K'jipuktuk (Halifax) — On Tuesday, Dec. 18, starting at 5:30 p.m., Emmett Peters will be hosting a traditional supper at the Mi'kmaq Native Friendship Centre, 2158 Gottingen St. Numerous local artists and merchants have also contributed goods for an accompanying silent auction, and 'All Nations' drummers will be lending their talents to the event. All moneys gathered will go towards assisting traditional healing ceremonies in South Dakota.

“Native healers and medicine men help a lot of people, but in our culture anybody that works with the pipe can't ask for money,” says Peters, the Seven Sparks elder at the Friendship Centre. “When they're doing ceremonies — making a sweat lodge or doctoring ceremonies — they have to go out and get wood. And in South Dakota you've got to travel for miles and miles and miles in a four wheel drive truck to look around for wood. That gets pretty expensive. Then you've got to do the same thing for the rocks ... then you've got to get materials to make ties. That's one of the things that the money does to help these guys. And a lot of times, people that come there, they don't have money. But they help them anyway.”

Several months ago, having been misdiagnosed by doctors in Nova Scotia, and then learning he had throat cancer that was spreading, Peters decided that he wouldn't undergo chemotherapy. Instead, he opted to head to South Dakota for traditional healing.

“I hadn't eaten for five weeks. I'd lost 27 pounds. People here in the Halifax area raised money for me ... and they raised enough money to send my wife and I down to see one of these healers. He doctored me up in four days and my cancer was gone.

“As soon as I got there, the thing I thought about first when I was sitting in the sweat lodge, was 'This was what was taken away from us.' Because at one point we had all those ceremonies. We had the medicines that we could cure just about any sickness. And when I was sitting there it reminded me of the residential school; 'This is what they took away from us.' So now we have to travel down there to see what we call a medicine man to get doctored. To them it was almost like going to get Buckley's for your cold, to stop you from coughing. It seemed like it wasn't really serious, or that it wasn't anything too hard to tackle.”

Now with a clean bill of health, Peters encourages everyone, from all nations and communities, to come to this Tuesday's dinner. There will be moose meat, oysters, blue-fish and more, all done in a traditional style.

“It helps these guys that can't ask for money and won't ask for money, and Christmas, people still celebrate Christmas — it's not part of our culture but we still partake of it for the kids' sake — but the main focus is to help them so they can continue their work,” says Peters. “They're going to do it anyway, regardless, but it eases the burden. There's no program set up to help medicine men. They don't get paid like doctors or priests or any kind of clergy. There's no recognition, there's no financial help there.”

For more information on Tuesday's supper, click here.