Following from the Sweetgrass Harvest Teaching

We met at a predetermined meeting place and played follow the leader through quiet back roads of the Ottawa countryside to Bourget. It was a fairly sunny day, not too warm or cool, for this year’s Sweet Grass Harvest Teaching's with Ron ‘Grande Ours’ Goddard, Grandmother Alma Lo, Nancy Myatt, Lise Menard and several people interested in receiving the teachings. Once we arrived at our destination, a lonely gravel and dirt road with trees on one side and a high grasses on the other, Ron and his friend tied two flags together, the Mohawk Warrior Flag and one I had never seen. It was white (symbolic of the Great Peace) and yellow (as of the morning sun) with brown snowshoes criss-crossed with a canoe (our ways of transportation). He told us it was the flag of his Ancestors when all Algonquin nations were at peace with one another. He told us the flags are bound together during every outing to symbolize the Great Peace of the Algonquin and Mohawk Confederacy. Grandmother Alma Lo is of the Tuscarora Nation/Mohawk Confederacy. The symbolism of peace was not lost on me. We were experiencing it by coming together from different nations, countries and backgrounds for this gathering and teaching activity.

We sang some honor songs and Ron said a prayer to the 4 directions. We then walked to the grassy ditches and got a crash course in what sacred sweet grass looks and feels like. It’s easy to pick regular grasses thinking they are sacred sweet grass and the experienced members of the group helped us by checking our harvest periodically and weeding out the bad grasses (pun intended). After a couple of hours we all had at least a good fistful of sweet grass harvested, so we loaded back into the cars and played follow-the-leader again, this time our destination was a beautiful park in Casselman. There we spread the sweet grass out in the sun to dry while we feasted, conversed and got to know each other a bit more. After the feast we received Ron’s sweet grass teachings and learned how to make our braids. As some of us received the teachings, others were already busy braiding and singing traditional songs. With a little imagination I could believe that we were in a pre-Columbian campsite learning as our Ancestors did before us. Braiding wasn’t easy for the newbies and in the time it took me to make one braid, the more experienced members of the group had several braids completed. We first timers were very proud of our very first braids.

It is imperative that we understand the teachings and uses for the four (4) sacred plants, not to mention all other plants Creator has given us. Wherever possible we should use these natural medicines instead of the man-made poisons offered to us as medicines today. Our ancestors knew how to use each part of the plants that grow wild around us to keep themselves strong and well.

I hope that Ron ‘Grande Ours’ continues these yearly Sweet Grass teachings for a very long time. We need people like him that keep the old knowledge alive. More importantly, I hope that there will always be someone to take his place as teacher when his time to teach has passed. If the valuable information that was once more common knowledge becomes lost, I fear that we as a people will have lost a very fundamental part of ourselves that will be extremely difficult to regain.

Written By: Diana Muse-Larose

August

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