Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey
Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey, and all its contributors and partners, ask you to join us on this remarkable indigenous led and inspired spiritual voyage.
Sunday, March 30th – Thursday, April 17th Arrival ceremony: Sunday, March 30th at 1pm–3pm
The Vancouver Maritime Museum is honoured to be hosting a community chest in collaboration with Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey. Arriving on Sunday, March 30th by canoe, the chest will be carried from the beach and displayed in the museum for visitors to see.
Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey is a movement that brings together generations of indigenous people with other nationalities along the pacific northwest that focuses on the Fraser and Thompson river watersheds with its mountains, salmon, and ocean.
We endeavour to honour our Grandmothers lived experiences, stories, and legacies left for those of us to discover and share through storytelling, teachings, ceremony, and art. This year Honouring Our Grandmothers continues moving forward by joining the cycle of the wild salmon, lasting for four years from fall 2022 to 2026.
The heart of this journey are the stories told by the thirteen Indigenous artists who, through the visual artwork they place on their cedar bentwood traveling message chests, share their relationships with their grandmothers, families, nations, ancestors, and Mother Earth.
A special community art project is the Elements chest. Which is created with the combined talents of seven multicultural artists, ranging from carpenters, poets, and visual artists whom have a historic relationship with Indigenous peoples. The chest is inspired by and named for the four main elements of fire, water, air, and earth, which no human being can live without.
These chests will travel to different communities collecting written letters, photos, and tokens for the creator, ancestors, mother earth, grandmothers, and families. These offerings help people to give thanks, celebrate, honour, grieve, resolve trauma, and find peace with what was destroyed, lost, stolen, forgotten, taken, gone missing, or murdered in their lives. The Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey will end with the messages being properly respected, laid to rest, and released in ceremony to the sky. The focus is on personal, family, and community healing journeys, which take strength, truth, and courage. The environment created will be a safe and respectful place, valuing all human emotions.
The touring chests will be featured in private and public ceremonies, personal and group exhibits at galleries or museums, special gatherings and festivals. These events will include visual artwork, performances, cultural talks, community engagement art projects and the Further We Rise Indigenous Arts Collective. With many unique engagements between indigenous hosts and guest nations that include Indigenous language, traditional singing, dancing, drumming, and regalia connected to canoeing, feasting, and gifting to improve relations between nations and its visitors.
Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey is a movement assisted by Further We Rise Indigenous Arts Collective and supported by Sacred Rock. Visit Honouring Our Grandmothers Facebook Group at for the latest events and information.
Honouring Our Grandmother Healing Journey, and all its contributors and partners, ask you to join us on this remarkable indigenous led and inspired spiritual voyage.
Honouring Our Grandmothers Healing Journey supporters are: Irene Adams, Autumn Walkem, Stephen Lytton, Nadine Spence, Trish Schaefer, Chelanne Adams, William Nelson, Tyson Adams, Tl’aaiyah Adams and Aiyanna Adams.
