Kahnawake, Quebec/CMEDIA: The new cultural arts centre reportedly in Kahnawake will be located on a three-acre site along Route 132, right next door to a local high school, offer a space to inspire youth to use their language outside of the classroom.
The former grand chief of the community, Kahsennenhawe Sky-Deer is one of the many women who spearheaded the project, and says once it opens she hopes to see the youth get a chance to be as immersed in the language.
In the 1980s, Sky-Deer enrolled in one of the first schools in the Mohawk community of Kahnawake that immersed children in the Kanien’kéha language.
“It was everything,” said Sky-Deer, in an interview. “It gave me a foundation of being proud of who I was.”
At the time, many in the First Nation on the South Shore of Montreal were still attending church-run Indian Day Schools, where the language wasn’t taught, she said.
Sky-Deer is optimistic about her community’s next generation, especially now that a new cultural arts centre is opening there in March of 2026.
“The last thing that we want also is for our young people to perceive the Mohawk language as a subject matter,” she said. “We have to change their mindset.”
Housing the community’s Mohawk language immersion program, the centre would also house its theatre, as well as its museum, which are all being expanded through the project.
Traditional ceremonies and workshops revolving around cooking and crafts like basket weaving will also be hosted there.
Since the fall of 2023, construction for the roughly $56 million project has been underway.
About $37 million have been pledged towards it collectively by the federal and provincial government, as well as Hydro-Québec.
There isn’t an equivalent for the word “reconciliation” in the Mohawk language, Sky-Deer said and added one way of translating it is “to make things the way they were,” she explained, noting that this wording has resonated with many.
“There was a time where most people spoke Kanien’kéha, our language,” she said.
After the introduction of the Indian Act, she said that changed.
Having been adopted late in the 19th century, the legislation laid the groundwork for Canada’s residential school system as well as the Indian Day School system that came afterwards, where English and French were imposed on Indigenous communities across the country.
When Kahnawake’s education centre gained jurisdiction over schools on the reserve, three Indian Day Schools operated in the community until 1988.
“Those impacts still persist in our community,” said Sky-Deer.
The harm these schools had on Indigenous youth has since been acknowledged by the federal government compensating those that attended residential schools and Indian Day Schools through settlement agreements.
The residential school system had been created in an attempt to destroy and assimilate Indigenous people, an effort it characterized as “cultural genocide,” Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015.
Canada opened up its settlement claims process five years later for those that went through Indian Day Schools, acknowledging many students experienced trauma and physical and sexual abuse.
“We have to find a way to get back… to that good road, and I think what this cultural centre does is provide that,” Sky-Deer said. ”Not only for this generation, but for a lot of people in our community.”
Although the new cultural centre is nine years in the making, dreams for the larger gathering space goes back decades.
The executive director of Kahnawake’s language and cultural centre, which will relocate to the new facility, Lisa Phillips said she remembers her colleagues talking about creating a new gathering space when she first began working there 26 years ago.
“I think it was only about two weeks ago, driving home, that I realized the importance and the magnitude of this project,” she told journalists on a tour of the site.
Staff at the language and culture centre, she said, had laid the foundation of a longhouse in the exact same locationIn the early ’80s but the project was stalled.
Being able to sit at the site today, she said she felt emotional to see how far those dreams have come.
“I thought about it, and it kind of overwhelmed me,” she said. ”This has been the dream of so many people within our community.”
Kimberly Cross, who works for the community’s tourism office, said that the new centre makes way for a major expansion of a local theatre program in Kahnawake. said.
Although the program is operating out of a small hall currently, the new facility is expected to have a nearly 200 seat space to showcase the next generation of talent, she said.
Having grown up in a family of performers, she said it’s something she wishes she could have had access to as a young girl.
“I’m hopeful for our current performers, our little actors and actresses,” Cross said.
“Just being able to come out of that comfort zone, to get out of your shell and to perform on a large stage like that makes a huge difference.”
The community’s band council says it’s still in the midst of raising an additional $4.4 million needed to make the project a reality.
A fundraising campaign aimed at the public has since been launched.
