Went to Eagle Lake pow wow on Saturday. Got there around 1930hrs. Each time I go there I realise why people love it so much. You don’t need to be native to appreciate awesome dancing. I don’t know how it is for others… but when the drumming is awesome, and dancers to match I literally forget everything around me and zone in on the dancing. For those who don’t know… the drum beat is representing the heartbeat of ‘Mother Earth’. If you get a good drum group like Northern Wind, Whitefish Bay Singers or Bear Creek, the beat becomes insidious. Sitting there watching the dancers moving in time to the drum you start focusing on that… before you know you’re moving in time to the drum and quite simply lose sight of the hundreds of people around you. It’s still quite weird… even more so considering my race… or what my race is not.

I dearly wish and hope for Nicolas to grass dance and Alex to shawl dance when they are both old and confident enough. I don’t want my children to lose out on one half of their culture because I’m not indigenous. I definitely don’t want them to become living proof that the government’s racist assimilation policies work so well. I don’t want them to become typical ‘assimilated indians’.

I can teach them about making the perfect cup of tea, and tending to a garden, and how to make Bangers & Mash, Spotted Dick and Toad in the Hole… I can even teach them a little cockney rhyming slang and all the stuff about British culture – but I can’t teach them the Anishinaabe language, nor can I teach them traditional arts like hunting or dancing, or drumming. I can teach them beading as I’m the bomb at that… but nothing else.

---

On another note I wrote an earlier blog about being romantic. I was thinking hard about that after someone commented… and I realised that I don’t think I am a hopeless romantic. Course, a relationship with romance in it is a good thing… but I’m not the type that would spend three nights a week having candlelit dinners, dancing in a breezy gazebo in the moonlight, and renting out penthouse suites in hotels with rose petals sprinkled all over the floor.I meant that I want a relationship where I can feel the person loves me without having to say it to each other… without having to constantly walk arm in arm, or without having to constantly be touchy feely. I’ve been missing out on that since forever. Having never been in a relationship with love in it, I think it’s only natural to hypothesise about what it’s like… know what I mean? So I think I was wrong in the earlier post which SUCKS because I HATE contradicting myself.