Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Adam Donnelly

NATIONAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S DAY

Kamloops celebrates National Indigenous People’s Day

Jun 21, 2023 | 4:21 PM

KAMLOOPS — On Wednesday (June 21), more than 1,000 people from all over Kamloops, including hundreds of students from School District 73, visited McDonald Park to celebrate National Indigenous People’s Day.

“It’s about celebrating our Indigenous heritage, but it’s also a celebration in which we want to include the whole community,” Cal Albright, Executive Director of the Kamloops Aboriginal Friendship Society (KAFS) explains. “That’s why it’s an open event for everybody.”

The celebration was organized by the KAFS and Lii Michif Otipemisiwak Family and Community Services (LMO). Along with fun activities for the young folks in attendance, there was drumming and dancing, as well as some Metis jigging.

For LMO Executive Director Colleen Lucier, these kinds of celebrations can help connect the past with the present for Metis and First Nations youth.

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“A lot of us, and I can speak for myself, didn’t grow up connected to Metis culture,” Lucier explains, “so we have to start by remembering who we are and what are those values. What were those teachings? What were those practices? Because they’re still within us. We just need to remember what they are and bring them back into practice.”

Gwen Campbell-McArthur and Marie Zwingli are Metis artisans, selling their creations at the celebration.

“My Granny was Metis, as well,” Gwen recalls. “I remember being at her knee when I was three, and the beading. That’s kind of where I got started.”

“I’m a beginner,” Marie explains. “You will some amazing ribbon skirts out here, that… for me, to wish to make someday.”

Both women recall a time when embracing their Metis heritage would have come with a stigma.

“My grandmother and my father were persecuted because of it,” Gwen says. “Metis were called names like ‘half-breeds’ and ‘DPs,’ which are displaced people.”

“I didn’t accept my Metis background. – I accepted it, but I wasn’t allowed to embrace it until I was around 45,” Marie explains. “To be able to come out now, and just be proud to be Metis is huge to me, and I’m learning every day.”

For organizers of the event, celebrating National Indigenous People’s Day with everyone in the community is an important step on the path of reconciliation.

Image Credit: CFJC Today

“It’s not perfect. It’s a piece of work that we’ll never get perfect, but it’s important to keep talking, keep sharing,” Albright says. “At the end of the day, it’s about making things better for the people who are less fortunate, and I think that the message we have to say.”