Mi’kmaw woman’s backyard sweat lodge a place to gather and heal [Video]

Nestled in the corner of Margaret Labobe’s backyard on the Lennox Island First Nation is a round, tent-like structure covered in blue and brown tarps. A well-trampled dirt path in the grass leads to a small opening that you’d have to crouch down to enter.

It’s a Mi’kmaw sweat lodge. And while it might not look grandiose on the outside, what happens inside, Labobe said, is sacred.

“The sweat releases your thoughts or whatever you’re into… It will help you, you feel that comfort.”

Sweat lodges, long used by Indigenous people to release toxins and negative energy, have been part of a healing journey for Labobe, who has overcome many hardships in her 70 years on Mother Earth. 

She was eight years old when she and her siblings were separated from their parents on P.E.I. and sent to a residential school in Nova Scotia. When the school closed in 1967 …