My Experience at the KWE! Festival

"You have to keep a language alive. Don't lose it, and you shall reconnect with your elders, nature, and culture."

A Cree participant said this to me when I asked how the transmission of knowledge could be secured. In one breath, they had distilled the whole festival.

What stayed with me most from KWE! was witnessing the resilience of a people determined, after everything, to revive their languages, cultures, and histories — and above all to secure their survival for the generations and centuries to come. I arrived in Wendake thinking I already knew a great deal. I left realizing how little I knew, and how much more I now want to learn.

I took part as a Leader of the Observatory on Human Rights at the UN and as an Ambassador for Fulbright Canada, within the initiative From Law to Living Knowledge. That title captures what I came to understand: meaningful learning is not born in a classroom, but in a walk across the territory, in a story entrusted with confidence, and in the patient exercise of listening.

As a chorister and cellist, the dances and songs reached something profound in me. What struck me was that every age was present, from elders to young children, moving and singing together. In that circle, the transmission of knowledge became visible: an attempt to reconnect the older generation with the one of today and of tomorrow, and to keep the memory of the ancestors alive in the same breath. The songs held sadness and grief, but also hope and an unshakeable faith in the future. There is something rare in that combination, a determination that refuses to let a culture disappear, carried through voice, rhythm, and gathering.

Conducting these interviews taught me to receive a lived reality with respect, rather than with the posture of someone who listens only in order to analyze. The openness people offered moved me deeply, and their trust is never a given. I carry it with all the responsibility it demands.

The experience left me with questions I still hold. How do I transmit a knowledge that is not mine without distorting it? What do I owe to those who welcomed me into their story? As a future jurist, I no longer want to treat Indigenous rights as an abstraction on a page; I want to let lived knowledge inform how I understand and practice the law.

My reflection does not end here. It continues in the questions it keeps raising, and in the work still to come.