Kindness starts with everyone

Organizations throughout the community made it a point to be a part of the Kahnawake Shakotiia’takehnhas Community Services (KSCS) Planting Seeds of Kindness Carnival at the Knights of Columbus, the first step in the launching of a broader anti-bullying campaign in Kahnawake.

“Going into the project, it was really important for us to collaborate with all these different organizations. Bullying is a community-wide problem. So, we wanted everyone’s buy in,” said Ohsenna’ón:we White, a prevention worker from KSCS who was one of the Carnival’s three organizers, along with Corleigh Iorihwiioston Beauvais and Dawson Aronhiakons Horne.

“It’s about getting rid of working in silos and just coming back together as a community,” said White.

“That was the message that we were putting out, that we wanted to give a united front coming from all the organizations in the community that we’re not going to tolerate bullying in our community,” said Beauvais.

That includes the Kahnawake Peacekeepers, Tewatohnhi’saktha, Kahnawake Collective Impact, the Kahnawake Youth Center, Kahnawake Tourism, and the Kahnawake Education Center (KEC), to name a few of the organizations that had a booth or activity at the Carnival.

“For us to stop this, we have to reach every age group, not just the children,” said Kyle Zachary, spokesperson for the Peacekeepers, who was at the Carnival on Wednesday.

Still, making it clear to children that bullying is wrong is how you can create adults who know bullying is wrong, he said.

“They’re not going to be children forever. They’re going to grow. They’re eventually going to be the leaders of this community. We have to work on stopping these kinds of behaviors before that point,” said Zachary.

The space was set up in a way to create certain areas inside the Knights hall that were more private or secluded, if people needed to talk with a support worker who was there.

“We really wanted to make the spaces intimate in a way where each person had their own space,” said Beauvais.

Activities included listening stations for testimonials, mini hockey from the Sports and Recreation Unit, colouring, and presentations on both days.

Pink balloon decorations to go along with the colour of Pink Shirt Day adorned the inside of the Knights as well.

“We really wanted to make it a warm and inviting environment for them. And I think we did a good job at doing that,” said Beauvais.

The activities were more geared toward younger people, as classes from KEC schools visited the carnival Tuesday.

“It’s important that we’re inviting the students from all of the schools in the community, because we believe that it’s important that our children are learning from a young age ways to prevent bullying and ways to be a healthy bystander,” said Horne.

“It’s important that our students learn these lessons, to be kind, to be active in the community, and to see that there are different organizations sharing the same message, that it’s not just their teachers, not just their principals, not just the efforts within the school, but the whole community addressing kindness and anti-bullying as a whole,” said Claire Farrell, who works in educational technology integration for the KEC and joined middle school classes at the Carnival.

Farrell said learning in that kind of environment, that of a mini field trip, helped them learn by giving them something new than the classroom.

“They were really engaged with the different stations, the different activities they had. It was really fun seeing the kids involved,” said Farrell.

Kids have changed, and so has bullying, she said, with so much more coming from online than when their parents or grandparents were their age.

“They can observe bullying in many ways. There are many resources available to them, within the schools, within our community, and we want to really let them know that they’re not alone if they are being bullied,” said Farrell.

More information is to come about how the rest of KSCS’s anti-bullying campaign will look like in the coming months, according to the Carnival’s three co-organizers.

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