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Antoine Mountain
Guest columnist
Monday, March 10, 2008
It is good to see the younger generation becoming more actively involved in their Dene culture.
In this case I am referring to a recent drum making workshop put on by the Deh Gah school in Fort Providence, for its Grade 6 class.
Lawrence Denetre showed the boys there how to make their own traditional hand drums while Aline LaFlamme, a Metis from Vancouver, instructed the young ladies in her style. Many people do not know Fort Providence served as a centre for the residential schools, where many of our Dene generations went.
Our older people tell of their experiences, when it was a matter of course to spend all of five years away from home, to finally return and have to re-learn their languages, like having to learn how to walk again after a major accident.
People my age got off pretty easy in comparison, getting to go home at least two months of each year.
We lived those warm summer months in fishcamps along the Duho Gah, now the Mackenzie River. Our parents were in Radilih Koe/Fort Good Hope to meet us when we returned, as was the entire town.
Each elder tearfully hugged and kissed each child and called you by your Dene name. In other ways you were made to feel that you were home and life returned to a normal pattern. I do remember an elder in camp playing his drum and singing for joy in the softly glowing mornings!
My grandfather died when I was younger and so it was left for my grandmother to raise my sister Judy and I.
Last summer, at the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik, Judy, while busy sewing, would regale us as to how we lived with grandma.
She would have the two of us young children, one on each side of her under a mosquito-bar, about ready to retire for the night. Grandma would then pass her old pipe to one of us to fill with strong tobacco and on to the other to light it. Then, just as slowly, take it to smoke and see to it that it got passed on back and forth, telling us old-time Dene legends and stories of "how people are" the whole time.
Although many of these stories were long we would beg for more under the midnight sun and it got pretty smoky under that mosquito bar, too!
We got our choice of the kind of stories we wanted to hear and we learned early not to try to be anyone else but ourselves, which still carries us through in life.
So anyway friends, these are the thoughts also lovingly imparted by this drum making workshop in Providence. I also say mahsi cho to reporter Roxanna Thompson and Shanna Hagen for this excellent spread in Deh Cho Drum.
- Antoine Mountain is a Dene artist and writer originally from Radilih Koe'/Fort Good Hope. He can be reached at www.amountainarts.com