Finding Community Connections with Shannon Dunfield

By Laura Mushumanski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

(ANNews) – Since 2014, our Metis sister Shannon Dunfield has been connecting with Indigenous youth through Indigenous sport. With a master’s degree and over three decades of experience in education, health, sport, and the not-for-profit sector, she has dedicated her life to uplifting others.

She has served as Chair of Indigenous Sport Council Alberta since 2018, was honoured to be President of the North American Indigenous Games (NAIG) Council from 2020-2023 and joined the Board of the 2027 Host Society in 2024.

What led Dunfield to Indigenous ways of knowing, started in her youth. “It’s about kinship connection,” she shares. “One thing my kohkom always taught me was how important it was to go into spaces, to be able to know who our families are, know our history. Any community you go into they are going to ask you ‘who are you? where are you from? who’s your family’…When we talk about those kinds of things it establishes those relationships… people will start getting a real good sense that we are connected, and we are related.”

This core teaching was instilled in her at a young age and she walks with this understanding in everything she does in life.

“It is good to have those connections and finding [them] when you are away from home, makes you feel like you are connected in some way and that you are not as far away from home as you think you are…. I always tell my kids when they go into different spaces to find those connections. Even if they are far away from home, there are relatives nearby that will help and support them as they navigate [being away from home]. Those connections will keep them grounded until they do come home.”

There is an innate understanding of familiarity when visiting with our relatives. Safety and connection in the body starts to form while these practices bring the spirit of togetherness family into our communities. “We want to make sure we are connected through spirit or blood memory to all our relatives across turtle island in some way, shape, or form,” adds Dunfield. Those kinship connections are important for a person to feel grounded everywhere they go while feeling like they belong.

“I grew up in my community [Kelly Lake] and was raised by my grandparents and grew up on the land. People always think I’m lying when I tell them I grew up in a home with no running water in a four-room cabin…People are kind of shocked that that still happens; this is the reality of a lot of our people. My community itself is taking back a lot of that…reclaiming who they are. Growing up in my community, we didn’t see ourselves as a reserve or settlement, but an Indigenous community tied together through family, culture and traditions. I grew up in a time when we ran free, we got to play outside, we got to do things… There was safety in that and safety in our community, and now you don’t see that anymore because there are so many different things and so many different factors that come into play.”

Living in her home community, feeling a sense of safety, with everyone looking out for each other, shaped Dunfield’s role within community. She is now an auntie to many Indigenous youths in sports. She’s learned through oral stories of how changes in the landscape shaped her home community.

“In my community, there were a lot of oral histories. They talked a lot about how we moved to where we were to keep the kids out of Residential Schools. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t impacted…Later on in life, learning that my grandmother and four of her siblings were taken when she was 13 years old to an Indian Hospital in Vancouver, and how she came back 5 years later – only two of the five came back. And how a lot of unanswered questions there and realizing that my grandmother had a scar on her back and never really thought it was, then realizing later on that that is what she went through when she went to the Hospital… Even though my community didn’t experience that Residential School piece, a lot of our community members were taken away and how that changed the landscape of how we lived and how we experienced life…I also think about when you are younger and growing up – you don’t think about how you grew up. We grew up poor but we never realized it… We always had food on the table, my grandfather was a hunter and a trapper, my grandmother was a hide maker and [did] beadwork. That is just who we were and took for granted…We weren’t neglected, we always had food…Education has always been really important to our community… in making sure our kids are educated and can go on and succeed in the areas that they want.”

In 2022, Canada Sport Hall of Fame reached out to Dunfield and wanted her to be part of a panel – the first inaugural reconciliation through sport that they were hosting. “I was on a panel with Olympians and Indigenous Hall of Famers, and one of the questions that they asked me was: how did you get to where you are at?”

That led Shannon to reflect, “I’m just a mom. I am a mom, that’s how I am here… growing up in my community, once we hit high school it was very difficult to play sports because we were a 45-minute bus ride out of town…Between myself and my husband, we wanted to create space where our kids didn’t have that same difficulty that we did. Along the way, when creating these spaces for my kids, I was becoming auntie to other kids.”

One thing that continued to tie everything together for Dunfield was the teaching her grandmother shared with her, and the importance of community connections. “You are connecting with all these Indigenous youth to create a space for them to be the best that they can be in whatever sport that they are doing. I think when you talk about that relationship, extending that relationship from my children to all these other youth was really important to me to be able to lift them up…You don’t realize how impactful those little conversations have on others… because of my grandmother always talking about how important it was to know who we are, to know where we come from, in order to know where we are going and how important it was to make those relationships along the way.”

For the youth Dunfield walks beside and ones that are listening, she says: “You are enough and don’t let anyone else tell you any different.”