Alberta Adventures

By Lisa Dixon, 1^st year MDP student

It’s been an exciting and busy first half of my summer field placement at Blue Quills First Nation College in St. Paul, Alberta.  It began with many new faces and names to remember as everyone at Blue Quills has welcomed me fully.  The first few weeks were filled with meetings, research, grant writing, and meeting a lot of new people.  Everyone has been great and gone out of their way to include me in campus and community events. 

But without a doubt the highlight so far has been the Annual Blue Quills Cultural Camp that took place May 27-31.  The week was full of people, ceremony, art, music, dance, food, and teachings.  Most of the work we were doing was put on hold, so Margaret and I could fully participate in the events of the week.  The usually quiet campus swelled, with well over a 100 extra people either staying in the dorms or camping on the Cultural grounds.  The highlights of the week for me were the ceremonies and the people.  I was able to meet a lot of different people over the course of the week, people who came from very different backgrounds.  But I learned something from every person I met; I was even reunited with someone I worked with in Winnipeg 3 years ago! There were several big ceremonies over the course of the week along with smaller teachings and other activities.  The first ceremony that I got to participate in was a Horse Dance.  On Wednesday there was a Bear Lodge ceremony.  The Bear Lodge is a type of a Sweat with four lodges, and one of the lodges was solely for women.  It was a beautiful experience hearing the teachings from a respected Elder in the community and a Past President of Blue Quills surrounded by strong women.

 

On Thursday, there was a gathering, The 4th Annual New Sun Gathering: A Call to Arts.  There was a Pipe Ceremony to start and then addresses from the two honored guests, Blackstone Actress Michelle Thrush and Alberta artist/writer Aaron Paquette.  Both Michelle and Aaron were fantastic and gave emotional and inspirational speeches about art in their own lives and how that has inspired activism and action.  Both have been involved in Idle No More, with Michelle involved in protests and organization and Aaron providing quite a bit of art work for the movement.  In the afternoon, Michelle gave a performance of her one-woman show, which was moving, funny and beautiful.  In the evening I participated in a Chicken Dance ceremony. The Chicken Dance went well into the night and resumed Friday morning and went into the afternoon.  We had a bit of break to rest up for the final ceremony of the Cultural Camp, a Yuwipi Ceremony that took place starting at dusk.  The ceremony began with a Sweat Lodge and following this we entered an area that was covered completely in order for the room to be completely dark.  The ceremony lasted about three hours and was extremely powerful.  This ceremony was the highlight of the Cultural Camp for me.  

Some may wonder what this Cultural Camp has to do with development, but there are different principles of development that are displayed on one of the walls here at Blue Quills and one says, 

 “Authentic Development is Culturally Based: Healing and development must be rooted in the wisdom, knowledge, and living processes of the culture of the people.”

Participating in ceremony is the basis for development and I was lucky enough to have participated in multiple ceremonies and learned from dozens of people about the foundation of Indigenous development.

Lisa Dixon (L), Michelle Thrush (C), and Margaret Lewis-John (R)

Best Practices of Northern Development… And Other Insights

By Naomi Happychuk, 1st year MDP student

For the past several weeks I have been undergoing a field placement with the University of Winnipeg’s Northern Sustainable Prosperity Initiative.

Until last week I have been helping organize a virtual round table on Models and Best Practices of Northern Development. This was a tele-video conference held in the Cisco theatre at Richardson College, connecting First Nation Chiefs, community leaders, and industry representatives from across the country to discuss how Manitoba’s own northern strategy should move forward.

Roundtable on Models and Best Practices of Northern Development

It has been a great opportunity to meet and communicate with so many of the people engaged in Manitoba’s development initiatives, all with their own unique perspective over a common interest. While securing participation and planning the agenda for the event, we were met with achievements, surprises, and challenges. 

I have been reminded of some of the key lessons I learned in my first couple of years of my undergrad in International Development…

1. Politics is everything, and despite my eagerness to incite collaborative action, (Gosh darn it! Why can’t we make this work already?!), it cannot easily be evaded and at the very least must be acknowledge. -Though I remain convinced that greater communication (particularly over a tasty lunch) could solve most of the world’s problems.

2. Though we may think the more we learn the more clarity we acquire, it is actually quite the opposite, and the more I learn the more complex (and perplexed) are my realizations!

3. This society is overworked! Everyone is busy! You would be amazed at what can happen last-minute! (Or the day before the main event!)

This practicum has enabled me to learn professionally, personally, and academically, experiencing “real” work (I now understand why people get so excited for the weekends), learning about what is important to me and what I want to look for in a future career, and expanding my knowledge of, and passion for, development.  

After a successful and insightful round table, I am now working on a few projects relating to climate change and adaptation in Canada’s North, and putting together a document on best practices of Northern development. With this I know I have much more learning to do!

Evelyn Poitras (L), Ovide Mercredi (C) & Naomi Happychuk (R) at the Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO) Summit

The Rip-Off

By Kirsten Junker-Andersen, 2nd year MDP student

Most people who have been fortunate enough to spend any period of time in developing countries have, at one point or another, found themselves in a situation where after finishing a purchase – be it for a handicraft or even some market goods – they realize that the price they just paid is nowhere near the usual price of that good.  While at times there may be a show of good-faith and some bartering that takes place, though this too depends on the culture, odds are that your khakis, birkenstocks, and aviators created a larger target than even your best smooth talking allowed you to dodge.  And that’s on top of the fact that you may already be getting the “lekoa” price. 

 

Kirsten (L) and Dulce (R)

This is usually just accepted with a laugh and a shrug as an additional cost of travel, however, sometimes the situation stirs up some other emotions beyond the usual good-natured humour. 

Today, was one of those days.  

The details of the situation are not truly important – it can be summarized by saying that we purchased handicrafts from a community that we are working with at a cost above what we agreed on, Botswana isn’t big into bartering, and at a quality way below expected.  After hearing critical feedback from numerous coworkers, as well as from the Chief of the community, we had become fairly distressed about the situation and wondered aloud how we could be ripped off like this.  We were angry. Angry at the producer, angry at ourselves for making a rookie mistake, and angry at others for not saving us from ourselves. In our angst concepts like justice, fairness, and honesty were thrown around – it was a rough day, just stay with me here.  Then we checked ourselves, and truly thought about it.

The community that we are working in does not have a reliable supply of water, private sanitation or access to electricity. How is that just?

Nobody in the community has a vehicle and they have to walk over 10km, one way, to reach the nearest village for supplies.  How is that fair?

Only 4% of the community is formally employed, making us likely the only customers this man will have for quite a while.  So to be honest, he was a businessman and accurately judged our willingness to pay - good job.  

All that to say, it’s just a matter of perspective.  I called this post the rip-off, but tell me, who’s really getting ripped off here? 

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Research and the Three Rs

By Gabrielle Héroux, 1^st year MDP student

It’s been almost two months since the official start of my field placement.  But the truth is, the lessons started even earlier – patience, open-mindedness, the ability to roll with the punches and adapt.  My first two field placement choices fell through.  So it goes, and so here we are.

And here I am, sitting at a bus stop across from Winnipeg Square waiting to meet up with Stella.  It’s raining.  Again.  We made this plan to touch base briefly here, she en route to Ma Mawi for the afternoon, I en route to campus.  We have materials and information to exchange.

We’ve been working with Dr. Jerry Buckland as research assistants on a project concerning financial exclusion, defined as the failure of the mainstream banking system to provide credit and depository services at competitive prices to all individuals, households, and businesses.  As a subset of broader social exclusion, it usually affects lower income people and communities.  In this project, we want to know how it affects indigenous people, both in Winnipeg and in Fisher River Cree Nation.  Here in the city, we’ve been working in partnership with SEED Winnipeg and Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata (Ma Mawi for short).  Our plan is to develop recruitment strategies with them to find participants for the various methods we intend to use (a quantitative survey, financial life histories, and two focus group-type activities).  We’re still in the initial phases of establishing these relationships.  So far, most of the work we’ve done has been from home, or from the University, drafting our literature review and mapping out protocols.

Stella Rakwach (L) & Gabrielle Héroux (R)

The two of us spent a few hours at Ma Mawi last week.  We had a meeting with Garry Richard, the manager of their McGregor location.  It’s a fantastic site, a bright and airy building that also houses a daycare, a youth YMCA complete with indoor skatepark and climbing wall, and a quick-care clinic on the second floor.  Ma Mawi itself offers different programs and classes – for youth, for seniors, for women, for parents – but most people just drop in.  They come to have coffee or something to eat, to use the computers or laundry facilities, to sit and chat with their friends.  It’s always busy.  They are clearly a crucial part of the community.

Everyone, no matter their reason for being there, has to sign in.  So Garry told us that one thing we could do would be to sit at their greeter desk, signing people in, and also handing out flyers about our project to stir up some interest.  This seemed like a good idea, so we went with it.

After an hour or so, an elderly man, non-Aboriginal, came up and read our flyer.  And he had lots to say on the topic of indigenous financial exclusion.  He called another man over, an older Anishinaabe man we had seen around and briefly spoken to.  “Did you read this?” he asked.  “The university girls want to help you Aboriginals.”

Oh no, I thought.  That won’t go over well.  Sure enough…  “You want to help us?” he asked.  “Then do us a favour and go back to where you came from.  Give us back our land.”  With that, he tore up the flyer and walked away.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that whole exchange.  For one, I felt it was neither the time nor the place to hash it out.  But it made me think about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and how best to do it.

It’s been clear to me, from the start, that I’m not out to “help the Aboriginals”, as though I’m some sort of crucial part of the equation without which they’ll never get anything done, as though I alone have something to offer that they, in their deprivation, need.  That isn’t what this is about.  I’m doing anyone any favours.

So what am I doing, then?  Jerry told Stella and me in one of our meetings that, in order to be a good development practitioner, you have to have a good sense of who you are.  Otherwise, you’ll be running around, haphazardly, trying to convert everyone to your way of thinking.  Being told to go back to where I came from really gave me pause.  Where is that, anyways?  Am I from France, because that’s where my Héroux ancestor came from in the 1670s?  Am I from Pinaymootang, because that’s where my Cree ancestors were from, where my mother is registered?  I’ve never been to either of those places.  What does this all mean?  And how much of your identity has to do with who claims you, as opposed to who you claim to be?

I’ve also been thinking about what Darren Courchene told us during our field placement orientation, about the elder who didn’t answer the researcher’s questions, because that wasn’t the lesson she wanted to teach him that day.  I’ve been thinking a lot about how that story illustrates the three Rs.  Respect.  Relationship.  Reciprocity.  As our research unfolds, as we begin to collect our data and generate results, we’ll all have to think very carefully about the practical application of these principles.  I know I’m bringing some biases into this project, naturally, having always been banked, having worked in a bank for years, having grown up the way I did.  So how can the three Rs temper the assumptions with which I’m starting out, and really make this work meaningful?