Staff
A meeting at the Circle of Life Centre will take place next Tuesday (July 16) at 2 p.m. to explore the Indigenous Knowledge Network’s five-year-long project, which is coming to a close.
Rochelle Bird, a Wasa-Nabin Worker with the United Native Friendship Centre (UNFC), explained how the project, which is in partnership with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, the Ontario Federation of Friendship Centres, the Métis Nation of Ontario, and the Canadian Institute of Health Research, went.
“The first stage of the project was to interview area elders about traditional child-rearing practices and how women were cared for traditionally when they were expecting, and even some of the teachings that came prior to that,” she said of her specific project.
“So I interviewed women from Seine River, Manitou, and Nigigoonsiminikaaning,” she said, and put together an oral history report.
Afterwards, Bird had to decide on how to best share the knowledge with families in the community.
She joined together with other programs at the UNFC that work with infants and children, and together they decided to host a camp at Sunny Cove Camp last summer.
“We had sharing circles, so that was the implementation stage of the process,” Bird said of the camp.
Also during the camp, she took many notes and photos, and then once back at work she complied everything into a “camp memory book.”
The book will be distributed to families at the meeting on Tuesday afternoon.
“Other partners from the Indigenous Knowledge Network did totally different projects,” she explained, noting that other people researched different things.
Partners in Ontario and Saskatchewan also were involved.
During the “Community Dissemination Meeting,” Bird said there will be an elder opening, then the UNFC executive director will address the group, and then Dr. Janet Smylie, who was the IKN principal investigator, will talk about the scope of the whole project from the very beginning until now, and maybe give some indications of next steps.
“Dr. Janet Smylie will be here to talk about where the project came from and what other projects were done,” noted Bird. “She’s based at the Centre for Research on Intercity Health at St. Michael’s Hospital.
“We’ll have some elders that shared at the culture camp talk about their experiences, and some families talk about the impact the camp has had,” she added.
“It’s really to let the general public know what had been done with the project and indications of next steps, or maybe find some partnership opportunities,” noted Bird.
“The meeting is inviting anyone with an interest in infant, child and family health to come out and see what the project was all about and how we can move forward as a community,” she said.
In the future, Bird would like to have traditional knowledge about infant, child and family health readily available at the UNFC.
“What is this network going to look like? Are we going to find some other way of sharing this knowledge?” she questioned.
