Culture camp on Sask. First Nation gives youth rare opportunity to learn land-based skills

"This is awesome," Ryan Caron said. "This is really good."

Caron, 35, is a member of Beardy's and Okemasis' Cree Nation, a First Nation located next to the small town of Duck Lake, Sask., about 85 kilometres north of Saskatoon.

On Thursday, Caron was one of several organizers who watched as about a dozen youth from the First Nation enjoyed a rare opportunity to learn traditional land-based skills — everything from creating medicine bags to working collaboratively with their families to erect a teepee.

Caron's voice flooded with emotion shortly after 13-year-old Hayden Blackbird and hunter Conway Katcheech clasped hands.

Katcheech was guiding Hayden as the teen took his turn slicing off a section of moose leg. Katcheech had shot the approximately 700-pound animal early that morning in a prized spot on the North Saskatchewan River near Fort Carlton.

"Never cut towards yourself, always away," Katcheech instructed, going on to talk about the signs of bad meat: a nasty smell and a lack of fat, none of which were in evidence on Thursday.

This was Hayden's first time butchering  a moose. Afterward, he said the experience had boosted his confidence.

"I'm just really proud of myself that I can do that kind of stuff," he said.

Jordan's Principle in action

Caron works for the First Nation's Willow Cree Health Services as a parent aide, helping to provide learning opportunities rooted in what's known as "Jordan's Principle."

Jordan River Anderson was a young boy from Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba who was born with several disabilities. He died in hospital in 2005 at the age of five after various levels of government disagreed for years over who should pay for his specialized care.

Jordan's death galvanized a movement striving to ensure that Indigenous children receive the same level of care and education as their non-Indigenous counterparts. In 2007, the House of Commons passed Jordan's Principle, which is a legal obligation, to ensure that the needs of a First Nations child requiring a government service take precedence over jurisdictional issues around which level of government pays for it.

In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found the federal government was being discriminatory in how it implemented the principle, and the tribunal has been called upon to issue non-compliance and other orders.

Today the federal government helps fund a wide a variety of Jordan's Principle activities and projects every year, including this week's culture camp at Beardy's and Okemasis' Cree Nation. The lessons there were meant to foster team-building skills and a sense of kinship within families, who could choose to sleep overnight in a teepee.

It was also a way to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next.

Caron says that after living in the city for years, he didn't know much about his own culture. It was his children's burgeoning interest in things such as dance that got him thinking about the need to preserve traditions.

"Gotta learn for them," he said of his own self-education in recent years.

The camp took place in a large, grassy field owned by the family of Hal Cameron, a cultural resource support worker for Willow Cree Health Services who helped co-organize the event.

"We really wanted to emphasize the beauty and acknowledge our land here," Cameron said. "There's some people who live five minutes from here, and they were in awe that we had this kind of landscape behind us."

It's the first time in three years a camp like this has taken place locally, in part due to COVID-19, he says.

Janelle Sutherland, Cameron's fellow organizer and a co-ordinator for the federal Community Action Program for Children, was also key to the camp's operation.

"Each gender had a part to make sure the camp ran smoothly," she said of the collaborative nature of traditional camp life.

Sutherland, who picked berries and distributed ice cubes so attendees could cool off under the blazing sun, says she felt humbled to be able to freely practise her culture, considering the old, federally imposed pass system that once restricted band members' movements off the reserve.

"This is my homeland, and it feels really good to be sharing it with all the youth because they are the ones who are going to be carrying on all these traditions," she said.

Food security instructor Jennifer Cameron was on hand to teach the kids how to cut and prepare strips of dry meat from the moose shot and skinned by Katcheech.

She clearly relished the opportunity to pass on what she'd been taught by an elder from another First Nation.

"I have some students that are 11 who make it regularly now," Cameron said.

'A break from the reality of the past'

One of the teepees at the site was reserved for the older mentors helping to teach classes at the camp.

Leo Gamble, 54, sat in the teepee awaiting the latest batch of youth to arrive on Thursday afternoon. He was there to teach traditional games using simple materials such as a willow branch.

In one game, partners were entwined in two pieces of string and had to figure out how to become untangled by talking and negotiating with each other, instead of simply taking their hands out of the loops.

Games offered "a form of entertainment during times when we needed a break from the reality of the past," Gamble said.

His parents were students at St. Michael's Indian Residential School near the town of Duck Lake — a system that stripped Indigenous youth of their culture and subjected them to various forms of neglect and abuse.

"When they became parents, they had very little to [no] knowledge of our culture and traditions," Gamble said.

As a young man, he was later able to learn "healthier ways" from elders.

"I was introduced to people that were living spiritual lives, either in recovery from addictions or people who had embraced the culture of our tribe," Gamble said.

And he's now passing that on.

"The little bit that we do today [at] this camp is a testament to the resiliency of our culture."