Indigenous Presenters Gathering to Showcase Wolfe Island, and the LodgePole Alliance

Jeff Green | Sep 25, 2024

For four days in early October, The Hotel Wolfe Island will be hosting an event, a gathering, that has been organised by the LodgePole Arts Alliance. LodgePole Alliance is one of the members of the Wolfe Island Commons, which was created in connection with the purchase of the hotel by local artists, partly as a way to preserve it as a community space.

The LodgePole Arts Alliance was founded five years ago by a circle of three people: JP Longboat – a multi-disciplinary Mohawk artist and storyteller, Paul Chaput – a Métis academic, actor, singer, composer, filmmaker, and poet, and Dr. Terri-Lynn Brennan, a mixed Kanyen'kehà:ka (Mohawk) and British descended inter-cultural consultant who has lived on Wolfe Island for the past nine years.

The LodgePole Arts Alliance’s mission is to create a space, virtually for the moment, for “Eastern Woodland (Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe) cultural practices, knowledge and teachings, celebrations and showcases,” as identified on their website.

The National Indigenous Presenters Gathering, the first event of its kind, came about when Terri-Lynn Brennan was facilitating a workshop for the Indigenous Peoples Performing Alliance in the spring of 2023 in Halifax. This workshop happened to coincide with a Maritime Indigenous Presenters Gathering that had been organised by the Atlantic Presenters Association.

“The idea of a national gathering of Indigenous presenters, hosted this time by an Indigenous organisation, took form for us and we started working to help create this gathering. It came together in an ad hoc kind of way,” she said.

Through the connections of LodgePole members with Indigenous artists and the community of Indigenous presenters across the country, the inaugural National Indigenous Presenters Gathering will have representation from different corners of the country as well as a larger number from Ontario.

Presenters is a term used to include: artistic directors of music, theatre spaces and festivals, museum and art gallery curators, and Pow Wow organisers.

“We use the term presenters, because there is not a better term,” said Brennan. “It is a catch-phrase for the people who not only book artists, but fundraise to pay them, and do all of the administrative work and organising to present art to the public.”

The Gathering will include elements that are open to the public, and others that are designed exclusively for the Indigenous Presenters who are coming.

“There will be opportunities for conversations to happen between Indigenous guests as the only people in the room, and who can hopefully feel safe and comfortable to speak frankly about what they experience in the sector,” she said.

The Gathering will also be an opportunity for the visitors to experience the land and customs of Wolfe Island, the City of Kingston, and Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe culture through performances, films and art.

The LodgePole Arts Alliance has big plans to establish a permanent centre. The Alliance is seeking to purchase the 80-acre Lemoine Point Farm on Lake Ontario in the City of Kingston, and establish a centre there, using the existing buildings while preserving the site's historical and environmental legacy.

“The family that received the land grant for the farm never sold it. To then return it to an Indigenous organisation seems fitting to us. It was a village in the past and there are burial sites on it. It is a big project and we have started to pursue it with the descendants of the Cloverdale family and with the City of Kingston,” she said.