A parade is a joyful thing. Even though they tend to make me teary. I enjoyed the May Day parade through Main Street, to kick off the Lil’wat Rodeo, this year – it was incredible to see the effort that people had put into their floats and vehicles and costumes and the treats and candy they were throwing out to folk. I loved the way people came with their folding chairs and umbrellas from the sun and used the flatbeds of their trucks as viewing platforms. I loved seeing the way people tended to their elders. And the kids.

A recent email from the Chamber shared that “The Pemberton + District Chamber of Commerce is working with the Village of Pemberton to organize the local Canada Day Parade. The parade will commence at the Community Centre and will wrap up at the Community Barn where the Village of Pemberton has other activities planned, including involvement from the Líl̓wat Nation. We are all honoured to have Maxine Bruce of the Líl̓wat Nation open up the activities at the Community Barn with her words and blessing.”

The Canada Day parade was on hiatus through COVID, and then out of respect for the revelations coming out of the Kamloops Indian residential school, and then last year, Canada Day events were organized by the community centre, without a parade… because… awkward. Is it appropriate? Is it insulting?

How do we evolve our celebrations and our understandings of who we are, to know better do better, to incorporate things that are hard to acknowledge and were quite intentionally buried, hidden, denied, covered up…

Our organizations and leaders are, to their credit, genuinely trying to grapple with this.

Wrote the Chamber, “We acknowledge that trying to balance celebrations of Canadian pride with reflections on the country’s Indigenous history of colonialism and residential schools is difficult. The settler community of Pemberton is on the traditional territory of the Líl̓wat peoples, and in order to establish new, better, stronger relations that move towards reconciliation, the parade theme is “weaving together the fabric of our community” and the colours are red, white and orange – in honour of residential school survivors.”

I avoided the Canada Day celebrations last year – I was still pretty crowd-phobic and I just hadn’t worked out how to reconcile all the hard things, so it was easier to stay away. But my kid has recently told me that Canada Day is his favourite day, and while he is fortunate to learn Lil’wat culture and language at school, he is grappling to understand his place in the world and what he can celebrate, about himself, and his place in community. And I don’t think we’re going to work out how to be all the things that we are – settlers, immigrants, descendants, ancestors, mixed race, indigenous to somewhere once upon a time, Indigenous to this place, St’at’imc, Lil’wat, mothers, daughters, friends, neighbours, (add your personal threads here), the hundred million different roles and responsibilities we all carry, with our beautifully complex identities, by staying away, by trying to avoid anything messy or uncomfortable or uncertainty-bringing.

I am woven together of so many threads, as it is. Even if I just think about my 8 known and named great-grandparents, that is an unwieldy number of threads and stories and strengths and blessings and burdens and complexities to try and weave together into a coherent story that I can tell and understand. I am really just the fabric of that, unfolding at any given moment. I add in my partner’s, and our kid’s fabric just doubled… and as he said, if we go back to the great grand ancestor, we’re all the same.

Cancelling any member of that family tree because they’re an embarrassment or a disappointment doesn’t really help us have resilience, in ourselves, as the fabric made from their genetic material…

And deciding just to avoid the possibility of awkward feelings by skipping Canada Day doesn’t really help us update the ongoing story of Canada… a story that is now tasked with weaving in a lot of different threads, that previously had been dropped, to make it tidier, and to erase all the discomfort.

Acknowledgement, then, today, for Maxine Bruce, who has walked at the head of the Pemberton Canada Day parade for many many years, often not as an invited and honoured guest, sometimes having to insist to make her quiet statement, and to sow the seeds of relationship building and change making… and to those people who step into the challenging leadership roles in our community, who don’t have the option of ignoring the hard things, and who aren’t… I’m looking forward to grabbing my frayed threads and flaws and love for this place and standing together on July 1, interweaving orange with red and white.

Basket weaving materials via Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, who shared: “Our baskets were great for cooking and storage. Our weavers became so good at weaving that they were able to weave so tight that no water was able to get through. We would also coat them in seal, bear, or salmon grease to ensure that no water got through. Many of our baskets are made from cedar root but some can be made from pine needles. The pine needle baskets were best utilized for berries as the berries were light enough to be held in the needle baskets. All of our baskets have designs. Those designs were able to depict where you came from, for example, family and nation. We were able to create those designs using cherry bark and canary grass. If we buried our cherry bark into the mud for six months to a year the mud would naturally dye the bark making it darker.”

This is a great way to showcase your business or organization and come together as a community. If you would like to enter a float or participate in the parade, access the registration form at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13nJ9B9jSkPUPdgbHKeyubSnrzBsoXxn1. Please email your completed form to nlangmann@pembertonchamber.com. The form is due by July 01, 9AM at the parade site. Early, timely entries help us better organize the parade.