Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo, a Kanien’keha’ka Choregraph

Barbara Kaneratonni Diabo, a choreographer renowned in the entertainment world, had agreed to meet me for a chat over a cup of tea. We met at “Lafayette”, a café in Pointe-Claire near the banks of the St. Lawrence. Barbara was no stranger. I’d met her at many a pow-wow, where, dressed in her regalia, she performed traditional and hoop dances – “Native Hoop Dance” – which demand unparalleled skill and stamina.
When she arrived on the terrace, she sat down opposite me and ordered a cup of tea.

Barbara is slender, her muscles honed by years of training, and as she reaches for her cup, I catch a glimpse of the yellow-beaded ring on her finger and her traditional earrings.
She smiles and says, before I even ask,

– I bought them at a pow wow…” she says, before whispering,
– We’ve seen each other a few times, but now I feel like talking.

Barbara is Kanien’keha:ka¹Mohawk of mixed heritage. She spent the first years of her childhood in Kahnawaké before moving with her (non-aboriginal) mother to a farm in Nova Scotia, while maintaining contact with her Mohawk community. She is English-speaking and speaks French, but did not grow up with the Mohawk language, which she still studies today.

– My Mohawk grandmother used to teach me words, give me necklaces and beads when I met her. I would ask questions because I was embarrassed not to know more about my culture…

She had her moments of uncertainty during those years, not grasping what “being Mohawk” really meant. But when she left high school, things changed. When she arrived in Montreal, she “reconnected” with her community while rubbing shoulders with urban natives from other nations.

Barbara is passionate about dance, which she began as a child. The metropolis enabled her to learn African dance and various contemporary styles such as jazz and modern dance, while returning to her roots through her community. She is also introduced to Haudenosaunee dances, which are different from those performed at pow-wows.

This whole period of questioning and research became the driving force behind his art. In fact, it’s this abundance

of ideas and imagination, imbued with aboriginal culture, that marks her approach with a singular touch.

– One summer, I went to study on a farm in Ontario. We were thirteen young Aboriginals supervised by Aboriginal teachers. We used our songs, our dances, our ceremonies. That’s where I learned how to practice my art and my culture together,” she says, before adding,
– That’s what I’m exploring…

After studying Theater at university, she became a teacher, working at the Native Friendship Centre and then at Kahnawaké high school. Immersed in an Aboriginal environment where young people use Mohawk words or names, she took lessons from an Elder.

– When I entered this school, there was anger, tension, but also pride… It was just after the Oka Crisis,” she explains.
– It was a charged moment,” she recalls. That’s when I started going to the Long House.

Despite the reference to traditional primitive dwellings, it’s a contemporary wooden house accessible only to members of the community. A spiritual fire is kept burning during exchanges and ceremonies between the various clans.

Then, she continues her immersion by following the “Red Road”, as the powwow circuit is known to some.

– When I dance, I honor my ancestors and share my culture.

For her, as for many natives, dancing represents a powerful spiritual event. It’s a medicine that revitalizes body and spirit.

Today, Barbara is a nationally and internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer²Grand prize Montreal Dance [performer] in 2021, as well as being artistic a teacher and director of the A’nó:wara Dance theater.

In 2019, for the show “My Urban Nature”, she mixed traditional Aboriginal dance with contemporary dance, ballet, hip-hop and urban dance. Then in 2021, she created Sky Dancers, a tribute to the thirty-three Kahnawake ironworkers killed when the Quebec Bridge collapsed in 1907, including her great-grandfather. It’s a touching tribute in a magical setting, during which Barbara introduces us to Mohawk history and language.

But her talents don’t stop there. She is also a facilitator of immersive creative workshops for young people and a wide range of audiences with numerous organizations.

– I always start by talking about my culture, trying to share it. It comes from my experience with the people I’ve interacted with,” she begins, before

bitterly blurting out the obvious after so much denial,

– We are a wounded people. We’ve been wounded for hundreds of years. You have to establish a relationship of trust with people, and that takes time…

She takes her cup of tea in her hand before telling me,

– By the way, I know that in France they say “amérindiens”, but here we say “autochtones”Greek “autokhthôn” meaning “from the earth itself”.

I nodded silently.

It’s not a detail, this appellation…. Far from being neutral, this term denies the presence of the First Nations on these lands, where Christopher Columbus landed thinking he’d reached India. It still raises eyebrows among the natives, with good reason, and fills many a page. Amerindian, Indian, native, indigene³Latin indigena, “born in”, aborigene⁴Latin aborigines meaning “from the beginning”, a multitude of sometimes inappropriate terms appear in the literature devoted to them. But few people understand the crucial difference in this statement, with “We are indigenous” signifying their presence on these great northern territories since the flint age.

But perhaps I should quote author Thomas King, who traces its origins in these words, in “The inconvenient Indian”:

Barbara explains that in the traditionally matriarchal Mohawk Nation, the role of the woman is very important. As givers of life, they transmit culture to their children and play an important political role.

– This status gives them an important role in spirituality and confederations,” she adds.
Before colonization, during “great-laws” as they were called, women had the power to elect or depose chiefs. This was not by chance, but by virtue of their experience as mothers, making them better able to know who was fit to lead.
– If a woman from the Turtle clan has a child with a man from the Bear clan, the man will live with the mother’s clan, and the children will have the mother’s clan,” says Barbara.
She pauses for a moment, then continues,
– We have “clan mothers” and chiefs. The “clan mothers” traditionally take care of everything in the community, in the village, in the houses. But the situation deteriorated when the settlers came with their religion…

Patriarchal power changes things,” she explains. This form of governance was soon replaced by band councils, a government institution set up by the Indian Act.

The Indian Act is “the Canadian law passed in 1876 dealing with registered Indians, their bands and the reserve system, which is still in force, despite some modifications”⁶https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Act

– Do you recognize more this power or that of the clans? I asked.

– I think the majority of us, and I’m talking about the community, want sovereignty. But we also know that we live with a lot of people around us, with the government of Canada… she said, smiling.

Most of the Mohawks tend to find equilibrium in the contemporary world,” explains Barbara, “but the damage suffered five hundred years ago is not about to be forgotten. The question of repairing the damage and growing up with it remains…

The interference of the colonists was highly detrimental to their evolution, resulting in clichés of victimization.

– When they arrived, their attitude was, “We can solve all your problems”. But that’s forgetting that we have a lot of things to sort out ourselves.

When she goes into schools to give workshops, Barbara talks about their challenges and wounds, so as not to obscure that part of the story, but she doesn’t end there. The most important thing is to highlight her culture, and the universal perspectives and values that are healthy and respectful of nature, and that can benefit society as a whole.

– The traditions and ceremonies perpetuated by our ancestors thousands of years ago are still with us today. The current infatuation with aboriginals stems from this dimension, this sacred link that is still alive…
– I want the world to believe in us,” she says.

– It wasn’t long ago that we adopted the modern way of life. We’ve always practiced this form of respect for nature, which wasn’t the case with the colonists when they arrived…” says Barbara, referring to the new inhabitants’ attitude of exploitation and capitalization of natural resources.

I was talking to her about the “longhouses”⁷https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhouse of old Europe, houses whose enormous pillars, necessary for their construction, had ended up causing the disappearance of ancient primary forests. Bloody territorial conflicts with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had occurred during the “Rubane”⁸in reference to their ceramics migratory waves, one in the 6th millennium BC in Eurasia, the other in the 5th millennium in northern and north-western Europe. Harmony had been broken, marking the advent of a new world order.

– I don’t know if you’ve read that book Sapiens⁹“Sapiens: a brief history of humanity by Yuval Noah Harar. “,” Barbara retorted.

The author tells the story of how Homo sapiens managed to survive and dominate the planet. The analysis explains the birth of concepts such as religion, the nation and human rights, questioning contemporary evolution through the weight of bureaucracy and mass consumption”.”¹⁰https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind.

– But for me, it’s a beginning that has to come back. Why have we become like this today? What’s happened?

Times have changed, but intergenerational traumas are still alive and well in the community,” Barbara tells me. We have to remember. But if coming out of silence is a relatively recent process, it will still take a few generations to forget, or rather to come to terms with history…

– It’s a question of repeating certain things and not making other mistakes,” she says gravely. Memory is essential, even if it’s never the right time to evoke these tragedies that were kept silent, because they called into question history, and perhaps also the conscience of certain institutions.

But time does not forget, and the dead return to tell the unspeakable… The children snatched from their

parents and buried in anomymous graves remind us of the savagery of colonization. And these stories of stolen territories, nibbled away over time, are not about to be resolved, because land is the roots and identity of a people…

While assimilation is no longer carried out under the aegis of religious establishments, which can be described as “disciplinary camps” in view of the abuses committed, schooling and university education are nonetheless part of this standardization of Western culture. So how can we ignore the attractiveness of major industrial developers and the scholarships they award to young native students, naturally implicated by the proximity of reserves and mines ?

Right now, the younger generations are assimilated,” I began. With education, are communities worried about the risk of them becoming more Westernized?

– Education gives us a place and the knowledge to change the system,” she replied, quoting “The Inconvenient Indian.
An Unexpected Portrait of North American Natives” by Thomas King; a book that deals with the complex relationship between whites and Indians, analyzing the paradoxes brought about by colonization and the backlash of assimilation.

Asking her if there was a subject particularly close to her heart, Barbara told me about her involvement in cultural actions to help indigenous people. She runs “safe spaces”¹¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_spaceand works hard physically, but bemoans the fact that she has no classrooms or space to dance. She rents out studios, pointing to the many companies and organizations that benefit from them…

– Do you think Mohawks are sufficiently represented in Quebec?
– In terms of our cultural visibility, there’s room for improvement,” she says, pointing to the absence of Aboriginal symbols and representations in Montreal…

Mohawks are known as the “Star People” in the Iroquois language of the Mohawk Indians of southeastern Canada, a reference applied to other aboriginal nations. They are also known by other names such as “flint people”, “lightning men”…

– Is it related to your cosmogony?
– Yes, because we came from the stars… It’s the creation story, the genesis. But we also have our stories of constellations and stars,” says Barbara.

A few months earlier, I had learned that the Mohawks of Ontario and the Assiniboins of Saskatchewan had stories referring to the Pleiades. Like many other peoples, the First Nations travelled using the North Star, which they knew to be aligned with the North Pole.

Mohawk longhouses were oriented according to the four points of the compass¹²https://astro-canada.ca/le_ciel_des_amerindiens-the_amerindian_sky-eng.

– Can you tell me about the original myth?
– I don’t say myth, because myth means “an invented story”… But do we know if it’s true or not?

Before colonization, transmission was mainly oral, with pictograms providing a visual transcription.

– I prefer to say ‘our stories’,” she laughs, before telling her story.

Here’s a summary, as this story, which has several versions, is much more detailed in its original version.

“In the beginning, long before the creation of the world, there was an island floating in the sky, Sky-World, on which lived a People who knew neither death nor disease. But one day, one of the Sky-World daughters realized she was pregnant. After a dream prompting her to use a special root, her husband dug up the marvelous tree that illuminated the island. As she approached the hole, the woman fell to the water below with seeds in her hand. Birds saw the Woman fall from the Sky and deposited her on the back of a giant turtle emerging from the water. Then a muskrat dived down to retrieve the mud from the bottom of the sea and spread it on the turtle’s back.

The woman began to dance, and the mud began to grow to the size of North America, and plants began to grow. The woman then gave birth to a daughter, who eventually grew and gave birth

to twins. The right-sided twin came out well, but the left-sided one caused the death of its mother.

The sky woman finally became the moon. Her deceased daughter sprang from her body the “Three Sisters” (corn, squash, beans) and other medicines like tobacco. The twins grew up. Sapling, the right side, present during the day, created animals useful to mankind, rivers and edible plants. Flint, on the other hand, created night and winter. The two men have fought for a long time, but their opposing paths create balance on earth.

– In our culture,” adds Barbara, “we don’t like to classify twins as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – which is a Christian reference. For us, they’re opposites, and their presence is important for balance.

In Mohawk tradition, animals are essential and treated with respect. All living things are interdependent and interdependent, in the tradition of the creation myth.

Maybe we should learn to look up to the sky again,” I thought as our conversation drew to a close.

To look to the stars, to find our true place in the universe, as the ancients did.

Perhaps this was our one and only chance of survival in a future fragmented by omens as ominous as they are pessimistic…