in person, online

Amara LeClair starts with the basic questions: Where are you from? Who are your grandparents? Did they forage?

“It’s about building that identity,” said LeClair, a family support co-ordinator at the Manitoba Métis Federation’s Infinity Women Secretariat.

She’s clocked demand from Métis women wanting to understand their culture. LeClair works with people who’ve faced gender-based and family violence.

On Wednesday, she set up a booth at the province’s first Indigenous Parenting Gathering — a free event focused on Indigenous motherhood, fatherhood and queer parenting.

It was fully booked within hours of registration opening, the provincial government said.

There’s desire to hear the good in Indigenous families and culture, LeClair said.

“If we keep talking about the trauma, all they know is trauma,” she said. “How do we build those pieces so that we can actually move our family forward, rather than leaving them stuck?”

Hailey Bird Matheson was one of roughly 280 people to attend the gathering in-person Wednesday. Another 142 had registered for an online stream.

Bird Matheson, a Peguis First Nation member, trekked through the Fort Garry Hotel with a day of sessions ahead. Intergenerational love, centring Indigenous joy in parenting and honouring ancestors were topics slated for discussion at the event.

“We’ve lived our history,” Bird Matheson said, referencing residential schools and past collective trauma.

“We know what has happened to us through ongoing colonization, and it’s just as important to centre our joy (and) centre our teachings.”

Highlighting the good in Indigenous families is the goal of the Indigenous Parenting Gathering, said Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine.

She and Premier Wab Kinew kicked off the two-day event by relaying their own experiences as Indigenous parents. Kinew shared that he hasn’t cut his seven-year-old son’s hair yet, despite adamantly keeping his own short when he was young.

Long hair is powerful in Indigenous culture, Kinew noted. Children in residential schools had their locks cut.

“(My son) still gets mistaken for a girl because he has long hair sometimes. That’s just kind of how people have been trained in their mentality,” Kinew told the crowd. “We still have a ways to go as a society before there’s true inclusion.

“But I think at the same time, we have to acknowledge that there’s been huge, huge progress.”

He encouraged the crowd to “keep pushing it forward.”

Fontaine spoke about ensuring her sons didn’t experience hunger, abuse and chaos growing up. Both are now becoming teachers.

“Becoming a mother changed my life. It made me realize that if I wanted my boys to have the best possible life, I had to do the work,” Fontaine said. “I had to shed the impacts of colonization, residential schools, neglect, abandonment — all of the things that many of our people have carried.”

Indigenous people from across Manitoba, and some from Saskatchewan and Ontario, registered for the event, she said.

A slate of Indigenous professionals and ministers are expected to speak. The event’s cost isn’t finalized because it’s ongoing, a provincial government spokesperson said.

Both LeClair and Bird Matheson said more events with the messaging are needed.

“It also needs to be a movement within our communities,” LeClair said. “How do we implement it, and how do we… encourage it? If we just teach it and we’re not living it, it’s going to fall flat.”

Fontaine pointed to organizations displayed at the Indigenous Parenting Gathering as outlets “doing the work” daily. New Directions, the Southern First Nations Network of Care and the Infinity Women Secretariat were among the outlets with booths.

The province hasn’t decided whether the gathering, organized by the government’s families department, will be an annual event, a spokesperson said.

gabrielle.piche@winnipegfreepress.com