All Nation’s Warriors team captain Tony Tulugak prepares for Ottawa’s Olympic Torch Relay.
For most people, carrying the Olympic torch would be an experience like no other. But for a group of young Ottawa aboriginals, the opportunity is especially meaningful.
A team of 20 Ottawa youth called the All Nation’s Warriors will run with the torch when it passes through the city on Dec. 12, starting at Lansdowne Park and heading down Bank Street to Torrington Place. Ten are from Métis, Inuit and First Nations communities.
The 20 were awarded the spots in the Ottawa Olympic Torch Relay because of their enrolment in SOGO Active last December.
The program was funded by Coca-Cola Canada and ParticipACTION to encourage teenagers to lead more active lifestyles. Since the Odawa Native Friendship Centre hosted SOGO, half of those selected came from native communities.
Beverley Sunday, team leader of the All Nation’s Warriors, says preparing to run with the torch not only gives aboriginal youth a way to improve their physical fitness, it also gives them a much needed boost of self-esteem.
“If this moment can motivate the youth to get ahead, then that’s why I supported this program and that’s why I kept going with it,” she says.
“It will allow for them to dream bigger.”
Often aboriginal issues get overlooked in mainstream Canadian society, she says, so having a group of young natives on the torch-bearing team for the Olympics is a start to highlighting their community.
She has been training with the team once every week since September, where they run for an hour.
Through SOGO, she says she has also helped the team members increase their self awareness, physical activity and standards of healthy living.
“I never thought I’d be doing this,” says Rita Cote, a 20-year-old nursing student from the University of Ottawa who will be running with the torch. “Situations like this don’t normally come up for people like me.”
Cote says she has become a role model for her aboriginal community, and hopes to show other young natives that if they “put themselves out there good things will come.”
She says reserves rarely offer youth opportunities like carrying the Olympic torch and SOGO Active. So, with few extra activities available many don’t usually get involved.
Sunday lived on a reserve until she was 18. She says these youth face a number of difficult challenges.
“When I was on the reserve you could do anything, there were no boundaries, it’s freedom,” she says. Sunday explains this freedom leads a lot of youth – often already living in poverty – to alcohol and drugs.
Some resistance groups want to use the Olympics to focus on these larger problems for natives in Canada.
No2010.com is a website that represents a group of aboriginals who are protesting the Vancouver Olympics because it will encroach on what they say is stolen native land.
Yet Betty Ann Lavallée, national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, sees the contribution native communities have had so far in the Olympics as a positive thing.
“I was proud when I saw that they had a Haida man carry the torch across on a traditional Haida war canoe,” she says.
“This is just fantastic that our people are expressing an interest and trying to become a part of it.”
Sunday hopes that having young aboriginal torch-bearers will just be a start.
“For me, I think it’s just the beginning,” she says. “It’s the youth that are going to make a difference, it’s the youth that are going to be our next leaders in ten years, and the youth have a really huge voice, they just need to be strong about it.”
At the moment, Cote is focusing on her immediate situation. “It’s more about presenting yourself to the world, and trying not to drop the torch – that would be really embarrassing,” she laughs.