Montreal’s First Peoples’ Festival celebrates global Indigenous community

Local politicians, event coordinators and members of Montreal’s First Nations community showed up to rub elbows in fine attire at La Grande Bibliothèque August 3 for the opening of Présence Autochtone, the Montreal First Peoples’ Festival.

The evening was formal, and a bit dry. Thankfully, the festival’s outdoor events more than made up for the lack of cultural grounding displayed in its opening ceremony.  

The First Peoples’ Festival has been around for 28 years and is a celebration dedicated to traditional and contemporary Indigenous art. Many of the events are free to attend, provided they don’t reach capacity, and the festival features film, music, visual art, traditional drumming, dancing and food. This year’s edition spanned 14 venues, featured over 50 films, five concerts, and four visual art exhibitions, as well as several professional development opportunities.

Starting on August 4, Montreal’s Place des Festivals hosted teepees, a longhouse displaying Native cinema and other traditional Aboriginal arts and demonstrations.

Mohawk dancing and singing from the Deer family, drumming from the Buffalo Hat Singers, Naskapi storytelling, shawl dancing from Ivanie Aubin-Malo and hoop and other traditional dance from Jennifer Brazeau, Barbara Diabo and the InterNATION dance troupe were all on the daily schedule that rolled through to August 7.

Musical highlights over the course of the four days included popular Indigenous artists DJ XS7 Shauit and a highly anticipated performance by Aboriginal Music Award winners Digging Roots.

The festival is a colossal event and takes a large team to bring everything together. “We need the whole year, an office and a permanent staff dedicated to coordinating the event to make it happen,” said head organizer André Dudemaine.

The vision behind the event is to create more visibility for Indigenous people and cultures within the city and instil a sense of cultural pride in Indigenous youth.

Tommy McGee, from Wemindji, noted that the festival offers a unique opportunity to meet Indigenous people from all over the world. “Being of Cree descent, it’s not too often I see Maoris from New Zealand,” he said.

“What we need to do is show the rest of the world who we are. We need to show how important we are in the cultural metropolis,” related Dudemaine. “If we want our youth to connect with our own culture, we need to show them how dynamic and meaningful they still are in the 21st century.”

In addition to creating visibility for First Nations within the non-Indigenous world, the event is designed to build bridges between Indigenous cultures across the globe. According to Dudemaine, art is an unrivalled vehicle to accomplish this.

“The artists are our best ambassadors because they speak directly to the soul. There’s no rational filter when you’re taken by a song, a dance, a film – you enter into it and believe,” he concluded.