It’s day 4 – Alyssa

Yesterday was day 3 and it was a very powerful day. We started off by making soap stone necklaces with auntie Julia. It was very time consuming ( I just finished my bear during my free time today ). Actually we had 2 classes before we started the activity with auntie. Our first class was with Shelva working on creative writing and researching colleges that best suite me. During the creative writing I pushed myself to be as creative as I can and seen my after product of if i put my creativity to something how good my story would sound. The second half of the class we were on the college bound website. We had the choice of putting in certain qualities we want in a college. It added a couple more colleges to my options. Than we ended the day with the blanket exercise. This was my first time experiencing something so powerful. The instructors first layed out a few blankets to represent the land native people had in Canada. Through out the time my peers were reading cards given to us at the begging. Each card said had something written on it that greatly impacted our people. Which caused for the instructors to cut down the blanket space. At the end of the exercise there were about less than 75 percent of the blanket space left for us to stand on. It made me tear up to have a physical presentation of what happened to our people and our land. I explained during our discussion time that all of us here at this program and many more are part of the 7 generation. Which our ancestors said that this generation would be the ones to do great things. That we were going to lead our people and bring back our cultures, traditions and language. I hope that all of us live up to this expectation and make our ancestors and future people proud. Today day 4 was a very fun day as well. Today we had the great opportunity to work with one of our great elders Vicente. He taught us Aztec dances it was really cool to learn another indigenous dance other than pow wow dances. I also participated in making bracelets and coloring with auntie Julia. It was a very calming and relaxing part of my day.