2 | NATIONAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY
JUNE 2025
culture
Celebrating the turn of the season
BY LINDSEY WARD
While the turn of each season plays a significant role in Indigenous culture, the summer solstice is an especially spiritual time. It only makes sense for National Indigenous Peoples Day to fall on June 21, says Elder Charlotte Nolin, a Tastawiniyew Otipemisiwak (two-spirit Métis) with the Ongomiizwin – Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing at the University of Manitoba.
Elder Charlotte Nolin. PHOTO BY DARCY FINLEY
“(Historically) the summer solstice was time to harvest the medicine. They would start doing the hunting and preparing for the fall and winter,” Nolin says. “We recognize that this is the time Creator gave us to enjoy all the fruits, the berries that we gather.” In 1996, Gov. Gen. Roméo LeBlanc declared June 21 National Indigenous Peoples Day. The House of Commons went on to designate the entire month of June as National Indigenous History Month in 2009. With more than 1.8 million Indigenous people in Canada — roughly five per cent of the country’s population — there is a strong need to honour the unique traditions, stories and achievements of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. A ’60s Scoop survivor, Nolin devotes her life to educating future generations about Indigenous culture. She says with the summer solstice comes an explosion of highly spiritual ceremonies, primarily the Sundance, in which participants dance for four days with no food or water. Some will even perform sacrificial rituals such as dragging buffalo skulls for the course of that period. “It’s a very spiritual ceremony and there are hundreds and hundreds of people that come to support those dancers during that time,” Nolin says. The balmy season is also a time when Indigenous cultures seek purification at sweat lodges — heated
dome-shaped huts comprised of natural materials. Led by elders, sweat lodge ceremonies can lead participants to clarity by communicating with Spirit, Nolin says. “Some people go to church to pray. We go to sweat lodges to pray. We know that for some of us, Spirit will speak to us while we’re in the sweat lodge and we’ll get messages about certain things and that dictates where your path in life is going.” That path pertains not only to individual participants but to the entire universe to which they’re connected. The Cree word for this interconnectedness is Wahkohtowin, explains Nolin. “All the plants, the animals, the birds, those that swim, those that crawl. For you to walk in a good way among all your relatives, you must take good care of how you look after yourself.” Another Indigenous cleansing ceremony is smudging, which involves prayer and the burning of sacred medicines such as cedar, sage or tobacco. Used for both medicinal and spiritual purposes, smudging is said to carry the prayers of the people to Creator and promotes positivity and peacefulness, Nolin says. “We use the smudge as a cleaning ceremony for ourselves so that when we look through our eyes, we see the good things in creation. We speak from our spirits so that good words come out,” she says. “When we extend
our hands, it’s out of love, not violence. And we ask Creator, we ask our ancestors to walk with us every day, to guide us in what we do.” While Nolin has spent nearly four decades educating others about her traditions, she spent the first four decades of her own life in the dark about what those traditions even were. For the first 14 years of her life, she was associated with the Catholic church, attending schools that painted Indigenous people as “savages that went around scalping people,” she says. The above- mentioned ceremonies were illegal back then and punishable by jail time. Many more years passed before Nolin began her cultural discovery. “I was 40 years old when I first became aware of who I was as an Indigenous person.” After her career change from construction to social work, elders began encouraging Nolin to embrace her culture, and she hasn’t looked back. Several years ago, Nolin was driving back from Sundance when her ancestors spoke to her. “They said this is your purpose here on Mother Earth, to leave footprints behind that others will choose to follow,” she recalls. “And I was in the truck, I said to myself, now it makes so much sense. I understand what life is all about — to leave footprints behind that others will choose to follow.”
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