Flying Canoë: Festival that brightens Edmonton’s winter

They enjoy music and dancing and discover the legend of La Chasse-Galerie, a combination of French-Canadian and First Nations folklore told by lost canoeists along the illuminated trails of the Mill Creek Ravine.

This festival is put on by La Cité Francophone, and its executive director Daniel Cournoyer says it all started as a partnership with the Winter Lights Society and its event that was called the Mill Creek Nature Walk.

Each year that event had a different theme and that is how the Flying Canoë Festival was born. When Winter Lights shut down, La Cité Francophone decided to make the festival permanent. 

“After that first year, my creative team came back to me and said we have to keep it. There is something to be built there,” recalls Cournoyer. 

Now, the festival provides venues that enable the Indigenous, Metis and Francophone communities to share their cultures and contributions to society, past and present. And let’s not forget the Flying Canoë version of the triathlon, with canoe races, buck sawing and axe throwing.

“The story of the Flying Canoe is a Canadian story,” Cournoyer explains. “It’s a piece of literature that is really well known in Eastern Canada. It told the story of this bewitched canoe. This flying canoe saved these voyageurs in their camp and helped them get home in time on New Year’s Eve in exchange for making a pact with the devil. Getting to the party wasn’t a problem. It was on the way home that things went awry.”

“The story itself is inspired by an Indigenous story, the bewitched canoe, and I thought it fit well with the prairie story and the story of Edmonton and Fort Edmonton,” continues Cournoyer. “And I thought the Indigenous connection was really important and we’re in a time of reconciliation… We have our Indigenous partners with Native Counselling Services of Alberta and with Metis programming. It’s really the coming together of these three founding communities to celebrate with all of Edmonton the wonder and magic of a long winter’s night.”

“You can be dancing and jigging in the depths of Mill Creek Ravine in the depths of winter at minus 25 with live music going. We figured out how to keep musicians warm and it really caught the imagination of Edmontonians, and that to us is the biggest surprise,” Cournoyer says. “Because we took part in an event that drew about 3,500 people and in eight years, in 2020, the month before the pandemic, we had grown it to 60,000 over three nights… That creates a lot of challenges, but it also creates this great community connection. And I think for me and what we’re trying to do as a Francophone cultural centre is create those community connections.”

Alberta’s Francophone community has been around since well before the creation of the province. The first Europeans to visit what became Alberta were French Canadians during the late 18th century, working as fur traders and voyageurs for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company. Modern day Alberta has about 2,000 places that have Francophone names: for example, Beaumont, Brosseau, Grande Prairie, Lacombe, Lac des Arcs, Legal, Falher and Plamondon. And of course, Edmonton has a large and vibrant Francophone community. Campus St. Jean was a catalyst for an influx of Francophones to Bonnie Doon in particular.

La Cité Francophone was founded in 1992 as a way to serve Edmonton’s Francophones. Phase one of its bright modern 56,000 square foot building opened in 1997 and then it nearly doubled in size in 2010. Thirty eight community-based organizations use the space. They include the Francophone school board, employment services and a welcome centre for new immigrants. There is also the French Quarter’s farmers market, a theatre, a gallery for visual arts and the ever popular Café Bicyclette.

Cournoyer says the centre is a hub of Edmonton’s Francophone community, with 10,000 Francophones living within 10 minutes of La Cité Francophone.

And now with the new Valley Line LRT it will be more accessible to people living elsewhere in Edmonton. But Cournoyer is especially excited about what it means to the Flying Canoë Festival.

“Our festival is literally going to be bookended with two LRT stops,” he says. “One being the Muttart by the Edmonton Ski Club where we host the Flying Canoë races and then, of course, La Cité Francophone is within a 10-minute walk of the Bonnie Doon station… So that creates a huge opportunity. We see the Valley Line as this huge connectivity to the Mill Woods area and the downtown area then the other lines through the Churchill Station to let people know how to get to our site and enjoy the magic and wonder of the Flying Canoë.”