Stories from the road: Kahnawake

She:kon! I hope you all had lovely weekends, as did we because this weekend we were able to travel to Quebec to the beautiful Mohawk Nation of Kahnawake for their annual Echoes of a Proud Nation Pow Wow. Before checking into our hotel on Friday, Kim - who is a former resident of Montreal - told Jen and I that we absolutely had to go to Smoked Meat Pete’s, her former go-to spot, for the best smoked meat in town. When anything is said to be the best, you know you just have to try it, so we did, and right away we knew it had to be the best because it was absolutely packed! Let’s just say it was packed for a reason because it was the most amazing smoked meat sandwich I have ever had! Good call Kim! I think it is safe to say we all very much enjoyed our meals and Kim also managed to get some reminiscing in. After this we went back to the hotel and called it a night as we were absolutely exhausted and wanted to be well rested for the pow wow on Saturday!

The first day of the pow wow was extremely hot, as was the second but heat is much better than rain, most of the time. We managed to talk to many people who were very interested in AAE. Alumni of Queen’s stopped by, some of whom were very happy with our program and appreciated what we were doing. Along with this we had some very avid and successful builders who managed to complete all the Keva block challenges, some were as young as five! By the end of the challenges, many of them wanted to be engineers in the future! They were very excited we were there and kept coming back to see us, wanting to know more about the comic books and the students in them!

After the long day at the grounds on Saturday, Kim gave Jennifer a wonderful tour of Montreal in the evening and managed to stumble upon some talented street performers, great graffiti and eventually went on to play some competitive games of ping-pong! Overall the two days were very successful and everyone persevered through the heat! Kahnawake has beautiful grounds for their Pow Wow and thousands of people attended. We had a wonderful time and hope to be back next year!