TEEN DANCER'S DREAM-INSPIRED REGALIA FILLED WITH SYMBOLIC MEANING

Eighteen-year-old First Nations dancer Maegan Mandawoub. 

The colours of Maegan Mandawoub’s regalia worn at Saugeen First Nation’s 48th annual powwow recently came to her in a dream. In her dream, she was helping her aunt get to a powwow, and they had to cross a creek. She turned to look down at the creek and saw a frozen lake. That ice is represented by her white regalia top. And there was a sunrise with purples and blues, oranges, reds and yellows, all of which are included in the 18-year-old’s traditional dress. She wore it as a proud member of Saugeen First Nation where she spent many of her youngest years. The two-day powwow was a spectacle of colourful regalia and native dancing and drumming, Indigenous food and crafts. The best of the best dancers turn out for prizes in several competitive categories every year.

Maegan Mandawoub is a high school student who now lives in Kitchener. She was this year’s head youth female dancer at the powwow.

As she explains it, two weeks after her dream, which was more than two years ago now, she learned her sick aunt wasn’t going to live long.

“I took that as a sign because, at that time, I was making my regalia, but I was just really undecided about how to make it and what colours to use. And then I had that dream.”

Her regalia is symbolic in other respects – her flowing fringes represent water, and women in her culture are water carriers. Orange bear paws declare she’s a proud member of the bear clan.

A butterfly on the back of her V-shaped yoke has a story itself to do with her unexplainable sight of white butterflies in winter. Her beaded headpiece and earrings made by an aunt look like what Maegan had in mind before telling her story.

She carries her mother’s feathered fan, which she said was a gift from inmates when her mom was a teen. (Her mother visited jails and sang for the prisoners).

The larger than life teen said she looks for signs and symbols as guideposts in her life. Some things others consider coincidences, she believes have significance.

“A lot of people in our community are also like that. We’ve seen too many things to know it’s not a coincidence.”

She respects and embraces the unseen and unknown as an article of faith.

She smudges her regalia – bathing it in the smoke of burning sweet grass to purge any negativity she may harbour, and then dances “for the people that need it.” She smudges her regalia at day’s end to “send those prayers back to the Creator.”

Interestingly, Maegan organized the first powwow in the Waterloo Region District school board two years ago at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium and she’s also a capable speaker with an expressed concern for the world around her.

She referred to the anti-Hispanic sentiment many believe is being stoked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s own inflammatory words. She pointed to what authorities have called white supremacist mass shootings, such as the one several weeks ago in El Paso, Texas, where 22 people were killed in a Walmart shopping centre.

Hispanic and Indigenous people who live in the southern United States are actually native to those areas, different than people and tribes farther south in Mexico, she said.

And she sees similar hardness in Ontario, calling out by name Ontario Premier Doug Ford and cuts to post-secondary education funding.

“He’s doing some very bad damage to our First Nations communities. All the funding cuts for our personal funds as well, like education and stuff. Like I’m scared to go to school because I’m scared I can’t afford it.”

So she “grasps” onto her Indigenous culture because it comforts her in these “intense” times.

“And I find dancing comfortable," she adds. "I find being at powwows comfortable. And just seeing all the things that are happening to young people today -- kids in camps, and the children who have been orphaned, you know I feel for them.

“So when I dance today, when I carry my tobacco, that’s what I’m putting my tobacco in for. Because those kids, they need all the prayers that they can get at this moment.”

Amen, Maegan!  Those kids need role models like you too!!!

*Note: Tobacco was considered a gift from the Creator in many Native North American cultures; according to some of them, tobacco smoke is a means of carrying the smoker's prayers to God.