Going back home: Healing through culture and tending to your roots
- Alyson Bear | April 26, 2018
You can take the kid off the rez but you can’t take the rez out of the kid. I am what you would call an urban native. My first home as a baby was the reserve and I ended up living on the reserve as a teenager but I grew up in Saskatoon. We always went to the reserve for different family gatherings and sports days. The feasts are the times I remember the most as a child.
Every year in November we would have a feast to honor and feed our relatives who have passed on. We had to wear long skirts, no exceptions and we came with one bowl and spoon and a lot of tupperware. The grandmothers and young women of the community would make over 20 huge pots of different soups and other food. The elders in the community represented certain heads of families in the community who have passed on, and were honored and given gifts. Another woman elder prayed while they all took a seat and ate first and everyone all the kids listened and no one talked and we all stood and prayed in our own way and dropped our heads in respect.
Then the young men would serve everyone in the entire community who came and sat in a circle around the school gym. I remember my uncles not eating until the very end and serving everyone carrying big heavy hot pots of soup and I realize now this would be teaching and instilling patience and respect for the elders, children and women in the community.
The food would come one right after the other you could not even finish the first one before the next one came and you could not say no to anything because that is rude and disrespectful. We are there in honor of the ones who have been called home to the spirit world and to feed them in the afterlife. When the feast was done you would have you knew what you will be eating for the next few days.
There are so many values, rules, laws instilled into one ceremony and the feast was one that we carried on and it was sad that once I became older and colonized I did not want to go anymore. Society made you ashamed to be Native. I started not caring anymore, started hanging out with my city friends more, started drinking because drinking was all around me. I started to get into trouble and rebel against my parents, school, the system, the world, and had a chip on my shoulder because of the dysfunction in my family and blamed my parents because we had no true knowledge of our own history taught to us.
I remember going to Whitecap all the time and for the sports days on the on the rez – it was a lot of adults playing ball and getting drunk and the kids running loose and my grandma ran the cook shack and we would work and help her and also get free food. She had her own business she was a cook and entrepreneur. She kept our family and the community as close as she could through her cooking.
I danced powwow when I was 4-6 years old a few times and my auntie Loraine made my jingle dress for me. I remember being bullied in grade 1 at a culture day where some wasichu boys in the class started hitting their hands on their lips and making that yell noise pretending to be native saying Indians are savages, stuff they clearly learned from their parents. I wish I didn’t quit dancing then but I did. I recently started dancing again about 3 years ago after being sober for one year. I don’t go as much as I would like to but I try to take my daughters as much as I can, so they can connect to who they are anyway I can try to show them and have a sense of identity. I was not raised traditional and I am just discovering who I am now, unlearning colonial ways a relearning my own traditional ways and the truth of what my people had to go through so that the rest us of could be here today! My grandparents are all residential school survivors and suffered through having their language, culture, identity, being beaten out of them and taken away.
Culture is what saved me and is healing me and is teaching my daughters about who they are, so they can grow up proud. No matter where I go and how much I learn I will always be that little rez girl at heart. I find myself always coming back home to family and to the land where I grew up only more eager to learn and go back to our roots.