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Shakes the Dust Hope Consulting
The Traditional Baby Swing
The Traditional baby swing teachings are offered as part of the psycho-educational component of healing, with a detailed understanding of how history, colonialism, and the forced assimilation of residential schools destroyed traditional native parenting concepts and rites of passages, further extending into the many facets of existing inter-generational impacts. This workshop consists of a gentle, traditional healing opportunity using the baby swing, and its associated teachings, in private one-to-one or facilitated family/group sessions.
Bev and Frank have attained the traditional knowledge and blessings to share this healing with others. They balance the male and female energy, together, and are able to respond to each individual participant in unique and meaningful ways. Frank also speaks and understands the South Slavey language, as well as having the cultural knowledge of the drum and songs.
This exercise directly, and indirectly, addresses components of lasting impact from the residential school legacy. Many of those that had attended the residential school were taken from the arms of their parents, from the well-defined kinship systems for child care, and the
traditional childhood teachings and experiences that had developed the First Nation Psyche and Spirit.
~We wish to acknowledge Darlene Auger as the visionary of the swing.
One of the major impacts of residential schools was a loss of love and nurturing that is extremely necessary for the healthy development of the individual. Without successfully attaining this stage of love and nurturance in the natural life cycle, one often seeks this through artificial means. With this exercise, we can recreate the nurturance and provide the experiences sought after in such a manner. By honouring the swing, and including the inherent ancestral wisdom of the grandmothers and grandfathers to assist, we can help those that were lost to find the love and reconnect with that feeling.