by Isaac Wurmann
Whenever Jaime Koebel travels somewhere, the first thing she asks herself is who the country’s Indigenous peoples were. Since 2014, Koebel has been leading walking tours of Ottawa to encourage the city’s residents and visitors to ask the same question.
“Before all of these buildings, before all of this concrete, what was here?” Koebel asked a group gathered at the Human Rights Monument for an Indigenous Walks tour on Sept. 15. Over the next two hours, Koebel showed the group of walkers a side of Ottawa’s history that can otherwise go unnoticed.
Originally from Lac la Biche in northern Alberta, Koebel is an artist of Nehiyaw (Cree) and Apeetagosan (Métis) heritage. Her work, which ranges in style from fish scale art to Métis jigging, is deeply informed by her Indigenous culture.
As a young woman, Koebel said she didn’t always realize her perspective was important. She first visited Ottawa when she was 15 years old and said it struck her that so few people in the city looked, talked, or had the same background as her.
“I was standing by that Pizza Pizza on Elgin Street over there, and I had seen white people on TV before … But it wasn’t until I came here that I realized how many white people were in the world,” she said at one stop during the walk.
Koebel later moved to Ottawa to study at Carleton University. Because she had spent most of her life surrounded by other Indigenous people, Koebel said she at first found it hard to adjust to life in the big city.
She said she had to learn how to navigate her different identities to participate in university life. “This is how indigenous people survive in the mainstream,” she said. “We’re always making adjustments.”
After graduating from Carleton in 2004 with a degree in Canadian Studies, Koebel worked as a policy analyst and researcher for a number of national Aboriginal organizations. By immersing herself in Ottawa’s rich Indigenous community, she began to realize her knowledge and skills had value.
In 2014, Koebel was hired as an Educator for the Sakahàn exhibition of international Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Canada. When her contract ended, she wanted to continue educating people about Indigenous history in Ottawa. That’s where the idea for Indigenous Walks came from.
Walking had been a way that Koebel coped with the isolation she felt when she moved to Ottawa. By going for walks, she said she was able to connect with the land, even though she was far from home.
In the context of her tours, Koebel said that walking can be an act of solidarity. “Walking together and learning together and sharing your spirit together is really important,” she said.
Koebel’s first tour participants were her three children. She said she would walk with them in their strollers and tell them about the Indigenous history that lay hidden behind the landmarks they passed.
“I really wanted them to be able to look at the world around them and find examples of monuments or architecture … where they could feel at home, or they could find something to identify with,” she said.
Like many Indigenous artists, Koebel’s work often looks at the intersection of Indigenous identity and colonialism. More recently, she has been involved with the Walking With Our Sisters commemorative art exhibition, which memorializes Canada’s hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
The tour on September 15 ended near the National War Memorial, at the busy corner of Wellington and Elgin. As cars zipped past the group and the sun set on unceded Algonquin territory, Koebel left the walkers with some words from fellow Métis leader Louis Riel.
“My people will sleep for one hundred years but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back,” said Riel in 1885. By telling the stories of Indigenous peoples to the walkers on her tours, Koebel is helping to return the spirit to her people.
“This is part of why I do the work that I do … I want to inform people,” she said as she looked out at the attentive group. “And now you know.”
This article first appeared in The Leveller Vol. 8, No. 2 (October 2015).
