“What a brilliant and excellent weaving of cultures so powerful at times I could barely breathe.
I was transported into an emotional and sacred and beautiful healing of reconciliation.
Thank you, thank you!”

– Opening Night Audience Member

“Shumka’s Ancestors & Elders is a historic union of Cree, Ukrainian Cultures.”

– Edmonton Journal

“And in a complicated world where we sometimes despair of making a go of things, where hate sometimes seems to flood out of our computers at every turn, I was filled with such hope and delight.”

Though I am not ethnically Ukrainian, all four of my grandparents were born in what is now Ukraine, as was my mother. And as a kid growing up in Alberta, I grew up immersed in the triumphant, mythic story of Ukrainian settlement – the story of doughty pioneers who left poverty and oppression in their homeland, settled on the prairies, faced down both the bigotry of their Anglo-Saxon neighbours and the harshness of the Alberta elements, hung on fiercely to their culture and language, and triumphed as advocates for multiculturalism. It’s a great narrative – and one indeed worth celebrating.

But I never fully realized, in my own Alberta youth, how much that narrative erased the story of the original people of this place, how much it papered over the displacement and death of Indigenous Albertans, how much our province’s official glorification of its Ukrainian settlers relied upon the official forgetting of the bitter truth of First Nations and Metis cultures all but destroyed.

Which is why I wish everyone in Alberta – and Canada – could have the chance to see Ancestors and Elders, the truly remarkable dance work co-created by the Shumka Dancers and the Running Thunder Dancers. It is a meditation on the universal role of dance and song in preserving culture, and on the way Alberta’s tangled roots can support and strengthen us all. It combines Ukrainian and Cree traditions in a bold new dance language. It is a show about reconciliation. About resilience. About recognizing our mistakes. About the way we are all shaped by the demands of this challenging, beautiful land we share.

It’s also a love song to Edmonton, a joyous celebration of everything that this city, at its best, aspires to be.

I missed the show when it premiered last year. I’m so glad I was able to see it this past Friday. After the second act, where jingle dancers and hoop dancers wove in and out of a traditional Ukrainian hopak, the young dancers gathered in the lobby for photographs. At one point, I saw a young Muslim couple, the wife in a traditional hijab, crowding in for a picture, too, while beside me, a Chinese-Canadian dad was trying to take a picture of his young daughter with the same group.

And in a complicated world where we sometimes despair of making a go of things, where hate sometimes seems to flood out of our computers at every turn, I was filled with such hope and delight.

Thank you to Shumka and Running Thunder for a night I’ll never forget.

-Senator Paula Simons

Past Performances

Funders