Piapot First Nation members learn more about their family histories at genealogy workshop

Dwayne Noname always wanted to know where exactly he came from and a workshop in Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan is helping him find out.

Noname's community, roughly 90 kilometres north of Regina, hosted a genealogy and kinship workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Piapot members were taught how to trace their family trees and how to gather and organize family photos, documents and oral stories, something Noname said he was happy to see people participating in.

"It's quite interesting to see where everybody comes from, my parents, grandparents," said Noname.

Noname said now that he has a paper trail of his ancestors, he hopes to pass the knowledge down to his relatives' children who want to know more about their family and where their last name came from.

Through learning more about his great-grandparents, Noname also learned that he is Saulteaux.

"I thought I was Cree," he said.

"I feel confident and feel really great about myself who I really am as a person."

Chief Mark Fox said In a written statement that the workshop was held to help reconnect members to their roots, family names and stories. Fox said the workshop will also help Sixties Scoop and residential school survivors recover their loss of identity.

"Knowing your history is knowing your story," Fox's statement said.

'This is about healing'

Dean Lerat, founder of Thunderbird Kinship and Genetics, with KNT IRS Consulting, facilitated the workshop.

Lerat, who is an RCMP staff sergeant from Cowessess First Nation, started doing genealogy work after helping his mother find out the identity of her father — something she never knew her whole life — and discovering she had a half-sister.

He said friends and family started seeking his help to find their own family histories through document research and DNA tests.

"This is about healing. It's about helping our people find their way back home to their names, their bloodlines, their ancestors," said Lerat.

He estimated he put in about 150 hours of research time before coming to the workshop, speaking with elders and studying treaty annuity documents for Piapot going back as far as 1906.

Treaty annuity payments are payments to people registered under the Indian Act and affiliated with a First Nation that signed treaties with the Crown.

Shannon Obey, who teaches Cree language at the Payepot School in the community, helped organizers with the Cree words in the treaty annuity payment lists.

Obey said a lot of the writing was hard to decipher, so they tried their best to break down what the names of members actually were.

"It's very, very exciting and it's very humbling to see how old Cree names used to be and then how they translated from Cree into English," said Obey.

"I feel like our names in the past used to hold a lot of powerful significance."

Obey said she learned lots of her own family history and wants to restore the power those names once had.

Lerat said he loves doing the work especially when he sees people's faces filled with joy when they find out they have more family than they assumed.