Hearthside

On Canada Day, the city of Winnipeg put on a drone show instead of fireworks this year. This was a great idea for many reasons. First of all, it is less loud for pets and people with sensory issues. Secondly, Canada is having a particularly bad wildfire year and it is not a good idea to poke the bear. The last reason is that the drone show allowed a unique opportunity to tell a story, and the story chosen was a retelling of Indigenous star lore. Everyone was captivated as the stories of the stars came to life in 3D in the sky above them. There were people exclaiming and tearing up. When the show was done people lay, stunned, on the grass, not willing to shake off the spell of the remarkable storytelling. Whoever wrote the story for the drone show, pieced together lots of different stories from Indigenous Star Lore expert, Wilfred Buck, and paired it with the broader Western understanding of the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. The result was a multi-layered story that broug...

So it is 10:30pm on a Sunday night. I am halfway through dishes in an attempt to make room in the kitchen to rack my mead… but instead I find myself at the kitchen table pounding out words at the keyboard. It doesn’t matter who it was this time out there is the broader sphere of online Heathenry. It doesn’t matter who got the gears turning. It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. That is the point of this really… Sometimes we disagree with other Heathens. Sometimes we disagree with other Heathens who are in our own tribes, kindreds, or close-knit communities. Sometimes those disagreements are beyond reparations and lead to a rift, or splitting off into separate groups. Sometimes tempers just flare, and Heathens are too proud to do the work to reestablish common ground. Either way unless it is my group, it is none of my concern… at least it shouldn’t be. The problem is that in this fast-paced modern world, when tempers flare we often turn to posting online to rant. (Ranting on i...

One of the groups that I am a part of challenged people to write the story of the marriage of Skaði, but wrong answers only. Naturally, many rose to the challenge. There were a number of witty results, and many that were well thought out. It was requested that I write a longer version of mine because it was quite enjoyable, so I will do that here. First, however, I wanted to talk about storytelling and how our Lore changes over time with different tellings.  Historically, there were many versions of a story. They would vary each time they were told depending on the Skald and the audience and what was being conveyed through the retelling. You could hear a story 100 times and each time it would be different. Part of this was your life experience, and part of it was what the Skald was trying to say through the story. When our Lore was written down often it was taken from multiple versions of the oral story, and mixed with the biases of the person who recorded it. Since then the bias o...

So I have written about Land Taking rituals before, but something has been nagging at me for a while as an inclusive modern Heathen. The idea of Land “Taking” in Canada (and other countries with histories colonization by Europeans) is problematic in a post colonial sense, where the mantra is Landback. I am a supporter of the Landback movement, but I feel the name Land “Taking” is doing a disservice to the purpose of the ritual within the modern context. Other names can be used as well such as “circumambulation.” But what is the purpose of this ritual? Some sources seem to say it is to Hallow the land or make it sacred. This makes sense if you were land taking to create a Hof or Vé, but Land Taking was done to create homesteads as well. It was the creation of the enclosure. This is not the same type of enclosure as the Enclosure movement I talk about in my Forest Commons posts. Instead this enclosure was the land needed by a family for the purpose of subsistence. The land was for raisin...

I was recently talking to someone in the USA about how they were trying to find the meaning in American holidays from a Heathen perspective. They were trying to be mindful of the colonial history of America and working to moving past that. It got me thinking about how that might look in Canada. Holidays about belonging to a nation or group of people, but how do we feel that sense of belonging when we are ourselves outside of the over-culture? How do we reconcile our shared colonial history as modern inclusive Heathens in Canada? If you are not familiar with Canadian Holidays, there are very few, and even less which are actually days off of work. Some days are provincially recognized only or have different names in different provinces even if they fall on the same day. The majority of days are either Christian or colonial in origin. So let’s take a look: Remembrance Day - November 11th This is a day to honour those who died in war, and honour veterans. What some people may not know is t...