The boy whose braids went viral. Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse crashed a…
By: Jenn Jefferys
Tags: Indigenous, Indigenous Rights, News, Canada, Indigenous People

Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse crashed a government press conference to cut off his hair in defense of his homelands — and went viral doing it

Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse’s Tsuu’tina grandparents taught him that he was never to cut his hair unless he’d lost a loved one. On October 1st he cut his hair — but not because he’d lost a person. It was because he was losing his homelands.

“I am going to speak, and you are going to listen,” he said on the heels of multiple political speeches and moments before upending a major press conference by cutting off his two long, dark braids.

“Today is not a good day. I woke up this morning to see my mother crying. She heard the news that this road was going to be opening.”

“To people who don’t know Tsuu’tina history, it is also Calgary’s history. In 1880, Chief Bullhead fought for our reservation and treaty rights. In 1883, us Tsuu’tina people came to this land to reside. My treaty rights were never sold and you can never take them. You may sell your own treaty rights, but you cannot take and sell mine.”

26 year-old Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse (whose spirit name is Sun Child) comes from mixed Tsuu’tina and Blackfoot ancestry. He’s a recent university graduate and a multidisciplinary artist working to raise awareness about the creeping colonial development of his homelands. For the last six years, he says, he’s watched his lands slip away.

When Seth disrupted a ribbon cutting ceremony and press conference outside of Calgary, Alberta recently he caught a lot of people in high places off guard and went viral.

“To me, having the land be destroyed, having it paved and turned into a highway — I just wanted people to know that I was mourning,” Seth said in a phone interview on October 15.

Cardinal Dodginghorse says he didn’t plan to go viral that day. But something about those two snips took news media aback. And as Seth’s braids fell away — “I leave a piece of me with the road” — so too did much local political capital for Premier Jason Kenney and Tsuut’ina Chief Roy Whitney.

The controversial development project announced that day as part of Alberta’s ‘Recovery Plan’ was the Calgary Ring Road — a stretch of highway running directly through Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse’s home community that’s displaced many family homes in the process. The project has the endorsement of Tsuut’ina Chief Roy Whitney, and according to the Government of Alberta’s website, this road will bring ‘economic diversification and sustained economic growth’ to the region.

Cardinal Dodginghorse sees his Chief and band council as nothing more than mere tools of the settler state under the Indian Act. He also says this road will do nothing more than “allow settlers to drive into work five minutes faster each morning.”

I asked Seth exactly what brought him there that day.

“So what brought me there was the south-west portion of the Calgary Ring Road was opening that day, and it was a surprise to people in my community, on Tsuut’ina. And it was a surprise to me especially, because the south-west portion of the Ring Road was built through my family’s land. They tore down and destroyed forests where my family lived; and our homes as well. That stretch of land, my family’s land, was forcibly taken from us. The land was surrendered in full to the provincial government so that highway could be built. People are going to be driving over where my family’s history was. And so I wanted to go there. For years, my family has tried speaking to people within Tsuut’ina Nation. It is something that I think people need to understand.”

Before cutting his braids, Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse read a letter aloud that his mother had written that morning, recounting generations of pleas their family had made to successive governments and band councils to simply listen, and leave the land with its rightful owners.

“You can’t build prosperity, and you can’t build relationships, when you erase the women that came from this land,” Cardinal Dodginghorse said.

This road, as it’s planned, will cut straight through Seth’s home community. His family believes every inch of new asphalt poured will weaken Tsuu’tina culture.

To a Native man on Turtle Island like Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse, long hair is sacred, and can signify the depth of one’s teachings and time spent in ceremony. It can help tell the story one tells as one dances at a powwow. It can also signify when someone is mourning the loss of one’s kin, or in this case, the loss of one’s homelands.

Seth thinks a lot about the work of his braided ancestors. “My ancestors fought for future generations. It stings a lot more, knowing that history,” Cardinal Dodginghorse told me.

The Cardinal Dodginghorse family and countless others from Treaty 7 have been forced off their homelands by white settlers for generations. This new road development is just the latest in a long line of betrayals. Imagine the feeling of dispossession and agony for a Native mother like Seth’s, driven to homelessness by yet another generation of politicians cutting deals.

“We lived here, we grew up here; we touched that land. Since I’ve spoken up, I’ve heard people try to throw criticism. You know, like: ‘why didn’t your family speak up sooner?’ I’d like people to know that we have tried to follow all the rules. But the rules are colonial rules — and they work to protect governments, and the Indian Act chiefs and band councils. My family has tried all of these processes over the years. But those processes are set up to fail. They only serve certain people. Their interests aren’t Indigenous.”

In Canada’s genocidal residential schools, which were active right up until 1996, the long hair of little Native children was cut and shaved just as it was for little Jewish children in Nazi concentration camps.

Native children were ripped from their communities, torn from the arms of their mothers, and thrown into these church-run schools where nuns were instructed by the state to ‘kill the Indian in the child’. If you don’t believe me, this history has been well documented in excruciating detail by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Testimony was collected from thousands of residential school survivors and their kin. Many died at these so-called schools, or while trying to escape from them. Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse was raised by residential school survivors. He says his long hair and braids are a source of pride.

“Men in my family in the past who put their long hair in braids, and they were put in residential school, they weren’t allowed to have long hair. They weren’t allowed to have braids,” he says.

To reclaim that culture today, to wear braids freely, means a lot to Seth and to his family. But to be able to reclaim sovereignty over their beloved homelands, to stop unnecessary development projects like one, would be better.

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For more on this story, check out my interview with Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse for Broadview Magazine here