Footprints: A Walk Through Generations Transcript

Sarah Pashagumskum:  Your Excellency, fellow laureates, and honoured guests, it’s a real honour to be here today on traditional Anishinaabe territory.

Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute’s innovative approach to Indigenous museology and heritage work ensures that our culture, our language, and our stories are maintained for our children and our grandchildren for generations to come.

This exhibit, curated and developed from a Cree perspective in collaboration with Elders in all of our 10 communities, is an example of the way in which we, as Indigenous people, can tell our own stories and share our own cultures in exciting and engaging ways.

Footprints: A Walk Through Generations conveys the knowledge and tradition of countless generations and celebrates our close relationship with the land we have always walked on and have always lived on.

As an Indigenous nation, we control maintenance of our own heritage, ensuring that our languages, our histories, our stories, our ceremonies, are accessible for generations to come, in ways that we determine.

We are grateful to all of those who contributed to this project: Canada Heritage, through their Museums Assistance Program, and the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec, our own Cree Nation government, our lead researchers and curators Paula Menarick and Natasia Mukash, the Elders who generously gave us their time, their teachings, and direction, and the community members throughout Eeyou Istchee who contributed to this venture.

Chinaskuumitin, thank you, merci.