Dozens of Regina kids gathered today in Wascana Park on Thursday for a celebration of traditional Indigenous games.
It’s called “get-outside-kids-club” and it’s put on by SaskOutdoors, Nature Saskatchewan and the Canadian Wildlife Federation.
Some of the games played included hand-ball, hoop-and-arrow, rock-in-fist and hoop-and-stick.
“Today I’ve learned that First Nations are very unique and they play very fun games and their games are different and with their games, we progress,” Brielle Gardner, one of the kids attending the event said.
It started with a teepee raising and knowledge sharing session from an Indigenous knowledge keeper about the significance of the teepee.
“We’re really connecting with different Indigenous cultural games today,” Shannon Chernick, youth leadership specialist with the Canadian Wildlife Federation said.
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She added that the goal of the event is to support reconciliation in the community. “These are traditional Indigenous games, so they would have been played at the time of the buffalo.”
‘The games were gifted to us from an Indigenous knowledge keeper from Pi Pot First Nation. It wasn’t about sitting down and writing stuff out. It was ‘let’s play this game that’s going to develop your hand-eye coordination, a game that’s going to develop your lung capacity.’ It was all just about skill development,” she said.
“Learning these Indigenous games has been really fun and I and I have learned a lot from every single game that I have played yet,” Adalee Gardner, another youth at the event said.
Chernick said that the games are played by lots of First Nations, “luckily, we’re so grateful that Pi Port First Nation was able to keep the knowledge in spite of everything that’s happened in their community over the last 150 years and so the games, we feel, are just so important to to maintain understanding about that culture.”
She said that being on Treaty 4, it is important for them to understand the traditions of the treaty and for land-based learning. Kids actually got the opportunity to put up the different parts of the teepee and also to learn about the cultural traditions.
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