President's Corner: June 27, 2026
Posted on: Jun 26, 2026
This weekend, the Kitchen Party Tour heads north. We will be in Grande Prairie on Friday, Peace River on Saturday, and Fort Vermilion on Sunday. Three stops, three communities, three places where Métis families have lived and worked and built community for centuries.
Each of these communities tells a part of the Métis story in Alberta. Grande Prairie was shaped by the traders, guides, and hunters who served the Hudson’s Bay Company, and saw a distinct Métis community take root at Flying Shot Lake in 1907. Peace River was a hub of the fur trade as early as 1792, with Métis families like the LaFleurs, Bourassas, and MacKenzies emerging as a distinct people on the land. And Fort Vermilion, established in 1788, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in Alberta, anchoring Métis life in the north for more than two hundred years.
When we gather for a kitchen party in places like these, we are not just visiting. We are coming home to ground that our families helped build.
June is also National Indigenous History Month, and as it draws to a close, I want to leave you with a simple message. Be proud of who you are. Our story did not begin with what was taken from us. It began with the land, with our families, with our languages, and with the way we have always cared for one another. That story did not end either. It is alive in every community we have visited on this tour. In every fiddle picked up. In every jig danced. In every grandmother and grandchild sitting together at a table. In every young person learning the words to a song their great-grandparents sang.
Being Métis is not something to explain to anyone, it is something to celebrate. The Kitchen Party Tour is one of the many ways we are doing exactly that, together. I hope to see many of you this weekend, in Grande Prairie, in Peace River, or in Fort Vermilion. Bring your family. Bring a chair. Come and visit, in the spirit of Âstam Pi Kîyoki. This is what carrying our culture forward looks like.
President Andrea Sandmaier
Otipemisiwak Métis Government