St. Albert has your passport to adventure with Children’s Festival

By Windspeaker.com staff
With files from Jeremy Harpe, CFWE-FM

The International Children’s Festival of Arts will open tomorrow May 30 with a wide variety of family fun events, including some with an Indigenous flavor. The festival is held in St. Albert, Alta. along the Sturgeon River, and covers five city blocks, said Stephen Bourdeau, festival coordinator, in an interview with Jeremy Harpe of CFWE-FM.

Sharon Morin, Musée Héritage Museum program manager, told Harpe she started with the festival 10 years ago, sitting along the river with the Red River cart, doing braiding and talking about the Métis sash. Now Indigenous peoples have their own tents at the festival. Festival organizers have really run with Indigenous programming, she said.

This year there will be a talk about the birchbark canoe and how they were the cars of the past and the rivers were the highways, explaining how the First Nations and Métis peoples used those. And participants will be shown (for a small fee) how to bead a flower. There will also be a Métis activity tent, with interpreters, talking about the Métis of the area and providing general information about the Métis peoples as a whole.

“We are very proud of our Métis and First Nations heritage and history in St. Albert, so we make every effort we can to offer a lot of programming that tell our story and the story of the community,” said Bourdeau.

The 36th edition festival, which is themed Your Passport to Adventure, will run to June 4. Information can be found at https://stalbert.ca/exp/childfest/

“It’s a great event to just come down with the family and spend a day,” he said. There are food vendors, and free and paid entertainment.”