SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
The beat of drums could be heard throughout downtown Yellowknife over the lunch hour on Friday as more than 100 people gathered on the lawn in front of city hall Friday to celebrate spring.
One-and-a-half year old Namen Joseph James Sangris played along with the group of Dene drummers from time to time throughout the hour-long gathering. - Laura Busch/NNSL photo |
As the group of eight Dene drummers from Yellowknife, Fort Providence, Wrigley, Fort Good Hope and Fort Simpson got things going with a traditional Dene drum dance, Annie Mitsima was the first of the crowd to start dancing, along with her one-year-old granddaughter Mialia LeBlanc.
Mitsima said she brought her granddaughter out "to help celebrate spring with the Dene people."
Dene people traditionally hold celebrations in late spring, when ice is breaking up, the land is coming back to life and people are returning to their communities after being on the land hunting in the winter and early spring, said Lawrence Nayally, who organized the event along with several volunteers.
"It's a renewal of the North. The ducks and the geese are flying back up to their migration areas. The moose and the caribou are going back to their calving grounds, everything all around up in the North is coming back to life," he said. "And (this drum dance is) to celebrate that and each other and how we used to be."
Also, it is a way to shake off the winter blues after a long, cold winter of being cooped up indoors and enter the social summer season.
In general, people in Yellowknife seem too busy to participate in traditional activities such as a community tea dance to mark the changing of the seasons, said Nayally, but added more people turned out and participated than he expected.
"Look, the city came out! There were a lot of people who came out," said Nayally. "More of this is needed. In small communities they do things like this a lot, but not really here in Yellowknife."
This event was not really about the Idle No More movement, events which Nayally also helped organize in Yellowknife over the winter. However, its intentions were somewhat the same: to show the youth of today are united and capable and to celebrate aboriginal culture.
"Just doing that in itself shows that we're doing this out of respect for what nature has to give to us and respect for each other," he said.
