Carleton’s aboriginal community kicked off the fifth annual Aboriginal Awareness Week (AAW) the morning of Jan. 18 with performances such as the Men’s Traditional Dance and the Fancy Shawl Dance.
“Our main goal of the week is to bring students, staff and faculty together to join in celebrating the diversity that we have here on campus,” said Naomi Sarazin, aboriginal cultural liaison officer with Carleton’s Centre for Aboriginal Culture and Education (CASE), of AAW, which lasts four days.
“It gives participants the ability to share in a meaningful, educational experience and to advance their knowledge on the culture, history and current status of Aboriginal People,” Sarazin said.
Tenasco explained how she went from a high school teacher to a business owner with the invention of moccasins for babies.
Keynote speaker Clealls John Medicine Horse Kelly, co-director of the Centre for Indigenous Research, Culture, Language and Education (CIRCLE) at Carleton, spoke of the importance of preserving aboriginal language and culture and how it can make all the difference in aboriginal communities and youth living within them.
“A healthy community means healthy children, and healthy children mean a healthy community,” Kelly said. “They are an eternal bond. The two ideas cannot be separated.”
Other events include Inuit drum dancing, Métis jigging, round-dancing, and a performance by Yuk Yuk’s comedian Don Kelly.
“This is just a finger-in-the-water sort of thing,” said fellow aboriginal cultural liaison officer Irvin Hill. “There’s a lot more that happens in aboriginal life and there’s a lot more that can be shared.”