Métis Jiggers dance the Red River Jig and other steps at Festival du Bois
Master jigger Yvonne Chartrand leads the dance troupe in a celebration of Métis culture and community
Yvonne Chartrand (front). Photo by Chris Randle
Festival du Bois (April 1 to 3) presents the Métis Jiggers on April 3 at 11:10 am at Mackin Park in Coquitlam.
CELEBRATING ITS 33rd year, Festival du Bois celebrates a wide array of influences that have helped shape French Canadian heritage, from Québécois folk music to African dance. The Métis Jiggers, performing for the North Fraser Métis Association, are among the many diverse acts making up the weekend lineup. Led by Yvonne Chartrand, Métis dancer and artistic director of V’ni Dansi and the Louis Riel Métis Dancers, the performance will showcase the culture of the Métis people through traditional and contemporary dance.
“Métis dance is all about community and belonging,” Chartrand says in an interview with Stir. “It’s a beautiful and joyful part of culture; it brings people together. It’s the thing in my life that has brought about the most healing. It’s taken care of me.”
The culture of the Métis people was born in the era of the French Canadian voyageurs, who travelled west from Quebec and married into First Nations communities across the Métis homeland. This ethnogenesis created a unique new culture that integrated both First Nations and European cultural heritage. The Métis later formed their own distinct settlements, languages, and cultural traditions, such as Métis dancing and music.
Chartrand’s father is a Métis historian and storyteller from the community of Saint Laurent in Manitoba. “I didn’t grow up in my ancestral community, as my father moved away for work, as many Métis people did,” she says. “My dad taught us cultural practices, and we experienced the culture just by living it, growing up in Northern Manitoba.”
When Chartrand was in her early 20s, she enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. There, she was introduced to Métis and contemporary dance through her sister, who had joined the Gabriel Dumont Dancers, a Métis dance troupe.
“I had my first dance performance in 1985, which was 100 years after Louis Riel’s prophecy,” Chartrand says, reciting his words: “My people will sleep for 100 years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who bring their spirit back.”
Riel is considered a great martyr among the Métis people, a leader of the Red River Resistance, in which the Métis people took up arms against the colonial occupation of their homelands.
“That year was a big awakening for me,” Chartrand says. “I met a lot of people who encouraged me and told me to follow my heart, which led to my enrollment in the fine arts program and also joining the Garbriel Dumont Dancers. I fell in love with dance and the arts; I was one of the people being awakened after that prophecy.”
After attending the University of Manitoba, Chartrand began touring across the country with several dance companies. She says at this time she realized her love of both traditional Métis and contemporary styles. In the late 1990s, she started teaching workshops to youth and encouraging them to pursue careers in the arts.
“When I first came to Vancouver, I couldn’t find anyone to dance with,” Chartrand says. “I went to Métis gatherings, and I was always asked to dance the Red River Jig,”. “And I was always like, ‘Come and dance with me!’ And nobody would come up and dance with me.
“I got asked to do a youth project in 1998, and so we decided to call it V’ni Dansi, the Come and Dance project,” Chartrand says. V’ni Dansi translates to ‘come and dance' in Michif, one of the languages spoken by Métis people, a mixture of Cree, French, English. . “I kept on teaching Métis dance after that, teaching people of all ages and hosting workshops across Canada.”
In 2000, she co-founded V’ni Dansi—the only company in Canada to teach and perform traditional Métis and contemporary dance—and the Louis Riel Métis Dancers, based in Vancouver.
Yvonne Chartrand (front).
Since the launch of V’ni Dansi, Chartrand has toured several dance pieces across the country, such as Marguerite, which tells the story of Louis Riel’s wife, Marguerite Monet dit Bellemeur, and Stories of Saint Laurent, a multimedia piece featuring audio and visuals from the Métis Elders in her ancestral community of Saint Laurent. She is currently producing a piece called La Mitchin Di Mitchif, an international collaboration with Dancing Earth, a dance company from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Métis jigging, which originated in the Red River area, is a lively combination of First Nations dancing and Scottish and French-Canadian step-dancing, and reel, jig and quadrille steps. Chartrand, a master Métis jigger, has performed multiple times at Festival Du Bois in years past.
“I love the Festival du Bois, it’s such a joyful place,” she says. “It’s a lot of fun. There is a real sense of joie de vivre there.”
Chartrand will be performing traditional and contemporary Métis pieces with dancers Nadia Dalton and Fergus Dalton and fiddler-musicians Keith Hill, Fagen Furlong, and Matthew Cook-Contois.
“It’s going to be a Métis kitchen party,” Chartrand says. “We’re going to come together and dance the Red River Jig, the Sash Dance, Broom Dance, Orange Blossom Special—the dances you can do with three people. We want to get the people dancing and share the dances with the community.”
“I’m really grateful to the Festival du Bois for inviting the Métis people there; we’ve always had a great connection with the French people,” Chartrand says. “Some of my ancestors were French-Canadian men who married First Nations women. I feel a heartfelt gratitude for the invitation to have an Indigenous presence at the festival.”
For more information, see Festival du Bois. The author is a member of the North Fraser Métis Association.
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