By Sarah Wallace

National Aboriginal Day events moved to July 13

Jul 2, 2013 | 6:31 AM

National Aboriginal Day was celebrated on June 21, and Prince Albert’s Indian and Metis Friendship Centre was to hold celebrations on that day but due to the amount of rain they had to postpone the event.

Executive director for the Friendship Center Connie Farber said they now have a new date set for their celebrations.

On July 13, the centre will hold the event, rain or shine, in Kinsmen Park.

“It’s a Saturday which is really neat because more families can hopefully come out. It’s not a long weekend so it’s something to do on a weekend,” Farber said.

She said they have a large tent they will be setting up in case of bad weather.

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“The only way it would ever be cancelled is if there were tornado warnings or something like that, then we would have to rebook … right now we’re all good to go,” Farber said.

The day will feature a Run of Hope for Missing Aboriginal Women and an attempt to set the record for the largest Round Dance.

Run of Hope for Missing Aboriginal Women

Kurtis McAdam wanted to do something special for Aboriginal Day and after looking on YouTube and doing some research he came across something called the Run of Hope.

“The more I looked into it I started to understand more and I found out there’s a few family members of mine that went missing,” McAdam said.

He said he started speaking with his elders about it, and they started sharing stories about their people being sent out to Alberta. Many of the aboriginal women never came back.

McAdam said every year they hold a round dance in honour of the residential school children who never came home and said since this is a memorial why not include missing aboriginal women.

“We’re hoping there is going to be a big turn out and people will support this and remember [the missing women],” he said.

The walk will take place on that Saturday at 11:30 a.m. at the Satellite Station on Highway 55.

McAdam said there will be signs along the way for people to follow.

World’s Largest Round Dance

Paul Daigneault is a part of the Regional Aboriginal People’s Circle (RAPC) and is one of the main people putting together the World’s Largest Round Dance.

He said RAPC wanted to try and attempt the largest round dance as a way to create awareness.

“Our Regional Aboriginal People’s Circle is actually about creating awareness about aboriginal issues and helping to create understanding so we were thinking about ideas of how to go about making sure that there was awareness out there, so we thought let’s try a world record,” Daigneault said.

RAPC found out there was no record set for the World’s Largest Round Dance so they thought they would give it a try.

“There is nothing registered with the Guinness Book of World Records,” he said.

RAPC has signed an agreement with Guinness and they will attempt the dance at 6 p.m. on July 13 with registration taking place at 5 p.m. at the main stage in Kinsmen Park.

Robin Longjohn explains that a round dance “is a gathering of nations.”

“There are many forms of round dancing, there is memorial, birthday, anniversary … people gather together just to share laughter. We have people from all over that just come together … it’s simple, a round dance, a gathering of nations to have fun,” Longjohn said.

Daigneault said they are hoping to have 1,000 people take part in the dance.

swallace@panow.com

On Twitter: @sarahthesquid