Anishinaabe guest speakers celebrate Black History Month

By Rick Garrick

TORONTO — Mount Dennis Aboriginal EarlyON celebrated Black History Month with a series of virtual presentations by people with Afro-Indigenous ancestry, including two Anishinabek Nation citizens. Aundeck Omni Kaning’s Jaden McGregor delivered his presentation on Feb. 17 and Wasauksing’s Shanell King delivered her presentation on Feb. 10. The presentations are posted online at the Mount Dennis Aboriginal EarlyON Facebook page.

“They wanted to feature me as a youth who has both of those heritages on what I’ve been doing and some of the cool things on my journey,” says McGregor, whose father is from Jamaica and mother is an Aundeck Omni Kaning citizen. “I’m a photographer so I like to share my work. I have a unique perspective being Indigenous and Jamaican — I feel like it is important to tell people what is happening and kind of share that part of myself with the world.”

McGregor says he began doing photography during a trip to Australia with his grandmother Jackie Esquimaux-Hamlin about five years ago.

“Over the years, I’ve kind of gotten more into it,” McGregor says. “I’ve upgraded the equipment I had and now I’ve got a drone so I can do aerial photography. It’s allowed me to get different kinds of photos from above. I just love getting outside and kind of experiencing the world through my lens and sharing that with other people.”

McGregor is also studying geography and aviation at the University of Waterloo with the goal of becoming a pilot.

“Just recently I went up with someone else in my program,” McGregor says. “I had my camera of course with me for taking pictures and video recording. Flying over the city was really spectacular — I really enjoyed that experience and I hope to do stuff like that all around the world one day.”

King, an early childcare assistant at Native Child and Family Services Toronto whose father is from Jamaica and mother is a Wasauksing citizen, enjoyed sharing her love of cooking, including how to make one of her favourite recipes, during the presentation.

“It’s called no-bake granola bars, so you can either have a cereal bar or granola,” King says. “You can either add marshmallows or apples, whatever you prefer. You don’t have to cook anything — the only thing you have to cook is the brown sugar and then you add some honey to it.”

King says she was asked about the different kinds of cereals that could be used and what else could be added to the granola bars during her presentation.

“You can pretty much put anything you want to make it healthier or non-healthy,” King says. “My son likes granola bars so I thought about making them instead of buying them at the store because when you get them at the store there’s all these ingredients. If you make them yourself you know what you’re putting into it.”

King also spoke about some of the beading, mitts and moccasins she creates during the presentation.

“It’s a little bit of an inheritance from my mom,” King says.

King says both sides of her family have similar backgrounds from the countryside.

“My family in Jamaica, they’re out in the country and the people from my Native side, they’re in the country as well,” King says. “When I went to Jamaica, they were plucking their own chickens and they thought me being Canadian I wouldn’t know about that but little did they know my mother’s mom had a farm of her own. My [Canadian] grandma had chickens, she had rabbits, she had pigs — all that stuff I inherited learning from her.”