If you go by the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ont., on Friday, National Indigenous Peoples Day, you might find the centre quiet.
For many of the staff of the centre, on the site of the former Mohawk Institute Residential School, it’s a day to be out in community — or at the local skate park.
Friday is also Go Skate Day, the international day celebrating skateboarding also marked on June 21.
Heather George, executive director of the centre, says most staff are out Friday at other community events or at the skate parks in Brantford or nearby Six Nations of the Grand River.
The centre will instead hold a celebration of National Indigenous Peoples Day on Sunday.
To help fund Go Skate Day events, Woodland has partnered with other cultural centres in different Indigenous communities on the Skateboard Project, an initiative led by Kanien’keháka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center in Kahnawà:ke, Que.
Scott Berwick, manager of arts & archives department with the centre in Kahnawà:ke, said he launched the initiative three years ago as a way to support artists and to help fund Go Skate Day events. So far, Mohawk communities have taken part but he’s hoping it will grow — and that more skateboard shops request the boards to help sell them.
It’s the second year the Woodland Cultural Centre has been involved — displaying and selling some of the boards in their gift shop.
George spoke with CBC Hamilton in advance of June 21 about the initative, how the centre is marking National Indigenous Peoples Day and what the day means to her personally, more than a year in her current role.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s Woodland Cultural Centre’s involvement with the Skateboard Project?
Last year was our first big year with Go Skate Day and so we sponsored a skateboard competition. We also had an exhibition of all the skateboard decks, which are all designed by different artists from different communities.
One of the things I am really excited about is it’s another way to see all of these Haudenosaunee designs presented out there in the world, whether the decks are being used as a fine art piece on someone’s wall or whether they’re actually out there in the skate park.
I think it’s just so great to see ourselves and be visible in all these different really creative and beautiful expressions.
Heather George, executive director of Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ont., says Go Skate Day, which falls on June 21 and will be marked at Six Nations of the Grand River, is another way Indigenous people can assert their sovereignty and build community.
For Woodland, our capacity has primarily been a promoter of Go Skate Day and sharing the work of the artists. Last year we used one of our exhibition galleries to show all the decks. This year we have them all on display in our gift shop.
It’s just another way to bring awareness to Indigenous art in a different form and I think also promote accessibility of art. We certainly bring in really senior artists and what would be considered fine art into our gallery spaces, but we also like bringing in more junior artists that aren’t as well known and using mediums that people might not necessarily think of in the art world as typical forms of art.
What do you see as a common thread between Go Skate Day and NIPD?
A lot of the ways that I think about creativity and athleticism and expressions of Indigeneity is that they are ways of asserting our sovereignty. I don’t know that everybody that’s out there at the skate park with one of these decks is thinking about that, but when I see it, when I see us building skate parks in our communities or I see someone in an urban environment with one of these decks, that’s what I think about. I think about how that is an assertion of our ongoing sovereignty.
Our sovereignty isn’t always based on political action. It’s also based on our ongoing existence and vibrancy as Indigenous people. And so for me, this alignment of Go Skate Day and the start of summer and being outside and on the land and with community and building more community, all of those things are part of our assertion of our sovereignty.
The really nice thing about Go Skate Day as well is that it’s something that anybody at any age can participate in. It really creates those opportunities for intergenerational knowledge transfer too. It builds community, and I think that’s really important for all of us.
What’s happening on Go Skate Day?
It’s an open invitation to come check out the skate park and meet with other community members. There are people of all ages that participate.
Even if you’re going to the skate park in Six Nations with your kids and they’re really young, the older youth always look out for them, so you don’t have to worry. Your kids will be OK. So, show up, show up with your deck, or just show up to watch.
How will Woodland mark NIPD?
On June 21, a lot of our staff are actually off or they’re going to be at the water park in Brantford supporting Brantford Regional Indigenous Centre with their programming, so if you come to Woodland on the 21st, you probably won’t find very much.
So, come see us on the 23rd, which is when we’re doing our celebration for National Indigenous Peoples Day. We’ve branded it ‘We Share Our Stories’ because it’s a bit of a sneak peek for the community at our plans for a new cultural centre.
We’re not making too much of a fuss about it yet because we’re just in our early fundraising stages, but we did want to be able to share some of the plans in terms of the floor plan and some of the design drawings, as well as give people sort of an opportunity to come out and celebrate everything that Woodland has been for the last 52 years and think about what we could do in a new space.
We’ve got art and hands-on activities, lacrosse demonstrations, smoke dance, food and different artisans, we’ve got film showings going on, and of course, our contemporary Indigenous art exhibitions and our historical exhibitions.
So, it’s really a day that is packed with lots of great things for families and I think gives us the opportunity to really imagine what a future Woodland space can be.
For non-Indigenous folks, it’s a really good opportunity to experience Indigenous culture and heritage directly from Indigenous people and it’s also just a really fun time for the community to come and participate.
We’ll have a few days of rest and we’ll do another event on July 5 to recognize our former honorary co-chair of our capital campaign, Robbie Robertson, who passed away almost a year ago. We want to take that opportunity to recognize his contribution to the capital campaign, but also his leadership as a musician and a performer from Six Nations. I think the reason that he gave his name to that campaign is because he saw the need for a space like this to support that next generation of artists.
We’re bringing together some really, really great performers like Lacey Hill and Jace Martin to share music and and honour Robbie’s legacy.
What’s top of mind for you this National Indigenous Peoples Day?
Heather George, Woodland Cultural Centre’s executive director, took over the role at the site of the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in 2023. Ahead of National Indigenous Peoples Day, she reflects on the year she’s had.
I’m grateful for the staff here that are working so hard to put this event together, and the community members as well.
And I’m really grateful that I get to bring my daughter to the residential school that her great uncles were taken to, and it gets to become a space where she gets to learn about culture, where she gets to engage with language, where she gets to learn our dances and see all of this beautiful art.
Janis Monture, the former director, used to say this all the time, and it’s so true: Residential schools are something that was done to our community, it’s not who we are. So we have this big responsibility of caring for this space, but also making sure that the things that residential schools try to take from us are looked after and supported and enlivened through the programming that we do here.
It’s a pretty big honour to get to spend every day working in culture because, for a lot of Indigenous folks, they have to do a regular 9-to-5, and then on top of that, they’re regaining their cultural knowledge and their connections to community.
My 9-to-5 is doing that and so it’s pretty amazing to get to to do that work.