Something was missing from the Edmonton Garrison when Sgt. Mike Rude came back from Afghanistan.
A career soldier with 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, he says he turned to his First Nations roots to get him through his mission overseas.
"My dad gave me an eagle feather to take with me and some sweetgrass to smudge [bless] the vehicles," he says, which he did whenever he had a bad feeling about his situation. "Our crew wasn't hit at all."
He attended several sweats when he got back — traditional ceremonies of heat, steam and prayer designed to cleanse the spirit. But because there was no sweat lodge on the base, he and other soldiers had to go to places like Poundmaker's Lodge for their services.
So he asked base command if he could build one back in March.
"It's a big part of the culture and healing and blessings," he says, "and I thought it was something that should be on the base."
To his amazement, command agreed and wanted to build it — fast. "That was on Friday, and on Monday they had called me and said when can we have a meeting and discuss the building of the sweat lodge?"
The lodge is now a proud new addition to the base, one which base commander Lt.-Col. Tom Bradley highlighted during the close of Aboriginal Awareness Week last Friday. "Much like Christians have a church, [the sweat lodge] is a place for quite reflection and solace," he says. The lodge — thought to be the first permanent facility of its kind on a Canadian Forces base — should help aboriginal soldiers on the base have a place where they can get together and feel understood.
The lodge, built in May, was a joint effort between the base and the RCMP and will be open to members of both organizations.
It will be a place of healing for everyone, says former senator and local elder Thelma Chalifoux, not just the First Nations. "It's a place of peace and getting to renew your spirit when you're hurting," she says. "It's for anyone who really needs something."
Sacred sauna
The base is always looking to accommodate the needs of its troops, Bradley says, so when Rude pitched his proposal for a lodge, it made perfect sense to build it. "We didn't have one before, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have one."
Rude and his father, Melvin Abraham, built the dome-shaped lodge out of willow and army tarps on the north side of the base. You can squeeze about 24 people into it, Rude says. During a ceremony, the presiding elder will heat rocks in a fire and place them in a pit in the centre of the lodge. As he or she leads the others in song and prayer, the elder splashes water on the rocks to produce steam.
It can get really hot in there, says Cpl. Jocelyne Bauman, an aboriginal soldier on the base and recent recipient of an Esquao Award, but it's a great place for healing and spiritual enlightenment. "It brings a lot of peace of mind when I go to a sweat." Sessions can last anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours, creating sauna-like conditions.
Not everyone on the base is Christian, Bauman says, so it's wonderful that the First Nations now have a place of their own to pray. "It's been a long time coming."
