A group of Gaels Jam attendees at one of the first Gaels Jams ever held in Nova Scotia.
January 31, 2024
-by Josefa Cameron
The Nova Scotia Gaels Jam 2024 is celebrating its 10th anniversary in February.
The event will connect 25 diverse, engaged, and committed leaders from across Nova Scotia and beyond for a week of listening, sharing, and community building.
Held from February 15th to February 20th, the jam will take place at the Tatamagouche Centre in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia.
Jams similar to this one take place all over the world through an organization called Yes World. The group facilitates identity-based events – the Gaels Jam is one of those.
Amber Buchanan is a founding organizer and facilitator with the Nova Scotia Gaels Jam.
She said the idea came to her through Tad Hargrave, a friend of hers who had attended countless conferences and workshops as a marketer. He found that the coffee break at each event was the best part.
“Given that you could just really connect with people and network and collaborate,” Buchanan said.
“So, we thought, what if we did something like a week-long coffee break, where the centre of the event is the people at hand. So that’s kind of how the idea was originally born.”
Hargrave and Buchanan attended a Yes World jam in Thailand, where she said there were more than 30 attendees from 19 different countries.
At the end of the week, Hargrave and Buchanan both agreed that they had to organize a jam in Nova Scotia for Gaelic speakers especially targeting leaders in the Gaelic community.
Buchanan said it takes a lot of organization and teamwork to pull off each year. Nova Scotia’s Office of Gaelic Affairs funds the event.
“We’re very grateful for that,” Buchanan said, adding that it is especially helpful presently with the cost of living.
This is the second time the Tatamagouche Centre is home to the Gaels Jam. In past years, it was held at Beinn Mhàbu, formerly Mabou Convent, the Cabot Trail’s Wilderness Resort in the North Shore, and other locations across the province over the past decade.
There have also been mini-events held over weekends done entirely in Gaelic.
“Otherwise, the five and six-day residentials are conducted in English with a lot of Gaelic throughout,” Buchanan said.
Aside from helping attendees to learn the language, Buchanan finds solace in the event.
“It’s a really healing and transformative event. I find it’s a real community-building event,” she said.
The organizers strive to be diverse in its leadership and participants.
“We used to have little pockets of Gaelic communities…Now we’re looking at people in each of these communities coming together as a whole, and so we’re looking at a whole lot more diversity, which means different ways of looking at things and learning how to communicate in clear ways.”
It is open not only for people learning Gaelic, Buchanan said, but also for people involved in music, dance, and storytelling.
“Anybody who is involved in the cultural arts is welcome to come,” Buchanan said.
The idea behind this year’s event is to unify people in the Gaelic Nova Scotia community.
“It’s not going to be just language-centred, but it’s culture-centred – looking at the Gaels as a people, Gaelic values and Gaelic ways of being…Because knowing the language is a privilege at this point and not accessible to everyone.”
Reconnecting with her Gaelic heritage is important to Buchanan, and she wants others to share in that experience.
“I think it’s important because we are a people who have been colonized. We were people who immigrated here with very little. There is a traumatic back story there that inevitably carries through the generations,” she said. “I think the Gaels Jam gives us an opportunity to do some of the healing work that got left to the side because survival took the driver’s seat.”
Part of the goal, Buchanan said, is to help people come together and collaborate, “and maybe process and work through issues that they may have.”
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