Culture camp crosses barriers

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Mellow-scented wood smoke rises and hangs in the still air. Blackened coffee and tea pots sit on the grill over a bed of smouldering coals.

Four pitched tents and two tipis surround the fire. Off to the side, near the rocky shore line of the Great Slake Lake, a hanging rack is full of dark, dried caribou meat. A duck is getting singed as some white fish await gutting and cleaning. An old lady scrapes a stretched caribou hide. An old man bends a strip of spruce around a bicycle wheel rim, making a drum.

Squinting his eyes against the sun, the old man looks up at a group of Grade 2 St. Joseph elementary school students. They have come to the N'dilo Cultural Camp to learn about Dogrib people and their culture. (N'dilo, situated within Yellowknife city boundaries, is designated as land set aside for Indians.)

Arctic College student Henry Beaulieu started the camp last year as a pilot project under the N'dilo band office and the Dogrib Development Corporation.

Renewable Resources granted the camp $50,000 to hire 14 staff, including five elders. Beaulieu says if this summer's operations are successful, fall and winter camps may be set up, complete with dog teams and guides.

Yellowknife school students have been touring the camp, discovering a new side of themselves, and native people. The camp has crossed barriers and changed some students' attitudes, Beaulieu explains.

Kids "coming to the camp realize what native people do out on the land. They could see it right here at the cultural camp. Some of them are totally surprised, some of the want to stay for the whole day.

"I guess they had never experienced anything like that in their lives," he says.

Elders in the camp taught the students important principles of Dene culture: sharing, respect and spiritual ties to the land. They saw a caribou's hide scaped, how a drum was made, how a tipi is set up, ate dry fish, and feasted on caribou stew, bannock and hot tea. Older students wielded axes and paddled canoes.

"We call them key experiences," says Phillip Mackenzie, a Dogrib Indian who is

a teacher at St. Patrick's elementary school. "It's education in a different setting. The children will get hands'-on experience."

He means the students will learn about Dogrib people and culture by feeling, smelling, hearing and tasting, and the experience will stay with them forever.

Visiting the camp "fit the curriculum very well, other than that we would have to manufacture it (a cultural context)," says Grade 7 teacher Sean Daly, who recently took his William McDonald students to the camp.

Students eagerly share their stories, describing how they hacked down spruce trees and used the boughs to make soft carpets for the tipis, getting sticky hands in the process; how dried spruce sap turned into pink gum when it was chewed long enough; how tasty the caribou stew was; how they made whistles out of wood, and worked on a drum.

Some things were too different, such as dried fish and dried caribou meat. And boiled beaver meat.

"That was gross," says a boy, curling his lip. "It was all soft."

Students gained an awareness of survival, making the right choices, in an environmental game. Three designated students, representing food, water and shelter, had to avoid the rest of the children, the caribou herd.

"It taught us that it's hard for caribou to find what they're looking for," said Grade 7 student Brandy Smithies, 13.

The experience was old hat for Robin Beaulieu, 14, who was taught traditional activities by her grandma and mother. Her granny "taught her everything" at her camp on the Great Slave Lake.

Some of her friends thought the camp would be boring and wanted to stay in school when they first heard of the trip, but "they ended up saying it was really fun," Beaulieu says.

It was a new experience for Cory Larocque, 13, who spent weekends in a cabin, but had not seen a Dogrib camp.

After visiting the camp, he "didn't know why people were so racist toward them (Dogrb people)," he comments. I hear stuff like that (racist remarks) from people I see."

Yellowknife schools administered by Yellowknife District 1 and the Catholic School board have been sending students to the school for cross cultural awareness.