Welcome Words | Land Acknowledgment & Reflections

Knowledge Keeper Grandma Karen MacInnis shares a message as we welcome the changing seasons of Spring and Summer. 

As our earth awakens, as our mother awakens around us, it is also our time to reflect what’s inside of ourselves, it’s our new beginnings. A chance to start over. To grow and to start over, and that connection as we watch plants grow, and ourselves as well. And new life coming. The animals are having their babies, the birds are having their babies, and it’s new life, it’s new everything and that is so beautiful.

It was also a time, way way back, when suddenly you had new food, which nourishes the body and we have several traditional medicines that you take in the spring to nourish your body, to give you that strength to get through. Maple syrup is one. Canada’s famous maple syrup. It’s not boiled down into maple syrup the way we sell it in the store, but it was used to add with water, with ceremony, to bring new energy into our spirit without creating the overdose of sugar.

The new berries will be coming out within the next few weeks – the strawberries. That was new life and new strength and one of the most important times for young women as we celebrated womanhood with those berries. It’s part of the traditions, we put the women on a berry fasting, which means that they go from a girl to a woman throughout that year. Different places have different ceremonies for it. So it was a new beginning for them.

It’s a new beginning, a new way of looking at oneself in the Spring. You’ve had Winter to reflect. You know, when you weren’t able to be out as much and maybe the heavy workload of planting and gathering slowed down so you had time to be with family and reflect and notice and talk and share. And now that spring is coming, you have this new time. It’s also the time when we plant or gather as things come right, depending where you were. So now you go to and you have to buy the groceries, which for a lot of my people is a difficult time. We are not a rich nation. There are those who have money amongst us, like anywhere, but there are those who are on the other end of the spectrum and it’s become difficult as people have to go out and buy food. You know, the rents have gone up, the price of gas has gone up, everything went up, which puts that strain on people. What I’m noticing is that strain and how do we work through that to be happy in this new season.