Indigenous hoop dance performance

To celebrate the indigenous cultures of Canada, the Alliance Française Ottawa offers you a hoop dance performance by the artist Makhena Rankin Guérin. A young Anishinaabe hoop dancer, Makhena will come to give a demonstration of this important dance in her community. She will also explain the origin of this dance and its uses in Indigenous medicine.

Makhena Rankin Guérin is an Anishinaabe and Franco-Ontarian two-spirit hoop dancer and nursing student. She was born and raised in Ottawa and her family is from the Abbitibiwinni First Nation. The hoop dance is created around a choreography performed in the cadence of traditional percussion which is intended as a medicinal art.

Makhena attributes her passion for medicine to her two-spirit identity. “In First Nations communities, the two-spirit, who has a female side and a male side, are people with mediating roles. I use the hoop dance to bring an emotion to the spectators which will act as a medicine for the head, the body, and the spirit. »

Through this ancestral art which almost disappeared in the 1950s, Makhena Rankin Guerin feels like she is reconnecting with her indigenous roots. Today, she passes on her art to her brother and awakens non-indigenous to her culture by sparking curiosity and breaking down barriers in those who have a “negative understanding” of it.

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