Nogdawindamin’s manager of cultural services, Darrell Boissoneau, says there’s something special that can be felt inside of the traditional teaching lodges of the Anishinaabe people.
In Garden River First Nation, a teaching lodge — consisting of a network of wooden poles that have been carefully bent, bound together and manipulated in order to form a large, dome-like structure — was the first of six established in northern Ontario by Nogdawindamin, a child welfare agency serving seven First Nations between Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold two years ago.
“We know that spirit is here all the time,” Boissoneau said while sitting in the lodge, situated behind Garden River’s community centre.
Nogdawindamin collaborated with each First Nation along the north shore in order to establish the teaching lodges as part of the agency’s ongoing work in building its cultural program, Anishinaabe Aadziwin (Looking After Native Culture and Way of Life), a team of 38 people primarily consisting of knowledge keepers and helpers.
The first teaching lodge was erected in Garden River in 2020.
Atikameksheng Anishnawbek First Nation, Mississauga First Nation, Serpent River First Nation, Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation and Batchewana First Nation would eventually receive their own lodges over the next two years.
“It’s for ceremony, to do different ceremonies that we need to do,” said Boissoneau of the lodges. “Ceremony is important for our children and our families and communities, because that’s the healing path we want to follow, and we know that culture is an important part of that.”
“The clear evidence that we found is that culture saves lives, and many of our children are high-risk youth, and we want to bring them to a safe place. We want to create this path, this path of life, where they’re going to receive the good gifts of life and strengthen who they are as an Anishinaaabe person.”
Boissoneau says the construction of the lodges was truly a community effort: elders, children, community members and people who work within Nogdawindamin’s programs and services “all came out and placed their hands on the work of all these teaching lodges.”
Everything that’s done, beginning with the harvesting of poles, starts with an offering of tobacco. It’s a way of asking those trees, those poles if their lives can be used to bring life to the teaching lodge.
“When we came to this site and all the other sites, we put our tobacco down and asked mother earth, can we place this teaching lodge here? When we made the holes for all of these poles, we put both tobacco and water in these holes, asking permission,” Boissoneau said.
After each teaching lodge is complete in each community, Boissoneau says that a ‘birthing’ takes place.
“The birthing of them is when we bring everyone together and we feast and celebrate this teaching lodge that’s here for our use and benefit,” he said.
Once a lodge is built in Thessalon First Nation, all seven communities served by the child welfare agency will have teaching lodges. Boissoneau says Nogdawindamin has been to the community and engaged in community consultation. Chief and council there have already endorsed it. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.
Boissoneau credits knowledge keeper and traditional knowledge holder Mike Bisson for the inspiration behind the project.
“He saw that we should have these teaching lodges in all of our communities,” he said. “It was a board decision, which was really encouraging. Our board supported this idea, along with our chief executive officer, and our senior management thought that having these teaching lodges would be a great idea for the care and well-being of the children that we’re working with, and the families that we’re working with as well.
“We wanted a safe place for people to come and know that their voice would be heard, and that people would listen to them.”
All doorways to the teaching lodge deliberately face east in order to signify the beginning of any ceremony that takes place there.
“That path of life travels to where we end our life, and that’s at the western doorway,” Boissoneau says, as he draws a line in the air with his finger from the eastern doorway to the western doorway. “If you’ll notice that [western] doorway, there’s an ‘X’ at the doorway. So, we don’t exit that doorway until our time here is finished. Or if there’s a special ceremony where a ceremony is completed, the lodge is done; that doorway is open and everybody exits through that, so that means it’s done.
“We know this is the path of life, and everything that the Creator has gifted the rest of us is on that path — and it’s up to us as individuals to find our purpose in life.”
The traditional teaching lodge, Boissoneau says, goes all the way back to the establishment of the Midewin lodge at the seven stopping places of the Anishinaabe people during their migration from the east coast to the place where “rice grows on water” in the midwest.
“One of the stopping places was here in Baawaating. The lodge was lowered here and sat here for a long time,” he said. “This is where our people gathered for ceremony.”
The teaching lodge was something that Chief Shingwauk of Garden River had once envisioned, Boissoneau says.
“His vision was of a teaching lodge, so this is what he seen at the time, but he also saw it in terms of modern-day education, and how our people were going to transition from our traditional way of life — holding on to that, our language, our culture and our traditions, but also learning what the settler people were bridging here as well, because he knew that education was going to be key for our people to be able to sustain themselves,” he said. “The idea of residential schools was born was Chief Shingwauk’s vision of a teaching lodge. I want people to be careful about this, because Chief Shingwauk did not envision residential schools as we see them today. “He saw it as a safe place for our people to be able to continue to learn their language, to practise our traditions and our customs and to learn what it is that the new world was bringing as well. Residential schools were the most remote thing from his mind, because it was a spiritual vision that he had.”
It’s ultimately up to each of the seven communities how to use the teaching lodge; one First Nation has been tanning hides and doing traditional basket making, while another used the building of its lodge as a backdrop for a television segment for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. In Garden River, its lodge has been used for hosting language revitalization meetings and has even played host to Sault Area Hospital officials and staff for cultural teaching sessions.
“It’s really beautiful seeing how the communities are utilizing these spaces,” said Jonathan Boyer-Nolan, Nogdawindamin’s communications manager. “Some are really gravitating towards them, some are slowly making their way down to the lodges.”
“Give credit to Nogdawindamin; it was their idea to strengthen that relationship with each community,” said Boissoneau. “It was really important, because oftentimes we see each other from a distance.
“But this brought everybody together, it really did.”