09/18/2023
"My name is Vanessa Gamblin, Osa Muskwa Iskwew, Brown Bear Woman. I’m the Director of Indigenous Relations here at Main Street Project and I have been here since February 2022.
Indigenous Relations is a space at Main Street Project that's been designed out of the strategic plan where we’re working with objective 3, which is to embrace and support truth and reconciliation and anti-oppression and decolonization and anti-oppression.
We've done all kinds of amazing things. We attend ceremonies, we go to sweat lodges, we do teachings with animals, we do rattle teachings. We call it building our bundles. We’re continuously developing our medicine bags, our regalia, all kinds of stuff. And how we do that is encompassed by the application of our Skabes.
In Indigenous practices, a Skabe is helper a person who has gifts they carry and the teachings they're gifted. And through that, we welcome people. Skabes have been here over a year and the first one was initiated through the shelter. We were trying to come up with a strategy of how to invite people in the doors in a good way, and one of those strategies was to implement Skabes.
And so big three questions asked at the beginning, and still do, when people are coming in brand new, we ask what's your spirit name, who's your family and where do you come from? That allows for creativity with community members to walk in the door and feel a little bit more comfortable.
A lot of times people don't get to hear or be asked what's your spirit name. So, Skabes are enhancing the shelter with lots of love and kindness, a lot of medicine. We've walked through protocols of teachings around medicine, smudging and bundle keeping. Skabes are in there, always building those relationships. And so now we have Skabes sit in every other department as well. We've implemented Skabes into housing, at Mainstay and The Bell and there's one that shifts between departments.
They're enhancing those spaces. They're taking them out to ceremony, to medicine gathering, out into the community to be with water, to be with Mother Earth, to get to know their connections and relationships within the community. They’re attending the Indigenous rallies and events that are out there and they're walking through lots of it.
And most recently, we've been really working hard over the past few months to help people within detox, shelter and Mainstay who are ready to go into Sundance spaces. So, they're part of creating Sundance, like putting it all together, harvesting everything, putting the grounds together and medicine.
And we have a full-time Knowledge Keeper that will go into every department. She's applying the teachings of the Seven Laws. She'll talk about truth one week, and the following week after that would be about wisdom. It's not done in a way as a classroom teaching, it's done in sharing circle. They sit in a good way. They start off in a good way, which is smudging or however they wish.
The importance of Indigenous relations at Main Street Project is absolutely critical. Canada, we know, is a vibrant country of Indigenous Peoples, First Nations, Métis and Inuit people. We know that at Main Street Project we have a very high composition of Indigenous people accessing services and we as Main Street Project have a responsibility to enhance these spaces, so it is very critical."
