LAC Hosts 'Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey' Community Elements Chest and welcomes your participation

The Langley Arts Council hosts the Nadine Spence and Sacred Rock's project, Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey Community Elements Chest at our Main Hall Gallery and Office Foyer at the Aldergrove Kinsmen Community Center from May 7th, 2024 - May 12th, 2024. 

About Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey: The Community Elements Chest

Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey is a multiyear multi-community, multi-generational movement. That brings together communities of the Interior Salish and Coast Salish peoples with neighboring nations connected to the Fraser and Thompson river watersheds, Pacific ocean, mountains, and wild salmon.

To honour our grandmother's lived experiences, story, and legacy left for those of us to discover, and share. There have been many destroyed connections to grandmothers, which have torn apart families, and as a result many don't know the stories of entire generations before. Which includes people not knowing their sacred connection to the lands, the culture, traditions and language. Through arts and ceremony, Honouring Our Grandmothers brings together people, family members, and communities who work to restore relationships between generations, tribes and Nations.

This is being recognized with the circulating of 13 Indigenous chests and one community “Elements'' chest throughout BC. The “Elements' chest is constructed and designed with combined efforts of multicultural, multi-generational, multi-racial artists, who work with and are led by Indigenous peoples. These chosen artists all have historical relationships with the Indigenous peoples. This special chest has been created as an invitation for all community members of all cultural backgrounds to participate in the Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey.

People are invited to place messages inside the specially designed-traveling chest. Messages can be handwritten letters, songs or poems to their ancestors, grandmothers, family members, lands, waters and wild salmon in honour, grief, and celebration.

These “Honoring Our Grandmothers” traveling message chests will go in timing of seasons of the lands, water, and salmon reflective of their birth and death. Starting in the high mountains of the attributing lands and water, that flow to the salmon spawning beds of the Thompson and Fraser River channels. Taking the salmon route of the waters of the ocean, coming back upriver completing the cycle at the spawning bed and mountains, closing the journey late 2026.

For time immemorial our Ancestors walked the old trails and canoed the waterways with the wild salmon. We welcome back the knowledge of those paths and waterways known to us, passed down from generations back. Reconnecting trails, waterways and communities again. Revisiting these pathways will strengthen our future, helping everyone find their way home.

This will assist communities, nations, and Indigenous peoples to create new memories for the living families who participated and to create a living memorial of truth, respect, and unity. These honor chests provide an indigenous healing way through the arts and ceremony.

-Sacred Rock, 2024-03-27

How to Participate 

All community members are invited to participate in this healing movement. Visit our Main Hall foyer May 7th - May 12th between 10 am and 4 pm to place a message for your grandmothers in the traveling chest.