Strawberry Moon Festival

Jeff Green | Jun 27, 2013

Marcie Asselstine started bringing her heritage into her job at the Ontario Early Years Centre in Sharbot Lake almost 10 years ago by running Aboriginal themed playgroups for young children and their parents. For the past 7 years she has been running a program for the kindergarten and grade 1 students in surrounding schools. She goes into Hinchinbrooke, Land O’Lakes. Sharbot Lake, and Clarendon Central Public Schools and St. James Major Catholic School once a month to spend a classroom period telling stories and passing on traditional knowledge.

And each year at the end of the school year, the program has ended with a gathering of all the children in one place, St. James Church Hall, for a Strawberry Moon Festival.

This year 120 children, the largest ever group, from all five schools, crammed into the hall for the festival.

They were treated to a performance by the Strong Women’s Drum Circle, White Wolf Drummers (Josh St. Pierre and Reuben Timmerman) a craft corner run by Lily Davis, bannock and berries courtesy of Mary-Ann and Anne Marie Wilson, home-baked corn bread, story telling by Danka Brewer in a tepee on the grounds, and a closing round dance behind the hall.

“I asked one little girl if she was having fun,” said Marcie Asselstine at the end of the morning-long event. “and she just put her hands on her hips and looked straight up at me and said ‘Of course I am Marcie, it’s the Strawberry Moon Festival, don’t you know.”

The Strawberry Moon Festival coincides with the summer solstice and National Aboriginal Day and always makes for a fitting end to the year-long program which is funded by the United Church mission support grant, the Anglican Church healing fund, and the Ontario Ministry of Child and Youth Services.