Singing Back the Buffalo
Last week I attended a screening of Singing Back the Buffalo, written and directed by Tasha Hubbard, with my family at the Regina Public Library Film Theatre. The last time we’d seen buffalo together was in 2018 in Grasslands National Park. I wanted my kids to see the keystone species of our ecoregion. To know their…
Medicine wheel dedicated to elder
On Sept. 7, Westminster United Church in Regina dedicated a medicine wheel in its Kâkesimokamik, “healing garden,” to local Elder Lorna Standingready. Standingready, who is from Peepeekisis First Nation and is a residential school survivor, was an Elder for the United Church of Canada. She provided guidance to Westminster in their decision to create the healing…
On the death of Grand Chief Cathy Merrick
Last Friday, Cathy Merrick, Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, collapsed while speaking to reporters outside the Law Courts building in Winnipeg. She was taken to hospital but did not survive. She was 62. Prior to serving as Grand Chief, Merrick was Executive Council member and then Chief of Pimicikamak Okimawin, the Cree…
Strawberry communion at Six Nations
On July 6, more than 160 people from a variety of denominations and organizations gathered in Ohsweken, Ontario, for a Strawberry Thanksgiving and Communion hosted by Six Nations Polytechnic and co-organized by Mennonite Central Committee Ontario (MCCO) and Adrian Jacobs, also known as Ganosono, of the Turtle Clan, Cayuga Nation of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee…
In the current of wavering defiance
I want to know how to pray. It’s December 2021. Advent. A season of waiting. Everything is waiting. Waiting for the pandemic to be over. Waiting for our leaders to start acting like we’re in a climate emergency. Waiting for our hemisphere to tilt back into the light. We are hunkered down for our second…
Leon’s Island
After 20 years of negotiations, planning and construction, the water has gone up behind Manitoba Hydro’s $8.7-billion Keeyask dam about 725 km. north of Winnipeg. The troubled project on the province’s largest river now floods 45 square kilometres. Manitoba Hydro says that is a small area for a 695-megawatt dam, but there is nothing small…
An incessant demand
“Where are you, Mennonites?” A colleague and I are in a Winnipeg café discussing the current land struggles of many Indigenous peoples. I listen intently as she speaks of the Unist’ot’en, Muskrat Falls and the Tiny House Warriors. I nod my head in understanding and offer affirming murmurs. But then, halfway through tea, she looks…
‘A mile in my moccasins’
Madelaine Kioke was born in the woods near Attawapiskat, in the James Bay region of northern Ontario, where her parents hunted and trapped. She lived out on the land until she was nine years old, learning to hunt and fish, and set traps and snares with her father. At age six, when her mother first…
My day on the Walk for Common Ground
The image on the Treaty 6 flag is striking. The crest shows a European and Indigenous leader engaged in a never-ending handshake, a longstanding and well-understood symbol of mutual agreement. The edge of the crest is lined with words that testify to the longevity of this agreement: “As long as the sun shines… And the rivers…
Confronting the fear of our history
“Yet we Christians have also been called to take a good hard look at ourselves. To reflect on our Christian beliefs, to scrutinize our missional practices. And to decolonize. It’s not that Christianity is inherently colonial, but for generations the church and its faith have been used —wittingly, unwittingly, and far too often—as instruments of…
