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The annual Back to Batoche festival is celebrating its 56th year as thousands from far and wide gather at the Batoche National Historic Site to celebrate Métis culture and traditions.
Nearly 40,000 people gathering in one area can make widespread communication difficult, but Batoche Resistance Radio was set up to help solve that problem and relay important news and information to festivalgoers.
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“The wifi can get really busy here, and when you have 40,000 people here, you can’t get to your phone and stuff like that, then to gather information and we have a lot of campers here and it’s really important,” said host Claire Letendre, who is also the adviser to the vice-president at Métis Nation-Saskatchewan.
“If there’s severe weather coming, we can notify them right away because they’re tuning in. Then we do elder interviews, we broadcast them from this main stage so people at home can listen to it too by a livestream.”
The broadcast can be heard on 106.1 FM. While Letendre said it is meant for the festival grounds, it can also be heard in surrounding areas. It is the second year Batoche Resistance Radio has been on the air.
Letendre isn’t new to hosting a live show. She previously hosted a TV show in Saskatoon called The Loading Zone in the 1990s before running a production company and later starting to work with the Métis Nation and Saskatchewan Tribal Council.
The biggest difference between the show at last year’s festival and this is the location, and how many people can access it in person.
“Last year we were in the lodge but we were kind of tucked away and nobody really knew we were there. But now where we are, we’re getting a lot of foot traffic. We have posters now that are up everywhere for people to finally see.”
“You can give a shout out. E-mail us and we’ll shout out for you if there’s a birthday or anything. We’ve been getting them constantly, so that’s our feedback. We know it’s working, so that we’re getting that interaction from people that aren’t on the site.”
They don’t livestream the show at every hour of the day, but they do stream the important components of the festival.
“When they do have fiddle competitions and stuff like that, we will broadcast it over the FM station. A lot of our older people need to be in their air-conditioned campers, but they still want to hear what’s going on. So, it really benefits them.”
They also run live interviews around the grounds with their co-host ‘J-Bird,’ who is around the ground talking to as many people around the festival as possible.
For Letendre, Back to Batoche is much more important than just the show.
“I’ve been coming to Batoche for a very long time. My fourth great uncle founded Batoche, Xavier Letendre,” she said, mentioning her favourite part of the event is the culture.
“I came from that era from the ’70s and ’80s where we weren’t allowed to talk about that and I didn’t even know we were Métis.”
“My very first real school, we went, we went to Batoche. It was our first trip. I said, ‘Why is my last name everywhere here?’ That’s how I found out. After that, we started learning. My dad started talking about it and I just wanted to learn more about it.”
Letendre said back then, research came from libraries with no such thing as internet to research which is why she got into media production.
“I can start teaching people our culture because it was hard to find and now if we can share it and get our people back you know it’s really good for us.”
She mentioned one other part of the festival that she considers to be one of her favourites.
“They feed the elders and they have a lodge there for them to cool down and take a break and then they feed them breakfast, lunch, and supper. I love it.”
— with files from CJME News
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