Gatherings bring healing in unprecedented time

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/06/2022 (1367 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s ceremony time — again.

It’s a time that looks and feels the same, but is different.

Many Indigenous communities restarted ceremonies these past few weeks, after over two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and hosting small, local gatherings — if at all.

The Manito Ahbee Pow Wow — which has some ceremonial elements — was held at the Red River Exhibition grounds last month.

A Midéwiwin lodge was raised for the first time in two years last week in Roseau River Anishinaabe First Nation.

In communities all across Manitoba, sundances with hundreds of dancers and relations are taking place now and throughout the summer.

I’m with my family in Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, where we are raising a lodge to hold healing ceremonies, share teachings, and relay knowledge as Anishinaabe have done for millennia.

The word for our people, Anishinaabe, means “spontaneous people” — a name we will live up to as we re-assemble our ceremonies in the wake of COVID-19.

Before the pandemic, our lodge moved from community to community throughout Manitoba, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota — really only needing some green space, a nearby camping site or hotel, and a place to cook and serve a few hundred people.

Now, due to infrastructure demands and health restrictions, we will be located here for the time being.

I’ve been here for days helping, but for weeks the community has been hard at work, constructing ceremonial space, bathrooms and a cooking tent in the middle of a community forest.

This is not to mention ceremonial work, like finding and cutting tamarack poles, building the lodge itself, and finding the sand, stones, wood and animal hides necessary to prepare the lodge.

Luckily, and unlike many communities, Kettle and Stony Point is able to handle hundreds of people arriving from four directions and the demands that requires.

It’s also affordable and reachable — an hour away from London, Ont., which has a range of hotels and campgrounds, a train station and an airport.

The third, and most important reason our lodge leadership chose this place, is because Anishinaabe take caring for our elders seriously.

Kettle and Stony Point has put into place attendance limits, daily testing, sanitization and everything from hand-washing to masking to ensure these ceremonies are as safe as possible.

They say that losing an elder is like losing a book, but for Anishinaabe it’s more like a library — so that’s not going to happen here.

This all means stressful travel schedules, hard-to-find accommodation, and extensive and expensive time away — but this is a small sacrifice compared to over 30 months absent of many songs, dances and teachings that make us who we are as Anishinaabe.

So, we have a lot to do to catch up.

The pandemic interrupted and extended ceremonies that take a long time to complete. In our lodge, people make commitments to learn certain teachings and songs, and involves sacrifices that take a year. This has now taken almost three years.

We also still have to complete songs, dances and stories that stopped in March 2020. I challenge anyone to try continuing something started two years ago.

I’ve been doing these ceremonies for nearly 40 years but, after nearly 30 months away, it feels a little nerve-racking — like doing them for the first time again.

We’ve also lost ceremonial leaders and elders. For some new knowledge keepers, this will be their first attempt doing ceremonies without their mentors.

We’ve therefore committed as a community to go slower than in the past. Ceremonies that used to take hours may now take days — so some in our community have committed to stay for weeks, and even months, to get it right.

We’ve booked 30 days over three months out of our lives to do this work.

It’s an unprecedented time demanding an unprecedented commitment.

This makes living kindness, patience, and love — central tenets to Anishinaabe teachings — more vital than ever.

It won’t be easy, but luckily we are in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Kettle and Stony Point is rich in culture, language and history — a part of the great Anishinaabe migration story from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and beginning 1,400 years ago.

Pride is also big here. We are only a few miles away from the former Ipperwash Provincial park (now owned by the community), where Anishinaabe activists re-occupied land in 1995 and Dudley George was shot by Ontario Provincial Police.

The chief of the community, Jason Henry, is also Midéwiwin and a part of our lodge. Unlike some communities where Christianity and traditional Indigenous practices are at odds, this community embodies long-held Anishinaabe practices of acceptance and inclusivity.

These ceremonies will be like coming home.

Different and new, but as Anishinaabe as ever.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca