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Antoine Mountain
Guest columnist
Monday, January 14, 2008
Friends, the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Film Festival, held in Toronto a couple of months ago, featured a number of excellent First Nations films along with, surprisingly enough, a winner from the North.
This one was in the form of a show highlighting the traditional, ceremonial uses of tobacco and its comparative modern abuses by cigarette smokers.
The celebrated entry, a one-hour radio feature hosted by none other than CKLB's Rita Chretien and elder Bob Wasicuna, took the grand prize from among many hours of other entries, proving that its parent company and Native-run society, the Native Communications Society, takes no back seat to any other in the field of Native broadcasting.
Many old(er)-timers in the North remember Rita's father, Tapwe Chretien, who was involved early in the Native Communications and was a first-rate activist for our Dene rights. Bob Wasicuna, of course, needs no introduction for his selfless work with many of our people still going through our traumas and in need of his traditional, spiritual knowledge and healing ways.
It is also fitting that a show on the topic of tobacco should win such a prize. According to some of our elders, this one of the four sacred plants, the others being sweetgrass, cedar and sage, was originally planted by The Creator himself on our Great Turtle Island (North America) many millennium ago. He had this plant in between his toes and jumped from place to place as he travelled, leaving a little of this tobacco in each place he visited.
Our peoples eventually learned to use this plant in a sacred manner, and it is still used today as a kind of spiritual currency, for when you are making an offering in place of taking something to use in the ceremony from the land. It is also given to an elder out of respect for their teachings, or in exchange for some good advice.
Sweetgrass is also said to attract the good spirits and is burned each morning by many of our people to start off the day in a good way. Cedar, they say, was once a very kind-hearted person. The cedar tree grew off the spot where this person was buried, so we use it to keep the bad spirits away.
The final of the four sacred plants, sage, from the little I know, is mainly a woman's plant, but can also be used to have a clear mind.
Well, friends, no doubt these and other related topics are the kinds of teachings that earned communicators Rita Chretien and Bob Wasicuna their prize for "The Tobacco Show," as this one has come to be known. So, I for one am glad that the work we started with the earlier version of our Dene Nation has now continued to bear fruit from the tree of life. Masi Cho.
- Antoine Mountain is a Dene artist and writer originally from Radilih Koe'/Fort Good Hope. He can be reached at www.amountainarts.com