Sioux Valley welcomes evacuees for an afternoon of fun and fresh air

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This article was published 29/08/2025 (210 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SIOUX VALLEY DAKOTA NATION — Evacuees displaced from their communities in northern Manitoba were invited to Sioux Valley Dakota Nation on Friday for what the chief called a mental health day.

A hundred people were at the event in the afternoon when the Sun visited. Sioux Valley residents and wildfire evacuees were hosted at the local powwow grounds with live music and children’s entertainment.

The event was a way to give a day of fresh air to evacuees, Chief Vince Tacan told the Sun.

“We thought we’d give our relatives from the north a mental health day, because staying in hotels gets hard after a while,” Tacan said.

Tacan added the event is combined with a recreation day for locals and a wrap-up event for the summer.

Tacan did not know how many evacuees were expected for the day.

A charter bus from Brandon was making back and forth trips in the afternoon, bringing evacuees to the event, Tacan said. He expected evacuees who were staying in Winnipeg to come out as well.

A mother from the Lynn Lake area, who did not provide her name, told the Sun she had been flown out of her community and is now staying in a hotel in Brandon. She has been staying there for nearly two months with family members, she said.

The woman said there may be a tentative return plan for late September, but wasn’t sure.

After getting off a charter bus from Brandon, the child evacuees spent the afternoon playing. A spray foam bubble machine was set up, mascots in superhero and princess costumes walked around, food and drinks were provided, and games had been set up on fields.

The games included volleyball, mechanical bull-riding and fighting with cushioned poles on a bouncy castle.

The day was a relief from staying at the hotel, where it can get crowded, said the mother. Her family spent some of the summer in a hotel room with five people, but recently they were split into two rooms, she said.

Roughly 4,760 wildfire evacuees are staying in hotel rooms in Manitoba and Ontario, a spokesperson for the province told the Sun on Friday.

The spokesperson was unable to say where the evacuees are from, but said the affected communities work daily to bring residents home.

Country music performances were live at the powwow grounds in the early afternoon. Four bands were scheduled for the day — the Darren Lavallee Band, Roadside Prophets, C-Weed Band and the Mike Malcom Band.

Sioux Valley Dakota Nation is one of several communities to welcome evacuees from the Lynn Lake area this summer. A local Brandon group put on a powwow with a similar aim in June.

The Oyate Wacipi Peoples Powwow hosted the earlier event, providing food and drink and entertainment to evacuees. Some evacuees from the Lynn Lake area told the Sun that they had become restless, having at that point stayed just over a week in Brandon.

More than 2,600 hotel rooms had been secured in Manitoba by the Canadian Red Cross as of Thursday, the agency wrote in an online bulletin. So far this year, more than 800 flights have been scheduled, it said, carrying more than 10,000 passengers away from dangerous wildfires.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com