Smudging helped David Fineday deal with trauma from #60sScoop

 'Smudge On': Saskatoon man working to fill Indigenous cultural, spiritual gap in city

Dayne Patterson · CBC News · October 2022

David
Fineday, middle, in a small circle of people who stopped by Friday for
Smudge On, a program that allows people to engage in the Indigenous
cultural and spiritual practice of smudging. (Dayne Patterson/CBC)

A
Saskatoon man is trying to bring the Indigenous spiritual and cultural
practice of smudging to those in the city, where he says it is lacking.

David
Fineday, 66, said he was taken from his home at about five years old,
then didn't see his mother until he returned home more than a decade
later at 16. 

He said his mother and elders then taught him how to smudge. Smudging is a spiritual practice meant to purify oneself by washing the smoke from burning certain herbs, like sweetgrass and sage, over your face and body.

Fineday
said he doesn't see smudging often in the city — so he treks from his
home in Saskatoon to a small, treed area near the corner of 20th Street
West and Avenue K South, and does it there.

Fineday
leads "Smudge On," a program backed by the Pleasant Hill Community
Association that invites people to smudge every Saturday. Last week he
also held a smudge on Friday for those who wanted to participate on the
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

"Smudge On is a spiritual thing that I am trying to bring back to our people," he said. 

"When you say your prayers that smoke takes your prayers up and that's how you're heard."

David
Fineday, left, and Dennis Kissling, right, carried a banner on July 1
with names of people they said were taken from their homes during the
Sixties Scoop. On the back it said 'Smudge-On,' a reference to the
practice of smudging, which Fineday said has been a way to heal from the
traumatic past. (Dayne Patterson/CBC)

Smudge
On started in June 2020, but has become more consistent through 2021
and 2022, operating almost every Saturday through the late winter months
into the late fall, Fineday said.

"People can come here if
they're having problems, they can have a smudge and have a prayer and if
they want to talk, they can talk," he said, calling it a no-judgment
zone.

"Everybody deserves a prayer, especially these people on the
street with their mental illnesses and addictions. They're chased out
of every other place."

Fineday said smudging helped him to know he wasn't alone and to heal from the trauma associated with being taken during the Sixties Scoop,
a period from the 1960s to 1980s when Canadian child welfare
authorities took thousands of Indigenous children from their homes and
placed them with non-Indigenous foster parents.

David
Fineday, right, hosts the Smudge On program almost every Saturday to
provide those in search of the traditional Indigenous practice an
opportunity to do it. (Dayne Patterson/CBC)

While
Fineday didn't attend residential schools, he said he moved from foster
home to foster home from November 1961 until June 1973.

Saskatoon
Ward 2 Coun. Hilary Gough stopped by Smudge On's Friday ceremony with
a case of coffee and Timbits for the attendees, who sat on blue tarps
that circled a metal firepit in the grassed area. 

She said she stops by occasionally.

"This
is something that is happening today, for [National Day for Truth and
Reconciliation], but it's also something that happens every week," Gough
said. 

"It is intended to meet people where they're at."

Gough said she thinks much of the work done on the national day needs to be done year-round, not just on a designated date.