You Can Watch the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival Right Now

When Margaret Grenier of the Dancers of Damelahamid received a phone call from the Canada Council last December, she thought it was likely about the Indigenous dance company’s funding application.

“I thought it was about the adjudication being delayed because of COVID,” Grenier said.

But the call was to tell Grenier, the group’s artistic and executive director, she’d won the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts, and the $50,000 that comes with it. The award recognizes artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement by a Canadian professional artist in music, theatre or dance.

“I was quite surprised, overwhelmed even,” she says. “I teared up on the phone.”

At the time, the plans for the Dancers of Damelahamid’s annual Coastal Dance Festival were just coming together, despite pandemic challenges that included the inability to have live performances.

Instead the festival pre-recorded performances and went entirely online. But the essential goal of the festival didn’t change, Grenier says. “The main focus is how we can connect with the community and support artists at this time,” she says. A major award like the Carsen Prize can go a long way in not only supporting the creation of new work but also allowing for new means of sharing it.

But there were other reasons that this year’s festival was especially meaningful to Grenier.

Her mother, Elder Margaret Harris, passed away earlier in the summer.

That was not just a personal loss. Harris was one of the few remaining Elders of her generation and the loss had resonance for the larger community as well.

“For the Indigenous community it means a lot,” Grenier explains. “The importance of passing the work down intergenerationally feels very tender. It means a lot.”

In honour of her mother’s life and work, the festival includes a new work that incorporates both Cree and Gitxsan traditions. Born in Manitoba, Margaret Harris was adopted into the Raven clan when she married Grenier’s father Chief Kenneth Harris. Together the couple raised their family, co-founded the Dancers of Damelahamid and started the first Indigenous Dance Festival, all in a time when the Potlatch Ban on Indigenous ceremonies had only recently been lifted.

The line of powerful women runs strong in Grenier’s family. Grenier’s grandmother Irene Harris initiated the process of documenting Gitxsan songs and dances, in part to prevent their permanent erasure by the Potlatch Ban. The ban not only threatened prison time for anyone engaging in or assisting with celebrations, but also outlawed the wearing of regalia as well as the practice of traditional songs and dances. As a form of cultural obliteration, designed to wipe away both family and community history, it proved brutally effective.

Born in 1882, Irene Harris used a reel-to-reel tape recorder to ensure this knowledge was documented and passed on. Grenier says her grandmother’s efforts required creativity. Traditional drums weren’t available, so things like pots and pans were substituted.

Trained as a matriarch, Harris invested a lot of resources to preserve the songs and dances. Although the reel-to-reel recordings she made with Grenier’s great-uncle Arthur McDames employed the rudimentary technology of the day, they were instrumental in preserving traditions that otherwise might have disappeared.

Grenier sees this as a fundamental act of hope for generations to come. Some of the works performed by the Dancers of Damelahamid are thousands of years old.

“The songs and dances are some of my earliest memories. I was very lucky to have a grandmother with such foresight,” says Grenier.

As a Gitxsan/Cree dancer, Grenier trained in the traditions of Northwest Coast Indigenous dance. Although she has been performing with the Dancers of Damelahamid since 1991, she took over running the company from her parents in 2003, inheriting and honouring the familial commitment to the cultural traditions of the Northwest Coast people. “I was really fortunate to have this background.”

As Grenier explains, Gitxsan traditions were held very closely, and because of this they were easier to lose. She is immensely careful to ensure songs and dances that were not intended to be shared publicly, but were meant to practise healing or other purposes, remain private. Although deeply valued by community and family, they were never meant to be shared with a general audience.

Founded in 2008, the Coastal Dance Festival has grown over the years, offering performances from different cultural traditions from Musqueam to Tlingit, Haida to Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw.

The 2021 edition features filmed and streamed events from across the province, as well as Washington and Alaska. In addition to The Dancers of Damelahamid, other dancemakers and companies include The Rez Kids I Guess, Chinook SongCatchers, Dakhká Khwáan and Git Hayesk.

The diversity and breadth of the performances speaks to a wider shift. Indigenous dance has entered the cultural consciousness in a major way, with companies like Australia’s Bangarra Dance Theatre and solo artists like Jacob Boehme who combine traditional dance forms with more theatrical elements.

The critical importance of continuing the connection with cultural knowledge and history is intimately bound up with identity, but it also has greater political implications around issues like decolonization.

Grenier is the first dance artist from B.C. to win the Walter Carsen Award. The recognition is not only an important step in celebrating and honouring First Nations Indigenous dance, but also an expansion in the definition of contemporary dance itself.

“In the last five years we’ve been invited to perform and share our work, I’ve seen a lot of changes,” says Grenier. “This kind of openness really allows for artists to work within our dance expression, to create work that is not compromised.”

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The Coastal Dance Festival is available online until Thursday. All events are free.