It is very difficult for Indigenous Peoples to tell their personal stories about the impact of colonialism on them and very difficult for non-indigenous people who feel great pride about who we are as Canadians to hear them. While non-Indigenous today are not to blame for what happened in the past, we are nevertheless still all treaty people.
We all share the impact of colonialism, not only on the relationship between us but also on the way our land is suffering from our thoughtless exploitation of her resources. Healing is a two-sided process and requires that when working on a project together we step into “ethical space” where each people brings to it their respective knowledge and values in order to generate “two eyed seeing.” It requires that we listen to one another respectfully with appreciation for what each brings to the project to see how it sheds light on what is required. We believe that the actual pursuit of a project itself in this way is what reconciliation looks like at the community level.
The Seven Gifts is then a project where we sought to model reconciliation in this way. The process of creating it was a cooperative one between an Indigenous and non-Indigenous artist supported by MMAMR to reflect the nature of the Truth and Reconciliation process.
The principal artists were Deborah Arnold, stone carver, and Nish Nabie, wood carver. Elder Larry McDermott, an Algonquin of the Shabot Obaajiwan First Nation was the Indigenous advisor for the project.
Our goal was to celebrate the cultural and spiritual beliefs of the Algonquin Anishinaabe embodied by their seven grandfather teachings and to provide an accessible, educational, sacred space for people to come to reflect on them.
The installation is located on the Mississippi River in Riverfront Park 321 Spring Street Almonte. It includes seven marble stones arranged in a twenty five foot circle. On each one is a bronze copy of a carved totem representing one of the seven grandfather teachings. The heron, the totem representing this installation was chose by Nish Nabie because it was used as a signature by some Algonquin tribes at the Great Montreal Peace Accord in 1701.
The images for the above photo story were taken by Rik Walton.