Walking With our Sisters

Commemorative moccasin vamps beaded by Crystal Albanese, photo from WWOS website.

Yesterday, I walked a “trail of tears” with many others at Batoche East Village. Walking With our Sisters commemorates with heart-breaking, yet heart-healing symbolism the grief over Indigenous girls and women whose lives have been stolen. It began with a smudging high on the East bank of the South Saskatchewan where we began a walk down to the water and back along a red-ribbon path with 1600 pairs, or more, of beaded moccasin vamps, each pair commemorating in its incompleteness the truncated lives now held only in memory. We each carried a small packet of tobacco to offer up with our prayers for the lost sisters at the end of our walk.

I thought about symbol and ritual; I wondered about the meaning for me of symbols and rituals deeply meaningful to Indigenous neighbours but unfamiliar and new to many of the participants in the walk. In a small way, I felt sorrow at my comparative inability to experience the raising of a spiritual awareness that seemed to ignite some special reverence, some other-worldly connection in the Indigenous people with whom I believed I was walking in solidarity. All I could think of that might resemble the smudging, the tobacco offering, the moccasin vamps in my tradition were the bread and the wine of communion.

This morning I wonder if it’s possible to reach into the world/home of the spirit except through the medium of our senses. Is it possible to fully express spiritual love for another without the touch, the kiss, the hand shake? Is it possible to reignite our spiritual bond to the suffering, forgiving, saving Christ without the bread and the wine? Are feathers, drums and the pipe the instruments by which the better angels reveal themselves in Indigenous consciousness; do they serve as guardians of love and justice, mercy and hope, and would these be lost if some villainy would come to steal away the revered artifacts, the traditional rituals?

How easy it seems to have become to dismiss all but the material in everything. How sad if we should lose our spiritual sensitivity so that we could no longer be touched to our core by art, by music, by story, even by the shape of a feather, the wafting aroma of burning sage and sweet grass, the shared bread and that agonizing sip of blood turned into wine, not in the glass but in our hearts.

The moccasin vamps were sent in from around the world by many cultures, they told us. Some had small tribute stones placed on them by walkers. I saw one pair apparently made to fit an adult woman’s feet, and alongside an identically beaded pair for a baby and I imagined the untimely ending of earthly life for a woman carrying a child, possibly unborn. This was for me the saddest pair.

After the walk, two women with eagle feathers and bowls of smouldering sage bathed us in wisps of light, fragrant smoke, an act symbolic of the cleansing of anger, hurt or shame with which the experience might have stained our spirits. 

A fitting conclusion to an unforgettable experience.