BY MICHELLE FOURNIE
Michelle Fournie (she/her/hers) is cree-Metis/English & Irish. Her Blackfoot name translates to “Centre Pole Offering Woman”. She supports her two children, and niece to her late sister as a committed wife to a Captain/Firefighter.
Owner of anti-oppressive communications consulting company, Sacred Four Communications, she is completing the last season of her Master of Educational Research degree at the University of Calgary. Michelle also serves as the Manager of an Indigenous student centre at a local community college in Calgary, and current co-chair of the Indigenous Gathering Place Society of Calgary.
Here Michelle offers Some thoughts on what it might look like to weave traditional practices into Western systems.
My vocational practice, research, and volunteerism is often centred between worlds. This is a natural calling as a young-ish Metis mother striving to reconnect to self, land, language, community, and being born, raised, and still living in an urban centre. Piikani Elder Dr. Reg Crowshoe and William Ermine of Sturgeon Lake First Nation might call this space between worlds an “ethical space.” I am drawn to reconciliatory work and my practice is informed by the Metis sash—interwoven in story to create something useful, strong, and new to survive.
There’s tension in this space for me.
We are collectively mourning as we lose those who should inform the future state of the world—Indigenous children to death by suicide, diseases of addictions, and discriminatory apprehension. I grieve the Elders who carry the stories that would have saved us. I listen for the last time to our languages, ever. I cry the tears of each side of my ancestors. I directly heal from the intergenerational trauma passed down to me through these hurt people who also had the highest hopes for their children. I relieve this tension by learning Wise Ways and applying them immediately to new scenarios. I navigate the Western system with the experience of generous allies while providing for my family and chasing education. One day I face lateral violence and the next day my face is painted with the same ochre that has protected the peoples for centuries.
Learning how to weave in new ways of working and being with each other is extremely complicated. But to be effective, this sash must make room for all threads, simultaneously distinctive and together. It must hold appropriate tension and be created with patience and attention.
I’m scared, but I do it anyways.
I grew up in the 80s in urban parks and my mom yelling, “don’t be scared, just go down!” after seeing my petrified look on the top of the oversized metal slide. Thirty years later with my own children, I offer a different approach courtesy of the conscious parenting movement by saying, “I know you’re scared, and go down anyways!” This is also how I view reconciliation.
What happens when we choose to go down anyways?
We choose accurate and powerful language to properly describe the unimaginable acts of violence, abuse, and harm inflicted on all Indigenous children and families in the name of economic and political gain.
We start identifying and caring for people experiencing trauma-based responses in the classroom and the workplace, while offering healing through culturally appropriate and holistic service offerings.
We quit boasting to each other about our well-intentioned pan-Indigenous approaches to advance diversity, and re-state each teaching connected to the person and place from which that dream/story/teaching came from.
We create supportive environments for Indigenous peers to engage in reconnection to land, language, culture, while the rest close the gap from awareness training to informed action and power sharing.
We stop antagonizing Indigenous peoples stating that the organization is committed to reconcile but then stifle these talented individuals because our systems aren’t ready to withstand that much change that fast.
We honestly refer to murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit beings as targets of current systemic racism and oppression, rather than casualties and victims of an unfortunate history.
We transform well-meaning discussions to brave conversations that start with different and better questions.
We mentor and invest in Indigenous youth so they too can share in the prosper from their ancestors, including Mother Earth.
We seek and depend on the wisdom of every single Elder that walks in kindness, selflessness, and love, despite what we have put them through as a country.
We start sharing.
We keep listening.
We work together.
We go down anyways.