Beatrice Lavallee on Treaty Four
Beatrice Lavallee talks about who brought the Powwow to the Qu’Appelle Valley
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Other than the, other than the Qu’ Appelle Valley, other parts of the Qu’ Appelle Valley like there’s the us, like Piapot is all Cree speaking people. The next reserve and the next reserve after that are all Soto (**phonetic) peoples, Soto (**phonetic) speaking people. And they too, I know in Pasquas (**phonetic) we used to go there as a little girl, as a, you know, child and they’d have their sun dance, rain dance lodges down in the valley as well all close to (*inaudible) beach as they used to call it. So it always had a very uhhh special meaning, I guess, for the people why they kept their ceremonies down in the valley.
And I know with the, the different tribes of the Sioux on the other side of the valley they’re the ones that uhhh my grandma used to say they’re the ones that brought the powwow into this country, the Sioux. So when you say, when you talk about a powwow in my language you say white smoke. White smoke meaning Sioux dance is the translation to that word. They, we would travel from Standing Buffalo as we know it today to come down to Piapot with all their regalia and come and dance call and the same thing would happen Piapot people would go many miles some days to go to these powwows. I mean talking winter and summer in the sleigh with horses and, you know, but they would still go because there was this powwow and there’d always be a feast following the powwow. And feasts to a, us Indian people really means that the significance of a feast is that we feed our relatives, our ancestors who have gone on before us and it’s for them that we have this feast. So that’s what it means to us as Indian people why we have feasts.
The other thing too that came into being after awhile was on the Gordon’s Reserve a little north from Piapot they would come down too, but they came down with the, with the fiddles and the guitars and showed us how to jig and how to square dance and how to do all those things and that got started in Piapot. So we had two; one for the younger people with the jigging and the square dancing type, the waltzes with the guitar and fiddle. And them days there was no amps so they had to really, you know, we were lighting our halls with kerosene lamps and them days that’s the way it was.
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