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Gaia's Gathering: Sowing the Seeds of Canadian Pagan Dialogue and Networking
BY Gina Ellis
In the spring of this year, Canada will be holding its first Canadian Pagan conference. While there have been indoor gatherings in the winter months in the U.S. for some time, and in Canada more recently, they seemed to me to be more like festivals without the bonfires than anything else. But now the move is towards "serious" conference-type gatherings that focus on dialogue. Small local conferences are springing up and sowing local seeds, and now we will have a national conference as well.
In a country as large as Canada, it's unlikely that a conference in any one locality will be within the means of everyone. For our first National Pagan Conference we wanted to select a central location that wasn't Toronto. We were originally discussing Winnipeg, but when we heard that Toronto was planning their own event, we decided to move our locale further west (also with the idea that the second conference would take place in Eastern Canada). There were proposals from Calgary and Edmonton, and we settled on the latter.
There has been a great deal of positive reaction from B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well as from the rest of the country, and even abroad. We are, of course, hoping that as many people as can manage it will come from Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. To that end, we have established a travel-subsidy fund that will be assisting one person from the Maritimes and another from Quebec to attend the conference. As well, anyone coming from East of Quebec or North of 60 will receive free double-occupancy accommodation and meal ticket (a $150 value).
The theme of our first conference is "Past, Present & Future" . One of the different things we'll do at the conference is to make the events participatory. Instead of presenters or lecturers, we will be having two days of panel discussions, so that Canadian Pagans can talk to each other, learn from each other, and share what they have done, what they are doing and what they hope to do in the future.
We will have a special guest, Kevin Marron, who wrote Witches, Pagans, and Magic in the New Age in 1989 about Pagans in Canada. He will start out the weekend with a look at our past as viewed by an outsider. (There's every possibility he may be moved by current events to do an update.) Filmmaker Donna Read will also be looking at everyone's past with her new film, Signs Out of Time about Marija Gibutas, and Sam Wager will talk to us about occult history in Canada.
Bringing us into the present, other luminaries for the weekend include Shelley Rabinovitch, Brendan (Cathbad) Myers, Lucie Dufresne and Jenny Blain (to be confirmed), all of whom are academics at Canadian universities as well as practicing Pagans and published authors.
Throughout the conference there will be participatory discussion panels (our future). The Saturday afternoon panels will bring together people from various Pagan paths from across country talking to each other and with the audience. The panels on Sunday will focus on the different aspects of being Pagan in Canada: Parenting, media relations, putting on festivals, how we as Pagans live out our ideals vis-à-vis the environment, our interaction with the mainstream community, organizing "churches" for marrying rights & other benefits, etc.
Speaking of organizing - it would seem that there is a deep antipathy to any kind of formal organizing among Pagans. This probably saves us from many of the problems that organized religion experiences, but it is a little awkward at times. Perhaps these conferences will begin to show some "third way" between total independence on the one hand and stifling organization on the other.
I think that in this Internet age, and age of atomized families and their mobile units, the day of religious organizations may have passed, and I'm hoping that what will come out of the national and similar conferences will be a new model, as well as a new sense of the need for networking - East and West networking, not just looking south, as is all too easy to do in Canada.
Gaia's Gathering, Canada's first national Pagan conference will be held between May 20th and 23rd in Edmonton, Alberta. The cost of the conference (advance registration until April 1st) is $85. Accommodation at the University of Alberta ranges from $23 to $80 per person per night. For more information, visit the Gaia Gathering website at: http://cnpc.officeprofessor.ca or contact the conference co-ordinator by email at coordinator@cnpc.officeprofessor.ca
Gina Ellis is long-time organizer, as President of the Pagan Federation/Fédération païenne Canada (www.pfpc.ca), which has a paid contract with Corrections Canada for prison chaplaincy in the Ontario region.
© 2005. This article appeared in the Imbolc 2005 issue of WynterGreene. Permission to reprint, with full credit, must be granted by the author. If you would like to reprint this article, please email Wyntergreene.
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