Building relationships was the theme of Saturday’s canoe-waking ceremony and the purpose behind the three canoes that sat in the Vancouver Police Department’s parking lot for the occasion.
Speakers from Squamish Nation and the VPD stood in front of the crowd of cadets and members of the public and acknowledged how much relations between the province’s native communities and police have improved through recent years, a long journey from uneasy beginnings that stemmed from a combination of mistreatment, mistrust and misunderstanding.
It’s through programs such as the Pulling Together canoe trip where police and First Nations team up to paddle over a days-long excursion through local waterways. This year’s journey is the 15th annual one and is planned for July 2 to 11 from Mount Currey to Mission, with some portaging.
The VPD canoe is named NCH’7MUT (pronounced In-CHOTE-Mote) which means One Heart, One Mind, and was “awakened” by members of the Squamish Nation and the VPD Canoe Club members who dipped cedar boughs into water and used them to brush over the VPD’s and Collingwood Aboriginal Youth Canoe Club’s vessels while members from Squamish Nation drummed and sang.
It’s a Coast Salish tradition for canoes to be “woken” before being launched into the water after being stored over the winter. Cedar is used in homage to the tree used to build the canoe, explained Alroy Baker, spokesperson for the Squamish Ocean Canoe Family.
“When we wake them up, we take off any feelings left on the canoe — any negative feelings so when we go onto the waters for the first time they’re not going to come on to our spirit and make it a harder pull,” he said. “We use cedar to honour the spirit of the canoe as it’s built out of a cedar tree so we’re keeping the spirit of the tree alive as well.”
The Pulling Together program started in 1997 and includes Vancouver police, RCMP, other public service employees such as fisheries officers and native communities from the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast. More than 500 aboriginal youth in B.C. have participated in the trip since its beginning, working alongside law enforcement, which is a completely new experience for many of the kids involved.
VPD aboriginal liaison officer Const. Richard Lavallee recalled his first Pulling Together canoe trip 10 years ago.
“I signed up, loved it and stuck with it. I ended up training to be a skipper,” he said. “A lot of these youth are troubled youth and have never had a good relationship with police but it humanizes us. We’re family for 12 days, it brings us together.”
Lavallee, who is part Cree and part French and hails from northern Manitoba, said forging relationships is what makes the journey, what he calls, an “amazing experience.”
“There was one youth who didn’t like police at all and I made a point of getting to know him. It took a few days but by the end of the journey, the anger had melted away,” he said. “At the end of the journey, we parted as friends.”
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