Dancing with ancestors to take back the land
By Kelly Anne Smith
NORTH BAY—Dancer/choreographer Christine Friday first dazzled with a live dance performance and then through film where she stunned the audience with the colonial injustice imposed on her family.
A 50-minute dance titled Maggie & Me: A Healing Dance was presented by Friday Creeations at the Capitol Centre on March 29.
Friday Creeations also premiered the 10-minute film, Path Without End – a documentary dance film about taking back power and speaking truth on traditional family territory.
Children, teachers and parents travelled from Bear Island. There were local students and Kookums in attendance with their grandkids. The children were entranced. One little girl turned to her mom to say, “Christine is on YouTube!”
There are layers of meaning in Maggie & Me, choreographed and beautifully performed by Friday through traditional as well as ballet, modern, interpretive and traditional dance movements. The stage was alive with a resurgence of culture and dancing with ancestors. Rich visuals of video backdrops with maximized sound design fulfilled the senses.
Earlier, Friday explained that Maggie & Me was in development for three years.
“I’ve always been rooted in stories of our culture. My gifts of the culture were through the arts,” explained Friday. “Part of my journey is about going back home. This marks a big significance for me to choose to launch and premiere this work in North Bay, as opposed to Toronto or Ottawa. This is where I want to honour my family and the people that I’m connected to and where I want to offer my gifts. I’m moving back home. It’s about who’s coming to the show and the different supports around me.”
Long time artistic collaborator Nipissing First Nation’s Penny Couchie of Aanmitaagzi: He/She Speaks danced the part of Maggie. Their connection is deep as both of their Great Grandmothers, Toulachi Turner and Sophie Friday, were best friends from Lake Temagami.
Maggie & Me dancers include Beany John and Waawaate Fobister.
To start the performance, Tasheena Sarazin, Performance & Customary Arts Artist at Aanmitaagzi: He/She Speaks in Nipissing First Nation, sang a song to settle and prepare the spirit to be awakened.
Friday’s inspiration for Maggie & Me began one night when she put down tobacco to be a Jingle Dancer, which is a healing dance.
“So that night, I went to sleep, but I woke up and I was in the dream spirit realm. I saw two grandmothers standing over me and they had wings on their right arm. As I looked towards them, I started to feel a vibration on my legs. I woke up and they were gone. I fell back asleep and then I became this bird and I was flying powerfully. It was dark. I went back to my body and woke up. It felt incredible,” recalled Friday. “So in the morning, I phoned a good friend of mine, Debbie Wilson from Rainy River in Treaty 3 territory. She said I should Google her great grandmother Maggie Wilson who was a dance artist in the mid-1850s. Maggie had talked about thunderbeings coming to visit her. They would caress her body with their wings and pass on knowledge about what to create.”
“The spirit dream presents all connections for me,” added Friday.
Friday calls her work ancestral and a spiritual experience.
“All of my work has always been whatever I was experiencing in my life. I would create a dance piece about it—as a way of becoming a better person, dance through it and then release it and let it go. That’s how I learned to become who I am today, is through dance.”
After the live performance, the film Path Without End was shown. Friday explains her mother is a spiritual woman so there is connection to the family territory in Lake Temagami.
“My mom grew up on Lake Temagami but she didn’t raise me on-reserve because of the challenges she experienced. She wanted to protect me from the different tragedies that were going on for our people. My mom went to Shingwauk Residential School with her sister and brother.”
Friday produced the film that she says is about creating the narrative to be able to take back power to speak our own truth.
“The shift is happening. We are telling our own stories of who we are and where we come from,” explained Friday. “I brought my mom, Michaele (Louise Friday) O’Leary, my aunt Verna Friday and my uncle Tom Friday to Shingwauk Residential School.”
Christine danced around the entire school in the act of taking back power.
“We have returned to take back our power from Shingwauk Residential School,” added Friday. “It was ceremonial. It was acknowledging and releasing young souls that were there. And then speaking our truth on our traditional family territory.”
Christine’s family has a story to tell.
“Part of our family is Cree from the James Bay area. During the 1800s, our Anishinaabe People would travel hunting and gathering. A popular gathering place in the summer was Lake Temagami. When my great-great-grandfather died, Chief Wabi Makwa adopted our family and gave us our traditional territory. This Traditional territory area encompassing a large territory surrounding Friday’s Point, including half a dozen lakes. My mom was raised on our tribal lands and her parents raised her and her two siblings at the camp. When she was five, she was taken away from her family and placed in a residential school. In the late 60’s, the government burned down my family’s hunting and fishing lodge, saying we owed back-taxes. This is a legal impossibility. This has always been the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin/Anishinaabe. We have never signed our rights over to the Crown.”
“The Temagami First Nation became an Indian Act Band in 1971″, continued Friday. “For me, reconciliation is about taking back our place on this land and reconnecting our families to our own traditional territories and allowing us to have our voice be heard again. That’s what happened to my mother’s generation. Through residential school, through the imposition of a system that wasn’t natural to us, we were made to feel small and insignificant.”
In Path Without End, the three siblings look for signs of the children once forced far away from their families. Christine’s Aunt Verna says, “They took me over 350 miles away to Shingwauk Residential School.”
“I can remember her coming back for Christmas on the plane and already the feeling of detachment had started,” Friday’s mother Micheale tells of her sister. “I remember thinking ‘How am I going to get over this?’ ”
Uncle Tom remembers being cold and unwanted.
His niece, after dancing professionally across Canada, is going home to Bear Island.
“I went to the Native Theatre School in 1995. That’s when I devoted my life’s journey to working with young people in our communities on reserves and to our people.”
With 12 years experience of offering a dance camp for Bear Island youth, Friday will now be a permanent resident and business start-up.
On stage and to cheering theatregoers, Friday announced her intentions to develop a culture creation centre on Bear Island. A yoga studio will be included as Friday is a yoga instructor as well as a talented dancer/choreographer, living the good way on her traditional land.
For more information, please contact Christine: fridaycreeations.ca