Keepers of the Athabasca to offer free workshops in northern Alberta

The Alberta-based Keepers of the Athabasca, a chapter of the national organization Keepers of the Water, will commence monthly workshops at a half-dozen Friendship Centres in northern Alberta starting in early September.

The workshops will be held in Slave Lake, High Prairie, Fort McMurray, Athabasca, Lac La Biche and Edson.

There will be a total of seven workshops in each community, with topics that include climate action, which will cover solar installation programs, as well as information on current climate science, emergency preparedness and energy efficiency.

The national Keepers of the Water is a group comprised not only of Indigenous people, but also environmental groups, as well as communities interested in the protection of water, air and land.

Alberta’s Anti-Racism Advisory Council has chipped in $25,000 towards the workshops that the Keepers of the Athabasca will be staging.

The first workshop will be held Sept. 3 in Slave Lake.

Other planned workshops for 2019 include a blanket exercise, which educates participants about Indigenous people since their European contact, and an Exploring The Treaties event.

In the New Year the workshops that will be presented are titled United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, Indigenous Water Governance, Circle of Water and Where’s My Power?

“In a way it’s a big experiment to see what sort of response we’re going to get,” said Jule Asterisk, the project manager for the Keepers of the Athabasca. The gatherings are collectively titled Flowing into Right Relationship workshops.

Asterisk believes the workshops should be well received because they are in line with Number 57 of the Calls to Action resulting from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

This particular call to action states municipalities and all levels of government should provide cultural education for their employees.

To this end, Asterisk said group officials have been contacting town officials, members of municipal councils, as well as police and hospital administrators and health care workers. They are hoping representatives from these fields in the six communities will attend the workshops, which do not have a registration fee, and then help spread the word about their events.

The invitations to attend the workshops include the following paragraph which states:

Cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity training are mandated for all public servants and this training can benefit everyone.  We hope you consider our workshop series as a valuable, while free, resource for you and your staff.  The Flowing workshop series is aimed to help a fracturing society understand each other better, by sharing paradigms to increase empathy, understanding, service, and business potential. 

While representatives from the Keepers of the Athabasca will be presenting these workshops to adults for the first time, the group has been offering one of the workshops to youth for awhile.

Joseph Large, the Keepers of the Athabasca’s workshop co-ordinator, has presented the Community Climate Action workshop to about 60 schools in northern Alberta in the past two years. He speaks to students ranging from Grades 4 to 10.

“It’s surprising to see how perceptive the children are,” Large said. “I’m hoping they go home and talk to their parents about it. And I’m sure they do.”

Large added the workshops are well received.

“They’re great,” said Large, who often attends events with his wife Esther, who is also a workshop facilitator. “There’s a real positive response and a real enlightenment for the children and for myself as well.”

The Community Climate Action workshop, however, is slightly different when it will be presented to adults as opposed to school children.
Those in schools are presented with a workshop lasting about an hour and only touches on various solar programs.
The workshop geared towards adult though will be between 90 minutes and two hours long.  That’s because it will include more in-depth conversations about designing solar installations as well as details on how to prepare, distribute and evaluate solar requests for proposals.

For those that do express interest in a solar program, officials from the Keepers of the Athabasca will be available for follow-up assistance. They can help plan and contract new solar installations.

Exact dates for the Edson workshops have yet to be confirmed.

But the five other communities will all have monthly workshops from September through November this year.
And in 2020 there will be monthly events held in those communities from January running until April.

Watch for details of these events at http://www.keepersofthewater.ca/athabasca