This is a brand-new initiative with the youth who have decided that we want to implement an action plan to bring culture, traditions, and history back to our everyday modern lives. We aim to create a healthy balance with a two-eyed seeing approach and incorporating teachings into our daily lives (such as focusing on all four aspects of health as it pertains to the medicine wheel).
How do we connect our modern, everyday life whilst keeping alive the culture and tradition of our ancestors? As of this moment, our community is lacking cultural traditions that are accessible for anybody and everybody in our community. Our youth sees the value in this as our core belief because some families lack cultural teachings and thus our goal is to change that and reimplement our cultural traditions. We are an Odawa community and understand that Odawa culture and traditions are very under- represented. We are passionate about changing this narrative by taking the time to learn the basics and roots of our culture. This year we will focus on the roots, then slowly grow larger and larger each year expanding our horizons, knowledge, and opportunities for community members.
Food sovereignty is one very important goal for us so we are going to start a medicine and traditional food garden, both available for community use and for trade with outside communities. This year we start small by learning how to care for and tend to the gardens. This will teach us patience, love, and the care it takes to grow our sacred medicines and traditional foods. This will help us build important relationships with our food and medicines. We would like to get in touch with our ancestors and learn how to trap, fish, hunt, gather, identify species within our ecosystems and bring balance and harmony to those systems as well. We will go on nature walks and learn how to identify edible and medicinal species in our ecosystems. We value spending time out on the land each and every day, so we will be making a conscious effort to try and build those strong relationships with the land around us. We want to be able to identify all flora and fauna around us, such as our ancestors did not too long ago.
Maple Sugar Camp, Moose Hunt, and harvesting will allow us to stay in line with our vision of food sovereignty, while also keeping us in touch with our vision of land-based learning. Ceremony is something our community is lacking and so we aim to implement this into our lives. We aim to begin with about a minimum of four ceremonies a year, upgrading to a monthly basis, every week, and then eventually by learning and creating our own ceremonies we can have them daily. This will not only bring us together and teach us important skills, but it will also help us with our healing, gratitude, and connections to the land, our knowledge, our ancestors, and our own spirits that we have unfortunately become so detached from. Everything is interconnected and ceremony is a great way to bring back our holistic worldview and traditions. These key traditions are essential for us to understand not only who we are as people, but also as a community and a Nation. Without these roots, we have a skewed sense of our identities which often leads to feeling lost and confused about our purpose. Thus, our goal is to bring back as much of the knowledge of our grandparents, great grandparents, etc. as possible and ensure that our future generations never question their identities as Anishinaabe peoples of Sheshegwaning FN.