First we smudge

When a Christian Reformed Church (CRC) pastor prayed a prayer lifting up Indigenous ways of being, Shannon Perez recalls feeling for the first time as if “I could belong here as my full self.” At the time, Perez was a young volunteer member of the CRC’s Canadian Aboriginal Ministry Committee (now known as the Canadian Indigenous Ministry Committee).

Perez, currently the executive director of the Indigenous Family Centre in downtown Winnipeg, described the transformative power of that prayer at 100 Women, One Heart,  in April. Designed as a fundraiser for the Indigenous Family Centre and hosted by the Canadian CRC in Burlington, Ontario, the event was billed as a way for the guests to hear Perez’s inspiring testimony.

Reclaiming sacred practices

Perez began by inviting the women to participate in a smudging ceremony. Perez explained how smudging is a sacred practice that uses one of the four sacred medicines (sweetgrass, sage, cedar or tobacco) burning in a small bowl. Participants use their hands to waft the rising smoke. Each action is associated with a prayer to Creator: wafting the smoke towards the eyes, mouth, ears and heart is a prayer to see good things, speak good things or hear good things. Wafting the smoke under your feet is a prayer to walk in a good way, and wafting the smoke behind you is a prayer to leave in a good way.

Perez said people could choose to simply touch the edge of the bowl or sniff the smoke if they didn’t want to smudge. “Participate in how it feels right to you.” Most of the women accepted the invitation to participate in the deeply moving prayer.

Smudging is a spiritual practice that was taken away from Indigenous people during Canada’s decades of colonial oppression, Perez explained. By participating, “you are helping to reclaim it and bring it back.” She said most activities at Winnipeg’s Indigenous Family Centre begin with smudging, which signals to the community members that they don’t need to abandon their Indigenous identities to be part of a Christian ministry.

Both Indigenous and Christian

Perez remembers the CRC pastor’s prayer as the first time she felt she “didn’t have to choose” between being Indigenous and being Christian. Perez’s own life and struggle to belong were shaped by the trauma her mother experienced when her Sayisi Dene community was forcibly removed from their traditional homelands and sent to Churchill, Manitoba in 1956. The relocation caused disruption and despair, and led to the deaths of nearly half of the community due to freezing, starvation and fires in hastily constructed shelters. Perez said her mother’s struggle with alcoholism and the breakdown of her parents’ marriage can be directly attributed to the trauma of that relocation, for which the federal government apologized in 2016.

The clientele the Indigenous Family Centre serves is similarly affected by intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools and the oppression of Indigenous people. And the trauma isn’t only in the past. The centre is located in a neighbourhood that experiences the effects of poverty and crime. Downtown Winnipeg itself is “ground zero” for missing and murdered Indigenous women, where recent landfill searches uncovered the bodies of four murdered Indigenous women.

“Life is heavy in our neighbourhood, fraught with tragedies and losses,” Perez said.

Yet there is hope. The food, crafts, ceremonies, sharing circles and smudging that take place daily at the Indigenous Family Centre allow guests to feel “seen, and loved, and that they matter,” she said. In daily acts of connection, generosity and kindness, “healing and reconciliation can happen.”