‘Heartbroken’ Fort Smith pledges to overcome trauma of shooting

As Fort Smith’s summer festival resumed following a shooting and half-day shelter in place order, residents were planning the town’s recovery even with tears in their eyes.

“We are heartbroken today,” said Jolene Bourque, an organizer of the Fireweed Festival. “Our community is really better than this. It’s better than this, and we need to do better.”

This year’s edition of the weekend-long annual Fort Smith highlight was interrupted when three people were shot and wounded outside one of its venues in Saturday’s early hours.

While two arrests had been made by Saturday evening, it wasn’t clear that the male suspect whose image RCMP had circulated was among them.

Bourque and fellow organizers spent most of Saturday at a loss. With no sense of when police would let residents leave their homes again, reorganizing the festival and compressing it into the remaining time became impossible.

“We were looking at plan A, plan B, plan C, looking at all the options and trying not to get ahead of ourselves, think worst-case scenario or put bad energy into everything,” Bourque told Cabin Radio as the festival gradually resumed on Saturday evening.

She kept returning to a phrase organizers held close throughout the day. “This has no correlation to Fireweed Festival.”

This was the second police lockdown to consume most of a day in Fort Smith in the past four years. The town’s residents are still recovering to some degree from 2023’s month-long wildfire evacuation. Fort Smith, like other NWT communities, has reported increasing concern about drug-related crime like the presence of illegal guns and instances of arson.

For all of that, the town’s residents – and some visitors whom Cabin Radio spoke with on Saturday – insist Fort Smith has something special that won’t be extinguished by what Bourque called “a series of unfortunate events” like the shooting.

“We are doing everything we can to be safe, to have a little fun and bring a little joy back into our lives,” she said after organizers, following discussions with RCMP, reopened Queen Elizabeth Territorial Park to festivalgoers on Saturday evening.

“Not to take away from anything that happened. We’ve reached out to the families and we are sending our love and utmost healing. We want everybody to be OK,” Bourque said.

“But we know – we know – that this town is magic, and the South Slave region is magic, and we just want everybody to be able to see what we see in it.”

Sue Glowach, an artist from Yellowknife, was setting up her stall about 100 feet away from Bourque. Organizers decided to open the park for two hours that evening, allowing food and arts vendors – many of whom had travelled long distances – the chance to try to earn some revenue after a day without customers.

Glowach had fallen asleep as the police-imposed lockdown extended into Saturday afternoon (the initial emergency alert woke many people at 3am). At 5:30pm, she woke to discover the park was reopening in half an hour and scrambled.

“I’ve been working for months to get paintings ready specifically for this festival, because I love this festival, and I always debut a new print and a painting at each festival that has meaning to them,” she said.

“I feel terrible for the people in town and the organizers, more than anything. But the people I feel bad about are the food vendors.

“If we didn’t open, these paintings will last. They’ll be able to go another day. But 6,000 spring rolls aren’t going to go over. So I’m thrilled that there are already people out here saying, ‘I’ve come for dinner.’ It’s lovely.”

Indeed, lengthy lines had soon emerged for the four or five food vendors that were the first to set up. Earlier in the day, at least one vendor had also helped stranded campers at the territorial park by offering food when nobody was able to leave.

Back in central Fort Smith, musicians from across the territory and beyond – with little to do, trapped in and around hotels – held impromptu jam sessions to wait out the shelter in place order.

“I talked with one of the elder musicians yesterday and he was so crushed that he wasn’t going to be able to play today. Like, he didn’t even know what to do, he just wanted to come and play,” said Glowach.

“Music is soothing. We have to demonstrate resilience and show that people can’t take over our communities. The goodness and love of the community, and the strength of the community, is what makes our communities thrive. And Fort Smith is a thriving place.”

The festival continues on Sunday, when organizers say it will return to its original schedule.

Avery Shoaf, the host of reality TV series Rust Valley Restorers who had been billed as a feature attraction of the festival, was among the first to set up in the park once events resumed on Saturday.

Behind an array of merchandise, Shoaf – bursting into his mile-a-minute TV persona the moment he spoke – tried to convey high-octane optimism despite the circumstances.

“There’s been a few little bugs in the guy’s bonnet, I guess you may say,” he said, referring to the shooting suspect, “but you know what? Everything’s going to turn out excellent and we’re back on track.

“It’s 100-percent my role to bring a little love and joy to everybody that’s here. The general population here in town has had one heck of a bad day. It’s just not good in such a small community.

“We need to show a little bit of love, a little bit of compassion, and you know what? Come on down, we’ll give it to you.”

“We just believe in this so much,” said Bourque, describing the year-round work put in by an organizing team that also includes Melissa Johns, Allison McArthur, Terry Freund and Colter Freund.

“We know what the North is capable of, what our community and the region are capable of, and the talent we have to help showcase.

“It’s just a beautiful piece of our history that we want to keep going and build stronger. So it’s… yeah. We’re just going to be better.”