Beverley Sunday, HAWK Studio founder, teaches a pilates class.
Drawing on experience from her upbringing on Alberta’s Goldfish Lake reserve, Beverley Sunday is challenging indigenous stereotypes and addressing a health epidemic with the opening of Ottawa’s first aboriginal fitness studio.
Formed in 2007 as a contract program in various Ottawa locations, HAWK Studio has finally purchased a permanent, soon-to-be revealed location, which will open in the city’s Hintonburg district this April. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people will experience mainstream workouts – such as Pilates, Pole Dance and Boot Camp – fused with the aboriginal culture and its emphasis on emotion and spirituality.
Thirty-year-old Sunday, founder of the studio, will offer more collaborative programs like her personally-designed RezFIT, which mixes the powwow aboriginal dance with Yoga and Pilates. Thus, along with the promised mind, body and soul benefits in mainstream fitness, HAWK will also add an emotional component.
Her holistic regimen derives from the medicine wheel, a representation of aboriginal wisdom in North America. The wheel, which encourages a balanced self emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually, will be Sunday’s tool to both improving aboriginal health and wellness and to squash falsehoods that depict Aboriginal people as smokers, gamblers and drinkers.
“I knew the biggest way you can make a change is in Ottawa,” Sunday says, who moved from Alberta to the country’s centre of policy and change. “This is going to make a big difference and, at the same time, bring in other cultures and unite everyone together.”
According to Audrey Giles, a University of Ottawa professor specializing in Aboriginal women’s physical activity levels, the HAWK program could be a step in the right direction for all cultures.
“I think that everyone could benefit from realizing that health is multi-dimensional and that we need to attend to all aspects of health,” says Giles, touting the new studio as innovative. “I’ve never heard of a fitness studio doing this sort of work.”
Since moving to Ottawa at the age of 18, Sunday has been determined to reignite the physical activeness of the city’s over 20,000 Aboriginal peoples – a grassroots approach that she hopes will infiltrate reserves and become a national phenomenon. Her ambition comes from poignant personal experience.
“Every time I call home to my Mom [on the reserve], she tells me that someone died, or somebody committed suicide, or somebody got diabetes, a heart attack or stroke, and these are constant messages,” says Sunday. “At the end of the day, you have to take accountability for yourself.”
Statistics Canada confirms this reality. A 2004 report indicated that off-reserve Aboriginal people in Ontario, particularly females, aged 19 to 50 were two and a half times more likely to be obese or overweight than non-Aboriginal people. Moreover, Aboriginal people in Canada are three to six times more likely to get diabetes than non-native people.
Sunday’s parents are part of these discouraging statistics.
Her father had a fatal heart attack 10 years ago and her mother recently lost both legs to diabetes.
These experiences empowered Sunday to dedicate her life to improving the lives of Aboriginal people.
Thirty-six-year-old Dawn T. Maracle, from the Mohawk reserve, has been a member of Sunday’s HAWK program for the last year. She says that before colonization, illustrative history depicts Canadian Aboriginal peoples as active and emotionally healthy.
“When your culture is taken away, you have to rebuild,” says Maracle, a senior research officer for the National Aboriginal Health Organization.
“We kind of lost touch with our physical activities. In the last 500 years, things have changed for the Aboriginal people drastically.”
Poor health has also impacted Maracle personally. She’s lost an aunt, uncle, grandmother and grandfather to illness and her father died of cancer at the age of 52. Maracle says that the lifestyle changes she and others are trying to make will be a breakthrough for the Aboriginal people.
“There’s a lot of talk about what we need to do and a lot of money given for studies," says Maracle Implementation is where Beverley focuses. It’s active action which makes her unique and special."