They have crossed ice ages, oceans, wild territories, survived the greatest genocide on the planet and remain more vulnerable than any other people to massive deforestation and the exploitation of fossil fuels on their ancestral lands…
It’s these hunter-gatherer faces that I want to bring back to mind at a time of climate change and massive exploitation of the planet.
Faces among which are mixed Metis and descendants of “coureurs des bois”, testimony of the wars that have raised these territories and the deep traumas that have marked the history of the First Peoples…
This site presents a part of the pow wows circuit in Quebec and Ontario, that I have been following for almost ten years.
These annual gatherings are considered medicine. A healing path that some refer to as the “Red path”, it is the spiritual healing path that First Nations have put in place to reclaim their identity after the wave of trauma they have been subjected during the colonization.
I’ve been to a lot of pow wows, running behind the dancers to discover the hidden face of a people whose legends fed my childhood. But you have to go further to “see”, to take off your mask as a jaded westerner in search of sensationalism to approach the “healing circle”, this initiatory circle represented by the dance floor.
The photo essay gathers portraits of traditional dancers made on the pow wow circuit in Quebec between 2014 and today, and is structured around articles and reports made on the reserve.
These photos do not reflect the daily life of the natives before their evangelization, but the words of the elders tell of the violent assimilation that took place when nomadic peoples settled, and the reality of the intergenerational traumas that resulted.
The tragedies of the residential schools, such as the one in Kamloops1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamloops_Indian_Residential_School, are there to remind of this, as are the “invisibles”: these itinerants lost in the streets of modern cities, fleeing the insalubrious shacks in the heart of the reserves of the Great North where entire families are crammed together…
Ninka North is my franco-canadian photojournalist & author pseudonym.
