Tradition comes to Spoken Word
When Sheri-D Wilson visited five elders who represented the Treaty 7 nations to discuss a project back in late January, she found more than a little common ground.
Wilson was looking for a way to incorporate the first people’s of this area — representatives from the five tribes from southern Alberta that signed the Treaty 7 agreement in 1877 — into the Calgary Spoken Word Festival for its 10th anniversary.
“In the circle that we had, there was sweetgrass burning, prayers,” said Wilson, who is director and founder of the festival. “The first thing that one of the elders brought up — Reg Crowshoe — was ‘what is poetry?’
“What they said about what poetry is in their language in the five nations, each of them had a different response. It was remarkably enlightening because it basically described what I had been exploring for all of my life up until now.”
The meeting eventually led to Tribute to this Land: The Elder Project. It involved Piikani Nation’s Crowshoe, Kainai Nation’s Martin Eaglechild, Tsuu T’ina Nation’s Tom Heaven Fire, Stoney Nation’s Sykes Powderface and Siksika Nation’s Clarence Wolfleg Sr. visiting three urban schools.
At those schools — Piitoayis Family School, Louis Riel School and Bow Valley High School — traditional stories were shared with students, who then took the stories and put their own artistic stamp on them. What resulted is a booklet, which will be launched Sunday as part of the Spoken Word Festival.
In a way, it encapsulates what the festival has been doing for years: Bridging generations and cultures by investigating the power of poetry, storytelling and performance.
On Sunday at the Festival Hall in Inglewood, five of the students will present their poems, which were inspired by tales of the Creator and the land.
Anita Crowshoe, the daughter of Reg and the project co-ordinator, says the resulting artwork and poetry showed her that the aboriginal youth, while perhaps increasingly distant from their heritage, still felt the spark of storytelling and their history.
“My hopes around this project was not just for the young people experiencing it, to hear the stories, but to see how that information has been processed in the 21st Century. Is it shareable with mainstream populations so they have opportunities to learn from it.”