Grassroots Growth and a Round Dance

In early July, I attended the Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, ON.  My partner and I had a booth in the not-for-profit area of the festival promoting the Moose Hide Campaign.  The story of this campaign is described beautifully on the website:

Paul Lacerte in centre with drum

On an early 2011 August morning, an Indigenous man named Paul Lacerte and his daughter Raven were hunting moose near the infamous Highway of Tears, a section of highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert, BC, where dozens of women have gone missing or been found murdered.  They had brought down a moose that would help feed the family for the winter and provide a moose hide for cultural purposes. As the daughter was skinning the moose her father started thinking…They were so near the highway that has brought so much sorrow to the communities along its endless miles, here with his young daughter who deserved a life free of violence…That’s when the idea sprang to life!  What if they used the moose hide to inspire men to become involved in the movement to end violence towards women and children?  Together with family and friends they cut up the moose hide into small squares and started the Moose Hide Campaign.(Moose Hide Campaign website)

Now, 8 years later, over a million Moose hide patches have been distributed in Canada and beyond.  The campaign has a new goal to distribute ten million patches.  My partner and I are helping in our small way to do that, to be part of this grassroots movement.  This allows us to have many conversations with men and women about the possibility of change.

As I sat at the booth, I began to wonder what a grassroots movement would look like if I tried to draw it.  I pictured a small patch of grass sending out runners underground that gave birth to blades of grass shooting up from the earth into the sky.  This would not be a linear drawing but more of a circle radiating out from the original roots.  And it would grow exponentially as well as more grass roots spread into more runners and more blades of grass.  And it would be tough to squelch.  If you have ever tried to grow a garden, you will know how grass is persistent and just pops up everywhere.  And then of course, there are grass seeds which are carried by the wind over great distances.  If they land in disturbed soil, they will take root and start spreading where they have arrived.  I thought about the Moose hide patches being mailed all over Canada and areas beyond and then being distributed in those areas.  I imagined the grass spreading and covering the land. 

After two days of working at the booth, we finally packed up the tent and table and sat down at the Main Stage to listen to the music and have some supper.  The second act that we listened to was a local band called Digging Roots.   David Newland describes them on the website as “a Juno-winning First Nations power couple Shoshona Kish and Raven Kanatakta [who] have built their sound on a unique musical marriage of unvarnished truth and unconditional love.”   You can check out their video For the Light here if you’d like to get a better sense of them. 

At the end of their Mariposa Festival  set, they invited the audience to join in a Round Dance.  You can learn more about Round Dances here:

   

One young woman started it and Shoshona invited everyone to join in.  People joined hands as the leader wove her way through the crowd.  The dance started really near to where I was sitting, so my partner and I jumped up and joined in at the end of the line which was only about ten people at that point.  As we moved through the audience other people jumped up to join in as well.  We didn’t make them wait until the end of the line though.  We simply dropped hands and made space for them.  The interesting thing was that as the line moved, at times I became too stretched between fast people in front of me and slow ones behind.  When I dropped hands to welcome other people into the circle, the pressure was eased.  Imagine that.  Adding more people to the circle takes the pressure off of the few.  The more people, the better.

Well, the circle grew larger and larger.  By the time I had made my way to the front of the stage, there were hundreds of people in the line ahead of me.  It felt so good to open the circle, to extend the generosity of space to people as we passed them by.  This dance is not about hierarchy.  There is space for all of us.  I noticed the joy on the faces of the dancers as the leader wound her way into a spiral and we faced other dancers.  In the video linked to above,  Adrian LaChance says, among other things, that the Round Dance is about healing through movement.  It certainly felt wonderful to join together with other festival goers in this dance over the lawn, over the grass, over the grassroots.   When the dance ended many of us extended our arms high into the air sending love from our hands to the band onstage.  This was the highlight of the weekend for me.

All weekend, I had explained to people that my partner and I were just taking our place in the circle of people working to end violence towards women and children.  I invited guests to the booth to be a part of the circle as well.  I had used the image of the circle to describe the grassroots, non-hierarchical model of the Moose Hide Campaign and now I had experienced the same thing physically.  The more people who joined in, the better.  There was less pressure on the individual as we all took our place. There was room for us all, we moved together and joy, not fear, not violence, was the result.  It seemed that as soon as a ceremony, a model was provided, we figured out how to make space, how to work collectively, almost like we had done this our whole lives.  Maybe it is in our DNA and the invitation released it.  I don't know for sure.  But, it felt like the new story that we are writing together, one in which there is space for all of us.