Web of Life: music and community in harmony with the Earth

Dear reader, 

The Regina Folk Festival’s 2023 theme is Web of Life: Music and community in harmony with the Earth. This summer we will celebrate the natural world, and the musicians, people and groups working to protect it, with the goal of encouraging greater engagement with environmental issues and to combat climate dread. 

While being the biggest party of the year, the Regina Folk Festival works to pay attention to emerging dialogues in the community, including the climate emergency, a leading concern of our time. This year we commit to reviewing the Regina Folk Festival’s connection to environmental sustainability and our interdependence with the natural world, with 2023 being year one of our learning. We must do this in order to help heal our planet and protect our future. 

The Regina Folk Festival has signed the declaration created and circulated by Music Declares Emergency Canada (MDE) and have started to develop a climate action plan to make our festival ecologically sustainable and regenerative. Music Declares Emergency have built music industry-specific actions we can adapt to our unique festival. Given their connections with musicians who are committed to climate action, we have also invited Music Declares Emergency to be 2023’s guest curator. 

In the book ‘Rehearsals for Living’, co-authored by Robyn Maynard and RFF 2022’s guest curator, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Maynard articulates that the climate emergency finds “its origins in slavery and colonialism, genocide and capitalism”. She outlines how the current climate emergency was not brought about by ‘humankind’, but rather is the direct result of European imperialism and its extractive, exploitative activities since the industrial revolution. To say otherwise evades responsibility and causes further harm to racialized peoples who are often the first to feel the impacts of climate change. 

For this reason, the Regina Folk Festival understands that it is critical to center Indigenous wisdom and expertise in our sustainability efforts and to make those learnings leading aspects in our climate action plan. We look forward to sharing those learnings soon and our climate action plan as it develops. 

Our summer festival and most of our events are held on the area known as Treaty 4, the traditional lands of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Nakota, Lakota peoples as well as the homeland of the Métis /Michif Nation. As an organization we want to respect and honour the Treaties that were made on all territories. The harms and mistakes of the past are still very much felt deeply today and will be for generations to come, including the physical damage we have inflicted on our planet. In moving towards reconciliation and in collaboration with Indigenous communities we want to focus on the land that we gather on and improving its existence. We celebrate the resilience, excellence, and wisdom of Indigenous people at the Regina Folk Festival. We are grateful for their leadership and unwavering efforts towards protecting Earth. 

Our festival theme, Web of Life, was inspired by The David Suzuki Foundation’s Declaration of Interdependence, written for the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which includes the line: “When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.” 

We invite our festival community to help protect the endless future this summer and every summer. 

Thank you, 
The Regina Folk Festival