Taking identity

Sometime around 1910, photographer Edward Curtis visited Piegan Blackfoot leader Little Plume at his home in southern Alberta.

By this time, many indigenous communities were relegated to reserves. Most had been exploited by governments and were viewed as a burden. Many endured poverty due to long-standing ways of life altered.

In this, Curtis found a market in Indian portraits. Framed as "disappearing" cultures, his portrayals of head-dressed chiefs, horse-backed warriors, and women in forests received critical acclaim. U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt called his work "truthful."

What Roosevelt and others didn't know was that indigenous peoples didn't look like this. Curtis brought trunkfuls of clothing and objects with him. When his subjects didn't fit the story he was telling, he dressed them up.

Kateri a saint for everyone

Long a presence in Winnipeg's West End, an aboriginal Roman Catholic parish is slowly discovering a new identity after their patron was elevated to sainthood earlier this year.

"We've come a long way and struggled and we've always been a poor parish," explains Joan Molloy, a member of St. Kateri Tekakwitha Aboriginal Catholic Parish.

"I think sometimes in poverty there's shame. Now we don't have to be ashamed anymore."

Molloy was one of several parishioners who travelled to Rome to witness the canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha on Oct. 21, 2012. St. Kateri is the first North American aboriginal woman to become a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.

Accounting for the ‘sixties scoop’

My adoption story as an Indian child starts at the old Grace Hospital in Winnipeg in 1968. That's the year I was legally adopted by a white, middle-class family. Like 20,000 other aboriginal children taken from their families in the 1960s, '70s and early '80s, I have been on a life-long journey to reconnect with my family and culture and to figure out how to fit into both of these worlds.

For many adoptees, this was a traumatic experience. Many were sent across Canada, into the United States and some ended up in Europe. This all happened under the unfettered authority of provincial and territorial child welfare agencies.

This dark time in Canada's history became known as "the Sixties Scoop."

I consider myself lucky. I was placed with caring, adoptive parents who loved me, and an adoptive grandmother whom I cherished and adored. However, like all adoptees I still struggle with the reality of trying to reconnect with my birth family and culture.

Roots, resilience, renaissance

Cree elder Betty Ross smudges her glasses, her head, her chest and body, and then offers me the smudge bowl so I can bathe myself in the sweet-smelling blue smoke.

I've come to learn the story of how Cree people came to Manitoba, but first we must smudge.

Tobacco, sage, cedar and sweetgrass and other medicines lay on a star blanket along with Ross's eagle feather, ready for action.

Hurrying hard

On the wall in Arnold Asham's crowded, second-floor office, amid all the curling trophies and business awards, are three words in big, bold, black letters:

Dream, Enjoy, Indulge.

"They're inspiration," the former professional curler and founder of one of Manitoba's most successful Métis-owned businesses -- Asham Curling Supplies -- explains during a recent interview.

Asham is a big believer in the power of positive thinking, and those three words help to keep him in a positive frame of mind. They also rather nicely sum up his approach to life: Dream big, be passionate about what you do and don't be afraid to indulge a little.

Skating through an open door

Playing elite hockey for the past five years, Julie Desrochers credits her aboriginal heritage for helping open that door.

Desrochers, last year's aboriginal female athlete of the year and winner of the Tom Longboat Award, is playing in her fourth year on Manitoba's women's aboriginal hockey team.

An assistant captain of last year's team, she has competed in the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships in Ottawa, Saskatoon and Winnipeg.

Stoking the fire

Playing multiple sports growing in Peguis, Kiinnan Stevenson-French remembers how sports came to him.

Stevenson-French attended many clinics and camps held in his community by the Manitoba Aboriginal Sport and Recreation Association (MASRC).

"It's very important that they do this for kids," said Stevenson-French, 18, who is now a first-year student at the University of Manitoba. He plans to pursue a career in environmental studies and maybe work as a conservation officer.

"It (MASRC) gives a lot of aboriginal athletes a chance to be involved in sports at an earlier age. The clinics and camps are development opportunities to give them a chance to go farther than they maybe thought they ever could."

Faces of the aboriginal community

MatonabbeeBorn in 1737 at the Prince of Wales fort, he was taken in by the chief factor to live there after his father died. He became a "leading Indian" of Churchill and became the middleman between the Hudson's Bay Co. traders and the aboriginal people. He guided Samuel Hearne to the Coppermine River in the Northwest Territories from 1770 to 1772 and was credited with making the expedition a success because he helped the explorers live off the land. He committed suicide in 1782 after he witnessed the French destroy the fort.

Chief PeguisHe was born in 1774 near present-day Sault Ste. Marie before leading his people west to settle at Netley Creek. He was a friend to the Selkirk Settlers and warned Governor Semple about plans by the Nor'westers to destroy the Red River Settlement, advice that Semple ignored, costing him and 20 others their lives at the Battle of Seven Oaks. Peguis later helped Lord Selkirk make treaties with the Cree and Saulteaux and was presented with a treaty medal for his help. He later was given an annual pension from the Hudson's Bay Co. A missionary persuaded Peguis and some of his people to settle in the St. Peter's area north of present-day Selkirk. After being baptized into the Anglican Church, he took the name William King, and his children used the last name Prince. He died in 1864.

Steeped in history

Manitoba is known as the heart of Turtle Island, the universally recognized name for North America among the continent's aboriginal people. Manitoba is historically called Manitowapow, the voice of the Creator.

Out of all the words written about this province, perhaps the most evocative is a newly revealed but ancestral passage about aboriginal feelings for this place. It is written in the introduction to the 2012 anthology Manitowapow edited by Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair and Warren Cariou:

"The most common explanation of the name is drawn from the Cree words Manitou (Great Spirit) and wapow (sacred water) or in Ojibway, Manito-bau: From the Narrows of Lake Manitoba where the waves dashed against the rocky shores of Manitou Island these sounds were thought to be sacred beats that rumbled through Creation and created beauty, definition and meaning. This is the voice of the Great Spirit, Manitowapow."

There are hundred of locations in this province known as historic landmarks dating back thousands of years and many of them known only to oral traditions to this day. Here are a few of the more familiar ones:

Icelandic Canadians are in the arts because they’re artistic

Examine the background of writer-filmmaker-editor Caelum Vatnsdal and you might reasonably suspect the existence of some kind of Icelandic Mafia lurking in the Winnipeg art community.

Consider: the 41 year old Vatnsdal got his start in the local film culture courtesy of the city's premiere filmmaker Guy Maddin, whose first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1989) vividly mythologized the Icelandic-Canadians of Maddin's own ancestry.

(Vatnsdal's first gig was as a camera assistant on Maddin's 1992 feature Careful, but he also appeared on camera and got to utter a single line of dialogue, which he can still recite: "Master has an occluded bowel. Alert Herr Doctor Schmidt at once!")

Look at the list of film projects Vatnsdal has himself directed and note the concert film We're the Weakerthans, We're from Winnipeg, featuring Weakerthans frontman John K. Samson, one of the programmers (along with Vatnsdal) of the Icelandic-Canadian arts festival Núna (Now).