Maple syrup festival to showcase Métis culture

The Manitoba Maple Syrup Festival is back this year on April 2021, offering up the sweet taste of syrup with a side of Indigenous culture and education.

Highlights of this year’s event, which takes place in McCreary, Man., located 137 kilometres northeast of Brandon, include a farmer’s market, pancake breakfast, events like a scavenger hunt and geocaching, and horse and wagon rides. Two sugar bush trees will be on display, and visitors will get to sink their teeth into fresh maple taffy poured onto pristine snow.

Since it takes place in the heart of a historic Métis settlement, facilitators have also chosen to include unique Indigenous educational events this year, including workshops on beading, pemmican making, plant identification for traditional medicines and, as part of the weekend’s entertainment, Métis jigging by Hayley and Hunter Oleschak.

Festival president Pam Little says including information on Métis history and culture is important.

“We’ve really focused on Métis culture over the years with music, but then we decided we really needed to try to do some reconciliation work too,” she said.

Last year, Melanie Gamache of Borealis Beading taught beading workshops at the festival, and this year she’ll be back doing the same thing. She also does a talk in the morning about the evolution of beading, its symbolism and how it relates to Métis culture and identity.

This year, Gamache is bringing new ideas to the festival.

“I have a program that I just re-developed and released this winter which is called Métis Connections,” she said. “It’s a two-part program, and the first part is an interactive presentation where I present stories on the culture, history and connections of the Métis people and the various names they’ve been given over the course of time.”

Gamache will also use the first part of the program to speak about the connection Métis people have with the Red River cart, bison, sashes and beadwork. She plans to share a lot of the stories she’s been given and the research she’s done on how all parts of Métis culture are connected.

Anyone is welcome to attend the first part of the program. The second part is a beading project. While Gamache teaches the foundations of beading, she’ll also be speaking about Métis culture.

“I share what I call the first evolution of beadwork, so I talk about what was used pre-colonization and what First Nations people would use,” she said. The second part of Gamache’s program costs $30 to attend.

Shawn Charlebois, who owns Red Road Compass, a business that educates people about Indigenous culture and land-based customs, will also be at the festival. Charlebois will be running a pemmican making workshop and the medicinal plant identification workshop.

Charlebois will be sharing Indigenous history and how pemmican, a food made by Indigenous people of dried and pounded meat, melted fat and sometimes berries, morphed into a staple for the Canadian fur trade.

“This food allowed Manitoba to be born, and allowed our nation to become Canada,” he said.

Charlebois applauds Little and the other people involved in putting on the maple syrup festival for wanting to include Indigenous content, which he said is absolutely necessary to tell the history of the area.

“I think it really kind of expands and rounds off this festival, because even when you start talking about maple syrup, oftentimes we predominately think it’s just associated with places like Quebec … but we know that this is a traditional food that’s been used since time immemorial,” he said.

The sugar bushes are always a huge draw for the crowds who come out to enjoy the springtime event, Little says.

“Once people get to the sugarbush, it’s like they don’t want to leave,” she said. “What makes it unique is you actually are visiting a working sugar bush, not heritage site.”

The festival is a great way to introduce people to the community of McCreary, which boasts a population of around 400 people.

“It’s a beautiful location that many people who come here have never been to before, and they don’t know about … the maple trees growing at the base of Riding Mountain National Park,” Little said.

Oftentimes when people come out for the first day of the festival intending to see everything that day, they find there’s to enough time to take in all that’s offered and so the end up returning for the second day of the festival, Little added.

“A lot of times people end up telling us that they couldn’t fit everything in. So now, if you don’t get to the sugar bush on Saturday because of the other things that are going on then you can go on Sunday,” she said.

Ninety-one year-old Claude Desrosiers has been a sugar bush producers for 30 years. Three decades ago, when he retired from teaching, he started out with makeshift equipment, only for his passion to quickly grow from a hobby to a way of life.

Now, Desrosiers loves to get back out and start tapping his sugar bush in the early days of spring.

“After a winter, it’s kind of nice to go tramping in the bush. I’ve been working in the bush for many years. At the beginning it was really a lot of work because it lasted a long time,” he said.

The perfect time to tap maple trees is when the temperature rises during the day but cools off at night. Unfortunately, over the last several years, Mother Nature hasn’t provided the ideal weather for Desrosiers’ business. When he started out, the perfect, spring-like weather – not too warm and not too cold – would last several weeks. Now, he says he’s lucky if it lasts several days, something Desrosiers puts down to climate change.

“We don’t have the drawn-out spring anymore,” he said.

Still, Desrosiers is looking forward to the festival, which is in its 11th year. He especially loves to see the children enjoying the maple taffy. He’s already packed clean snow away into coolers to ensure that, whatever the weather throws at the area, there will be plenty of room for pouring the amber-coloured sweet treat. “I need snow for that, and I never take a chance on the quality of snow, so in January when we had those substantial snowfalls, I packed it away in the freezer,” he said.

Desrosiers is proud of the festival’s connection to Indigenous culture and the effort of the people who run it to ensure that they tell the story of the land and it’s Métis people, who were active maple syrup producers.

“They were tapping trees and making maple syrup in this area for a long time,” he said. “They still produce maple syrup.”

The weekend will also feature entertainers Owen Anderson, Juilianna Moore, Avery Styklao, the Boom Chuck Club, hypnotist Jesse Lewis, and the Cameron Campbell Band.

Last year around 540 people attended the event. Little hopes that this year’s event will draw an even bigger crowd. Family passes cost $25, while individual ones are on sale for $5.

Miranda Leybourne, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Brandon Sun