Xavier Kataquapit

Many families along the James Bay coast are headed out onto their ancestral lands during this time of year. It is our most important season as so many events coincide that make it a perfect time to hunt and gather food. Even though it is still winter weather, temperatures moderate at around zero degrees which makes it more hospitable and manageable. This is also the time of the Niska, the Canada Goose migration where millions of these birds fly north for their summer nesting season.

Hints of spring are all about with warmer days now and our record snow banks are slowly melting. This winter is not over just yet but here we are in mid March and it looks like the extreme freezing temperatures are in the past. We may still get some snow but those huge storms we have experienced this winter are probably gone for the most part. Yes, spring is blossoming with every day.

As an indigenous person raised in a remote First Nation and on the land I am very familiar with my cultural and traditional roots. It was a steep learning curve for me to adapt, adjust and fit into the non Indigenous world when I first left Attawapiskat to further my education in the south.

The Walk of Sorrow participants arrived in Kirkland Lake, Ontario on Wednesday August 4 to create awareness of the residential school era and to acknowledge the support of local First Nations. The walk was led by Patricia Ballantyne, a First Nation Cree from the Deshchambault Lake community of Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. This June she felt a need to do something in light of the discovery of multiple unmarked grave sites near former residential schools across the country.

The news that the graves of 215 children had been discovered near the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia came as shock to me, my family and to every First Nation person across the country. As shocking as it was, it was also knowledge we had known about our entire lives.