Students at Craik School learned the importance of the interconnectivity of all living things last Wednesday through native hoop dancing as part of an ongoing effort by the school to provide students with an understanding of and connection to First Nations culture.
“With the hoops I connect all of the make-up-all, which represents the earth,” said Saskatoon hoop dancer Lawrence Roy Jr. “With the earth everything is connected to one thing or another, so one thing needs another thing to survive and therefore so on and so on. If you take one of those things out then the earth will fall apart. It won’t explode, but it will fall apart.”
Roy Jr. has been practicing different hoop dance styles like the great eagle and the prairie chicken for close to 25 years and now travels to schools throughout Saskatchewan where he teaches children about native culture and how to perform the hoop dance during workshops for each grade.
In Craik, he first performed a dance to traditional native music with 30 hoops for the whole student body in the gymnasium. During the dance he formed the eagle, flower, snake, butterfly and ball with hoops during the half-hour presentation as a way to demonstrate how everything is connected in some way to another.
Roy Jr. said he is not sure how those images came into place as the representation of all living things, as the dance’s origins go far back into the past, but he does see the benefit of using them to teach the message.
“The eagle is flying high up into the sky, so it can answer the prayers for all the people that are praying,” said Roy Jr. “The butterfly is for the beauty of the world. The flower is for the beautiful smells and everything that you experience throughout life. The ball represents all the different things that are around that you need to survive.
“When I was a kid I always used to try and sneak around like the army men and that is the thing you would have for the snake, a sneaky thing slithering into the next camp or something, so that person can scout better or go and see different scenes.”
Jody Kearns, a grades 3 and 4 teacher at Craik School, said Métis and native culture is a big component of their curriculum, so every year they try and come up with a way to try and enforce the importance of the First Nations to their students.
“Native and Métis culture is not something that is usually found in our area, so this was something for the kids to see and experience,” said Kearns, noting the workshops with the grades 1 to 8 students were the big part of the day. “It wasn’t just them seeing hoop dancing that I wanted. I wanted them to actually learn it and be a part of it so they have a connection and remember it.”