The Aboriginal Service Centre (ASC) hosted a Mohawk Stories Night with Elder Paul Skanks as the speaker Jan. 6. The event, open to all, was held in the Ojigkwanong Centre on campus.
“This space has many resources for Indigenous students,” said Pitseolak Pfeifer, a student at Carleton who often attends the ASC’s events and spends time in Ojigkwanong. “It maintains a sense of community.”
The group sat in a circle and Elder Skanks commenced his greeting and Thanksgiving address. He held a feather in one hand and a braid of burning sweet grass in the other as he walked around the circle and let the aroma fill the room.
The feather, he told the circle, signifies who is speaking and the scent of sweet grass creates a calming atmosphere, or as Skanks explained, “I do not want to offend anyone, but this is what ‘new-agers’ call aromatherapy. It’s the same thing.”
The importance of Indigenous rites and rituals is associated with the burning of sweet grass, sage, or tobacco.
“We burn that medicine to bring things back into balance,” Skanks said.
The gathering focused on the balance of difference and similarity, of past and present, nature and mankind, and more broadly of good and evil. Throughout his telling of one of the multiplicity of different Indigenous Creation stories, Skanks was emphatic that all these contrasting concepts serve a unified purpose.
Before his telling of the story, Skanks looked around the circle and said, “There is a commonality in our belief systems . . . But we are distinct—not in our nations or languages but as individuals.”
He said as a child he wasn’t allowed to speak his language at school, on his own reserve, even at recess.
“The educational system of today—don’t get me started on that. It is so flawed.”
He expanded on his experiences in sweat lodges and fasting lodges, clarifying their purpose.
“Both are to withdraw, gain clarity in what life is about. To help change the lives of not the individual but of the world,” he said. “Don’t show up to a sweat lodge like a Cineplex.”
During his telling of the Creation story, he passed around a cup filled with peach pits, with one side painted black. He said they represented the skulls of chickadees, a sacrifice made by the natural world in the story. With this sacrifice as an example, he accentuated the importance in his culture of being thankful of the natural world, all creations, and the Creator.
At the conclusion of the event, Elder Skanks had everyone hold hands in the circle as he recited his closing, then instructed each person to hug one another and thank each other.
“I’m not prophesizing, but think about these things,” he said to the circle. “Think about the importance of saying thank you.”
