La Ronge girls Rock at Camp

They built on the success of the camp in Stanley Mission when they created the La Ronge version, which started on Monday and wraps up Friday with the campers showing the public their work in a final showcase performance at Senator Myles Venne School, starting at 5 pm.

“We started the program in Stanley Mission with one of our first programs ever was Girls Rock Camp and we decided to call it Girls Rock the North and we’ve been doing girls rock camp every year in Stanley mission since,” Doyle said.

The camp in La Ronge also called elders from the Woodland Cree to make sure that the culture of their people is properly represented in the camp.

“We’re so tickled that we can bring it to La Ronge and it’s going so well,” said Doyle.

They had the New Dawn Drum Group come to the camp and speak about their mission and to perform.

New Dawn are family members of Happy Charles, a resident of La Ronge who has been missing from Prince Albert since 2017.

This is the first time the CAMP team has added cultural art to a camp, but they decided it was important to do it right.

“In doing consultations with communities before bringing in any forms of cultural arts, we met with Elder Abby McIntyre, and she said that she’d like to be beading and dancing traditional dancing. So we are including it and it’s kind of spiraling us into another idea,” Doyle said.

They won’t dance at tomorrow’s performance because the girls do not have regalia and that’s where the new idea came from; a regalia-making camp.

The La Ronge camp has included beading as an initial Indigenous art, although there are many more.

“When we look at Indigenous culture and history and traditional use of the arts, it’s really a form of expression, storytelling. And when we look at, like singing, dancing, our art styles, every Indigenous group has their own unique versions of all of those,” Yuzicapi said.

To help demonstrate the beading, Yuzicapi brought in her own regalia and showed the campers various women’s power dances that they would see in pow wows across the province.

As a Dakota woman from a community in Treaty 4 territory, Yuzicapi is aware that it doesn’t necessarily follow cultural practices, and things will be the same in La Ronge, which is in Treaty 6 and includes Plains and Woodland Cree people as well as Assiniboine.

“So all of our peoples in the province, all our Indigenous peoples, have stories of how and why we do things the way that we do. There’s a lot of similarities, but with the movement of like reconciliation and things like that, there’s people that are assuming we’re all the same, but we’re actually all very different,” Yuzicapi said.

She gains the local knowledge from the local people and her own observations.

One of the key differences she has noted in northern girls is a lack of shyness like she sees in more southern communities.

“They’re very confident and that’s something that I find that’s different from the south,” Yuzicapi said.

“I think music is just bigger in the north or there’s more opportunities for it. So that’s one of the things that I noticed coming up here. The bravery they have to perform and like, even like a lot of them already have confidence in, you know, songwriting and wanting to play an instrument.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com

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by Susan McNeil

La Ronge girls Rock at Camp

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