A photo from National Aboriginal Day celebrations in Red Deer in 2017. (rdnewsNOW/Josh Hall)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

coming together

Urban Aboriginal Voices Society invites public to day of learning

Apr 18, 2019 | 4:17 PM

Red Deer’s Urban Aboriginal Voices Society is hoping its upcoming community day will inspire and move the bar up in terms of local citizens understanding one another.

It happens Tuesday starting at 8 a.m. with a pipe ceremony at Festival Hall before moving into public consultations around 10 a.m.

At 4 p.m., agencies and residents are welcome to attend the organization’s AGM at which many important topics will be discussed, according to Tanya Schur, Community Facilitator.

“We’ll be looking at the plan around justice and some of the challenges faced by our people in the system, we’ll be working on education and an action plan for more engaged Indigenous students, and to have safer schools,” Schur says.

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“We’ll also be talking about housing and homelessness, and the health and mental health of Indigenous people. As well, we have a group working on preserving and promoting culture and how we can make the culture more accessible to people.”

Starting at 6, a free youth night which includes supper, will give attendees the chance to hear from one of central Alberta’s more prominent Indigenous voices.

Chevi Rabbitt, an accredited fashion makeup artist, and award-winning human rights advocate who also happens to be transgender, will be the keynote speaker.

“One of the things we have heard overwhelmingly over the last couple years from our community working and living in central Alberta is that both racism and intolerance have affected our people in almost every area — housing, employment, justice, and education,” Schur says, adding that discrimination is holding people back from living a good life.

“Chevi’s story about bullying and recovery and what it means to be strong, proud and Indigenous is one that we really feel that our youth, in particular, need to hear and will really benefit from.”

Schur believes, in the end, that Rabbitt’s experience is one that exemplifies the need for communities within Red Deer and across Alberta to come together.

“We’re really trying to work systematically at helping, especially non-Indigenous agencies, to really put those TRC calls to action into place, and to learn more about Indigenous culture, intergenerational trauma, the effects of not just residential schools, but colonization and the continued impact of the Indian act on our people,” she says.

“We’re trying to help people understand the reality of First Nations and Metis people living in urban settings so that there’s less confusion and fewer myths that people are holding about Indigenous people.”

Schur also notes that the society has reached out to both of Red Deer’s new MLAs.

The Urban Aboriginal Voices Society began in 2008 as a community project of the Red Deer Native Friendship Society, and became a standalone organization in 2015.