Indigenous People's Solidarity Group
The June 2023 Solstice ceremony at St. Matthew's Indigenous Healing Garden. (Marcelle St-Amant)
The Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Group (IPSG) was founded in 2018, as congregants and community members acted on the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We aspire to live in accordance with St. Matt’s Territorial Acknowledgement, now posted streetside, which recognizes 15,000 years of Indigenous history in this place as well as our commitment as settlers to the Land and its first stewards.
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The IPSG hosts regular ceremonies and events—including book studies, Indigenous Song Circles, liturgies, and other activities—as well as oversees Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan/Healing Garden.
Anyone can join the gardening, reconciliation and spiritual events being held in the garden. Sign up for the St. Matt’s e-newsletter for regular invitations and reflections from the IPSG, and/or contact Outreach Coordinator Betsy Anderson to join. Keep up with our activities on Facebook.
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Why We Wear Orange 2024 Campaign
We wear orange because we are Treaty People, not just one day a year, but every day. If we are settlers here we have not honoured our Treaty obligations, nor have we made just reparations for that dishonouring.
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Listen to the Haudenosaunee Oral History of the Two Row Wampum/Tekhni: Teyoh:te? Karwentha: “Now we have laid our vessels out, parallel to each other, so too it is with our beliefs. …Our authority, beliefs, and laws have been dropped into our vessels. That is how people will know it, by the likeness to two paths.”
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This 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Dutch is foundational to Indigenous understandings of peaceful co-existence within shared territories through Treaty-making. Treaties were expected to be honoured “as long as the sun shines, and rivers flow.”
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Thank you to everyone who helped create and/or participated in the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Group's Why We Wear Orange Campaign this September, and/or were part of the many events in Tkaronto that put Indigenous, Metis, and Inuit peoples at the centre. Let us continue to learn together, acknowledge wrong-doing, and move toward the Right Relationship envisioned in the Treaties.
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Honaria for Traditional Elders, Drummers, Singers, and Dancers collaborating on the Why We Wear Orange Campaign are funded by the Government of Canada through Heritage Canada. Private donations support youth involvement and other costs.
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Elder Catherine Brooks at the Fall Equinox Ceremony 2024
UPCOMING EVENTS
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May 3, Bloor St. UC Gala in support of Gibimishkaadimin, a canoe trip in Temagami for Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth on a path to Right Relations. Last year’s Gala supported Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan. Co-chair of the St. Matt’s Board, Laurie Monsebraaten, approached Robin B in December with respect to the IPSG organizing the entertainment portion of the evening.
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June 16 to 22nd: Pollinator Week: Volunteers required for an Outreach Table by the garden entranceway offering information and easy-to-engage, family-and-child-friendly activities, date(s) and times depending on volunteer availability. We will also offer a Manidoosh/insects activity to Hippo School classes. Canada Nos Une (Butterfly Ladies) is a possible collaborator during this week.
Sweetwater Moon reflections
Gitchi miigwetch to Elder Peduhbun Migizi Kwe/Dr. Catherine Brooks for leading our Women's Sweetwater Moon Lodge Monday night, and to Fire Keeper Michael Buyers for working with the Fire in the Good Way he was taught by Elder Asayenes/Dr. Dan Smoke. We spoke; we cried; we toasted one another with Sweetwater from Sheila Moll’s sugar bush in a dozen or more languages, from Anishinaabemowin to Yiddish. We know Creator will hear us, and honour us as women, as daughters, mothers, grandmothers.
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We were thrilled to welcome our Latinx sisters from Brazil and Mexico, and to speak at the Feast table of how we might collaborate more deeply in the coming year: un Pueblo; una Tierra; una lucha como familiares.
Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan has featured plants grown by the agricultural nations of the Americas since its inception, including those important to north-south, pre-colonial trade routes. Watch for opportunities to have conversations about bird, butterfly, and human migration and the question of borders come summer.
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The next afternoon, the Hippo School children heard the story of how the Maple fed Woodpecker and then the People facing famine, as learned from Elder Gary Sault of the Mississaugas of the Credit. Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan Crew Lead Vanessa Barnes led the children in recreating the relationship between Maple and Woodpecker with hand gestures, sharing a photo of a Red-Crested Woodpecker and pointing out where sap still dripped from the Norway maple where we had tapped.
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The children then had the chance to sample the sap, the light syrup made from that sap, and a dark syrup boiled down over an open fire by the Regal Heights Residents Association. "Boil" and "steam" were the words of the day, and all variations of sap and syrup were declared "yummy." As they went on to their next activity, the children gave four shouts of "chi miigwetch" to thank the Maple for its gift.
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Thank you to all women who attended the Sweetwater Moon Lodge, with additional thanks to IPSG members Betsy Anderson and Sheila Moll, who set up the Parlour and led the clean up. We are also grateful to Susan Noakes and John Keating for their help in tapping our two trees (only one successfully), and their guidance in producing syrup.
Celebrating the "sweetwater". Children from Hippo school help in tapping.
On Sept. 23, 2023, the IPSG and Community History Project hosted a Why We Wear Orange Tea & Bannock gathering featuring Council Fire's Red Bear Singers. Red Bear Singers was founded to bring the healing of drum and song to Residential School and Sixties Scoop survivors and their families.
Pictures of Why We Wear Orange Day by Linda Wojciechowski