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Learning on the Land

Reflections from the Mississaugas of the New Credit Homecoming Pow Wow

Pow Wow dancers invite audience members to join in for an intertribal song.
Photo credit: Teodora Pasca (1L)

On August 25 and 26, the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation hosted the 32nd annual Three Fires Homecoming Pow Wow and Traditional Gathering. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people came together to celebrate the community’s culture and continued resilience through song, dance, and ceremony.

The New Credit Reserve is located outside Brantford, Ontario, a short drive from the Grand River and roughly equidistant from the shores of two great lakes. Around 2,300 people are members of the First Nation, and about one-third live on reserve. On the weekend of the Pow Wow, the community welcomed visitors from far and wide, including a group of students and staff from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

I was one of those visitors. I am a first-generation immigrant to Canada. My family has only been in Toronto for about sixteen years. I am newer to this land than the descendants of its colonizers, but I am still a settler who benefits, willingly or not, from the settler-colonial state.

Indigenous communities have a long and painful history of protecting their lands and cultures from people who overstayed their welcome. Law itself—Western law—has too often been used to coerce and dispossess Indigenous peoples. In light of that history, it is a remarkable and humbling thing when a First Nation welcomes newcomers like me to their land. And on the day of the Pow Wow, so long as we respected the people and the land that hosted us, we were more than encouraged to participate.

Pow Wow ceremonies are a stunning whirl of colours and sounds. The procession of dancers opens the Pow Wow with the Grand Entry, entering “in a good way” through the eastern door to the ring. Lilting melodies and booming drums fill the air as dancers spin and step to their rhythms. There is something to take away from every song and dance at a Pow Wow, and guests that day were treated to a wide repertoire. Intertribal songs invite everyone to join the circle and dance; honour songs pay solemn respects to those who request them; and the clinking bells of the Jingle Dress dance (traditionally 365 of them, one for each day of the year) is meant to bring health to those who are ill.

It poured rain on and off throughout the festivities, and though the weather would otherwise have made me skittish, I didn’t mind it that day. The theme of the Pow Wow was “Our Story: Water is Life.” The Mississaugas of the New Credit are descendants of the Mississaugas who met annually to exchange goods with white traders at Missinihe (“trusting water”), known to settlers as the Credit River. Water is sacred and precious to the Mississaugas, as it is to many First Nations. It is lifeblood that no being, human or otherwise, can do without.

Today the law school, like the entire university, is situated on Indigenous land. Our classrooms sit on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The least we can do in exchange for the use of the land is to be respectful of its history, including the parts we may be ashamed to confront. If we want to do better, as future lawyers, we should work together to stop that history from repeating itself.

Spending a day at a Pow Wow does not discharge that duty, but it can shed light on how much we have yet to learn. I learned just as much that day at the Pow Wow as I would in a more traditional classroom. I purchased art, I tasted homemade bread, and I watched people of all ages, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, duck under the main tent and dance under the rain. And I will never again walk by water without being grateful that it is there.

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