On a Wednesday night in mid-September, when the northern light has begun to fade earlier and the air over the Slave River carries the first real bite of autumn, the town of Fort Smith will fill with fiddle music, the thunder of feet on wooden floors, and the flash of brightly woven sashes. The first-ever NWT Métis Jamboree runs September 15 to 17, three days of jigging competitions, musician showcases, an artisan market, a Métis-inspired fashion show, and the steady, welcoming hum of a community gathering that has never happened before — and very nearly didn't happen at all.
"Everyone is welcome," said Melissa Johns, the jamboree's organizer. "This is the first NWT Métis Jamboree and we hope it becomes an event people look forward to for many years."
For Johns, the jamboree is the culmination of a brutal, revealing summer. She also organizes Fort Smith's Fireweed Festival, the town's signature summer event, which was violently interrupted in late August when a shooting outside the Dirty O'Fergie's bar wounded three people and sent the community into a shelter-in-place lockdown that lasted more than half a day. The festival paused, organizers scrambled through plan A, plan B, and plan C with no clear sense of when police would let residents out of their homes, and the weekend that was supposed to celebrate Fort Smith instead became a test of whether the town could hold itself together.
It did. When the lockdown lifted, the festival reopened briefly Saturday night and ran as planned on Sunday. "People showed up," Johns said. "They checked on one another, they danced, they laughed, I cried." She said the weekend was not about pretending nothing had happened, but the opposite: the community carried its grief openly and danced anyway. In the aftermath she kept returning to a conviction that would shape the jamboree: music and art are not decoration. They are how people reconnect, find comfort, and begin to heal.
Fort Smith knows something about healing. The town of about 2,250, known to its Dene and Métis residents by the name Thebacha — "the place by the rapids" — has long been a gathering place at the junction of the Slave River and the portage route that once connected the fur trade routes of the Athabasca country to the Mackenzie basin. The Northwest Territory Métis Nation traces its roots through communities including Fort Smith, Fond du Lac, and the Village of Little Buffalo River, a people born of the fur trade itself, of First Nations and European worlds braided together into something new. The Métis sash, with its bright woven colours, began as a practical tool for voyageurs — back support, tumpline, towel, rope — before it became the great emblem of the Nation, worn across the shoulder or around the waist to proclaim, quietly and proudly, "we are Métis."
The jamboree was timed to coincide with the Northwest Territory Métis Nation's annual general assembly, a deliberate logistical choice that lets delegates from across the territory gather for governance and then step into celebration alongside the broader community. Anyone may attend the festivities, whether Métis or not. For Johns, that openness is the point. Métis residents from across the NWT will connect with neighbours and visitors, and the town that has weathered so much will get to show itself as a host.
The festivities begin Wednesday night with a jigging competition, the dance form that is to Métis culture what the fiddle is to its music: inseparable. Métis jigging fuses European step dancing with Indigenous footwork, danced to fiddle music marked by a percussive bow and a driving "horse gallop rhythm" that distinguishes it from Irish, Scottish, or bluegrass traditions. The most widely accepted account of the Red River Jig traces it to a wedding dance for a Métis couple in the early 1800s, and the tradition has run through Métis families for generations, passed down in kitchen parties and community halls. To dance the jig is to hold a living history in your feet.
A highlight of the jamboree will be the all-ages jigging competition, which promises the particular joy of watching children learn the steps from elders, and elders watch children make them their own. The Kikino Northern Lites, a Métis traditional dance troupe from the Kikino Métis Settlement in northeast Alberta, are scheduled to perform. "Kikino" is a Cree word meaning "our home," and the group was founded in 1978 by elders Georgina Thompson and Doris Bellerose, who identified a need to teach youth traditional music and dance. Nearly five decades later, they still travel to share that tradition — and on a September night in Fort Smith, they will help launch a new one.
The jamboree continues with a showcase of Métis musicians from the South Slave region, the artisan market, and a fashion show featuring Métis-inspired clothing, beadwork, and design. There will be an artisan market where knowledge holders, beadworkers, and makers can share their craft, and the promise of traditional foods shared among elders, youth, and everyone in between.
"I am looking forward to everybody coming together to celebrate our culture, to wear their sashes proudly, to share music and jigging, art," Johns said. "People can expect entertainment, but they can also expect to feel welcomed and included, and we want it to feel like a true Métis community gathering."
The jamboree is free and open to all, with no capacity limits. It is, in a sense, an act of faith — faith in the idea that a community can come together after a hard summer, that culture is not just preserved but performed, that the sash can be worn proudly even when the year has been heavy. Fort Smith has been through a shooting, a shelter-in-place, a long pandemic recovery, and a month-long wildfire evacuation as recently as 2023. Its motto is "Perseverance." The fireweed flower after which the summer festival is named grows in the ashes of burned ground, and the town has leaned on that image all summer: resilience, renewal, strength after devastation.
For Johns, a successful jamboree would look simple: people coming together, enjoying each other's company, in a beautiful and meaningful way. Dancing, music, art, traditional foods, and culture shared among elders, youth, and knowledge holders. Three days in September, in a small town on the Slave River, where the fiddle plays, the feet fly, and the sash is worn proudly — everyone welcome, everyone included, everyone home.