Miss Indigenous Canada contestant helps First Nations in emergency situations

By Kelly Anne Smith

KETTLE AND STONY POINT FIRST NATION— Miss Indigenous Canada contestant Alabama Bressette is from Kettle and Stony Point First Nation and currently working in Poplar River First Nation, Manitoba, where she works in emergency management.

“I’ve been working with ISN Maskwa for about a year. It’s proud to be an Indigenous organization that helps during emergency situations – floods, fires – and gives community engagement during a state of emergency, drug epidemics, doing patrols around communities, kinda like security. We are CSPs (community support personnel) – we’re here helping the community with whatever Chief and Council asks for.”

Her employer can take over entire communities to do evacuations as well, says Alabama.

“When I’m not a CSP, I’m part of the command team. I’m the planning chief. That’s oversight of the community being in a different place. For the month of April until halfway through May, I was in Barrie with the community of Kashechewan (First Nation) because of a pre-evacuation for flooding.”

Alabama has been busy since January, only home for less than 30 days.

“I need to go home and hang out with family, visit my Grandma, my Popi. It’s always a minimum of two weeks. After that, if they ask us to stay a little bit longer they switch us out so that we can go home.”

Talking about home had Alabama explaining the important history of why she distinguishes that she is from Stony Point First Nation.

“I am part of the Kettle and Stony Point band, but during World War II, with the War Measures Act, the federal government came in and displaced the Stony Point community into Kettle Point. And they promised the land back and said it was only for training,” she explains. “Stony Point, it’s also known as Ipperwash, Camp Ipperwash. That’s where Dudley George was shot…Since they were promised land way back in the day, it just never got returned…It ended up being a cadet base. My whole life I lived in an army barrack because back on May 6, 1993, I wasn’t born yet, my whole community went in peacefully and said, ‘We’re going to take our land back and we’re going to live here’.”

“Back then, my grandma and my grandpa, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins all just went in and took a barrack. Since then, we’ve been living in there. In the past five years, they’ve been doing transitional homes. It’s kind of a heart-breaker watching these barracks get torn down because these are my friend’s and my childhood homes. But it’s for a better future. The land is getting cleaned up. People have clean water in their transitional trailers,” Alabama continues. “One thing about home with the cleanup, there are undetonated bombs and grenades and ammunition. So, there are contractors there and everyday between the hours of four and six, if you’re not familiar with it, you can hear these detonations go off. What they do is they bury it into the ground and safely detonate them and it rattles every single building, scares every dog. You feel it in your chest because there’s quite a few of them that go off every day…As a child, we were told that if you see something metal sticking out of the ground, let an adult know, don’t go up and touch it because it could be an undetonated bomb.”

It is active protest to grow up living in an army barrack on the land the family took back from the federal government.

“With the living conditions that we’ve had and knowing other First Nations that have issues recognized by the federal government, ever since I was young, I felt a calling to step up to the plate and challenge that this not how a Canadian citizen should be living. We are all a part of Canada. This is our nation and we need to work together, not against each other.”

Alabama is an advocate for Right to Play. A role model of Alabama’s, Candace Scott Moore, was a mentor for Right to Play, bringing it to her community.

“Before Right to Play, a lot of the youth didn’t speak to each other. When Right to Play came into the community, they showed us leadership, life skills, built up our confidence. And I fell in love with the program. It was all youth-run. We got to do a lot of community events. That’s where a lot of my friends and I in the community became closer. And where I learned we all share the same thoughts,” she recollects. “Just recently we started coming together and we’re doing youth nights. We’re drumming. And we’re trying to do community socials to get the people of Stony Point back together as one community again. With Right to Play, as a youth I was sent to a summer program and there, we didn’t know we were getting evaluated on our public speaking skills. I was fortunate enough to be asked to do a speech regarding First Nation communities and their issues that they face and what Right to Play has done for me in those times.”

Planning for her Miss Indigenous Canada Traditional Presentation, the first thing that came to mind was a teaching and a hand drum song.

“I was a part of the First Nation Technical Institute program for social work…we did a lot of self- recognition and self-healing. One of the requirements that we had was learn about the drum, feast our drum, and continue to use it,” she explains. “In that program, I got to learn a song and I’m planning on doing a little teaching about how sometimes life goes fast…life is constantly changing. That’s kind of the teaching behind the song. I’m proud to have my drum. I’m proud to use it at home and teach the kids some songs…My Grandma, she went to Residential Schools. I never heard her speak Ojibwe. She was real proud of me of making my drum. ‘Can you come over and sing for me?’ I’ve got to sing for her. She spoke a little bit of Ojibwe to me. And it made me just break down and cry because I’m seeing her get past her traumas and she’s trying to teach me from her childhood and that really touches my heart because as old as I am, she never opened up like that to me before.”