Xavier Kataquapit

Grassroots First Nation youth welcomed the arrival of the Mahmo Inninuwuk Wiibuseego-stamok walkers at Queens Park in Toronto on Friday August 8, 2025. The walking group completed their 22 day and over 700 km walking journey from downtown Timmins to Queens Park at a combined rally held together with First Nation youth groups Youth Rising Together and Okiniwak. The awareness walk and rally at Queen’s Park was organized by these grassroots youth movements to show their dissatisfaction of Ontario’s Bill 5 and Canada’s Bill C5.

For almost three decades I have been writing a column and producing writing mostly involving First Nations. At the start I felt more like an activist as did many of our leaders. We had been through more than a hundred years of colonization, residential school atrocities, reservations and living in poverty with insufficient housing, poor health care and little support for education.

First Nation youth from northern Ontario protested a major meeting between hundreds of Chiefs and Prime Minister Mark Carney in Ottawa on Thursday July 17. The federal government had set up the meeting with the Chiefs in a tightly controlled event that was held at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. Jeronimo Kataquapit, an Attawapiskat First Nation youth leader led a group of 20 other young First Nation protesters to the entrance of the meeting and were turned away by security. Media had also been blocked from the event.

Northern First Nation Chiefs and leaders came together on the Attawapiskat River on July 1 to show their support for a youth led protest against Ontario’s Bill 5 and Canada’s Bill C5. They came to meet with Jeronimo Kataquapit, a First Nation youth from Attawapiskat First Nation who is leading a protest to occupy the land and water way that the people of the Attawapiskat River call home.

I’ve been filled with a renewed sense of hope for the future through the work of Jeronimo Kataquapit, who has made it his mission to highlight the connection that the people of Attawapiskat have to the land and it’s waters. He is the son of James Kataquapit and Monique Edwards who are both deeply connected to families in Attawapiskat and Fort Albany First Nation. James is also my cousin. Jeronimo’s grandparents Alex and Susan Kataquapit and Daniel and Elsie Edwards have always represented traditional Cree families who are deeply connected to the land.