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THE COCHRANE TIMES Tuesday, October 28, 1976
WOMEN GATHER AT WHC
Through songs and stories, women from the Cochrane area and from the Morley reserve found new ways to speak to each other last weekend, and new ways to listen. Singing the Same Song: Women Celebrating Women was the third annual Women's Conference to be held in Cochrane. Organizers of the conference designed it to build bridges between the two cultures, and.even they were surprised at the overwhelmingly positive response from participants. The room at the Western Heritage Museum was full to overflowing with more than 250 women, who spent the day thinking about their place in their own bodies, in their families, and in the world.
Mrs. Georgie Mark, an elder from the Morley reserve, gave the opening prayer and blessings at lunch and at the ending of the conference. Ann Mortifee's keynote speech (keynote because it was full of notes and in the key of G) began the conference on Saturday morning. Mortifee sang, accompanied by her own drumming, at intervals through her talk. By the end of her hour-long opening she had the entire audience standing in a huge circle around the edges of the room, singing with her "Spiraling down to the centre, the centre of the earth..."Her thesis was straightforward: "In the first part of our life we build up all the differences and sorrows and misery we can possibly get hold of. In the second part we try to get rid of them, heal them, and release them."
Mortifee told the crowd she was brought up on a sugar cane farm in Zulu land, under South Africa's apartheid policy. "I remember one day standing outside my white house on the hill," she said, "Wondering why I was born into the white house, why not in the mud huts - why I was white and not black? I knew these were important questions, and that if I could find an answer I wouldn't be so anxious."
"There's a reason we were born into different bodies, different races," Mortifee told the group. "The Great Spirit does not do things for nothing. It's our job to find out why this body, why this time,why this personality? To find out why Creator made us."
She compared the pain of living to the grit inside an oyster. "What creates the pearl is dissatisfaction, discomfort. The oyster coats the grit to make it less painful to carry. The pearl is our wisdom, which we gain by living with pain." The word Shaman, Mortifee said, means the Wounded Healer. She found great comfort in that translation. "I'd spent my life trying to heal, but to be yourself is to be wounded. Instead of saying 'I'm wounded, I'm a victim', say 'Thank God that I am wounded!"
The rest of the morning was spent examining story telling with two skillful facilitators, Joyce Irvine and Tina Fox. Joyce Irvine has been practicing social work for 50 years, specializing in family therapy, and describes herself as being in her crone years. She is in great demand as a facilitator and public speaker. Tina Fox was the first Stoney woman to take post-secondary training off reserve, and holds a certificate in Management Development from the University of Calgary. She is now a member of the Nakoda Nation Band Council. She has five children.
Each began by telling part of her own story. Tina Fox spoke movingly about the transition from girlhood to womanhood. "The Nakoda people celebrate transitions of different stages of life. Your first period in the old days was a big celebration. A mother would take her young daughter to a woman in the community she admired, and hand her over for four days. In those four days the older woman would teach the girl to tan hides, keep house, cook, her own cleanliness, and how to keep her self sacred. "Those four days would stay with her for the rest of her life."
The young girl was told not to talk to, or flirt with, men during those days, Fox said. "Because if she did, all her life she'd be boy-crazy".
Even during the days of the residential schools, the older girls in the schools tried to continue the tradition. "I remember
Helen Beaver," Fox said. "She would take the younger girl under her wing and dress her up in ribbons, and put her to work. The supervisors didn't understand what the heck was going on, but she persisted. So she was able to pass on this tradition."Fox told how those abused as children found the transition into womanhood particularly bitter, "Hating ourselves for being women, because of what had happened to us."
But she said that when she had her own children she made sure that her daughters worked hard for those four days.
Joyce Irvine, following Fox, voiced what many women in the audience must have been thinking: "How might life have been different if we had been helped to be proud of that transition into womanhood?."
She continued Mortifee's pearl metaphor."Our wound leads us to our pearl - because we were wounded, and didn't have that help, there must be some purpose which is leading us now to find the pearl of our womanhood."
Irvine believes that it's the job of older women to let younger women know about the journey to womanhood.And she believes that storytelling is an essential part of that job - not just the stories you tell other people,but the ones you tell yourself.
"We are meaning-making organisms," Irvine said. :From our earliest days we tell ourselves stories about ourselves in the world around us. The powerful stories we hear, however, many times repeated, start our act of creation of ourselves."
She urged the women to allow for surprises. The worst thing we can say is "That's the way I am."
Irvine talked about three levels of story that affect us: our personal stories (and how we allow that story to change), our family stories, and the cultural mythology that we live inside.
At small tables, the conference participants told each other stories for an hour, exchanging stories about their own and their families' histories.
After lunch Ann Mortifee returned with a "playshop" about inhabiting the body you were born into, using more songs and ending with a centering exercise.
The conference concluded with a closing ritual led by Joyce Irvine, and a last prayer from Mrs. Georgie Mark. Women left the meeting energized and looking forward to next year.