Xavier Kataquapit

In November 1993, a group of eight students from my high school English class in Attawapiskat agreed to collaborate on a Christmas play. We wrote our own script which we presented at a combined elementary school / high school Christmas concert at the JR Nakogee Elementary school gymnasium. Our group of eight students from Vezina Secondary School of differing age groups and grades were excited to take part. The project was led by our English teacher Rhonda McKay, a bright young woman who started out her teaching career in Attawapiskat.

An early winter storm has subsided and I am on my way to the local outdoor hockey rink. The bitter breeze is still pushing from the north and grainy wisps of snow dance around my heavy boots. It is the winter of 1992 here in Attawapiskat and I am bored on a grey overcast Saturday morning looking for something to do. I have my favourite hockey stick with me and a plan of practising my slap shot. There are few people out and I am looking forward to spending my time alone at the rink. A powerful wind has blown falling snow into huge drifts all around the community.

Christmas is a stressful time of the year. It has always been that way for me. From the time I was a child I have more or less endured the coming and going of Christmas.
Back home in Attawapiskat in the 1980s when I was a kid, Christmas revolved around a lot of alcohol, drugs and general tragedy. My family did their best to make this time of the year happy but it was never easy.
On one hand there was all the hype about what we should be getting for Christmas in terms of the latest new toys and gadgets and this information came to us through the television and local store.

Recently, I viewed a documentary titled ‘Reel Injun’ a production by Cree film maker, Neil Diamond, who is originally from Waskaganish, Que., on the James Bay coast.

Television was never a big part of my early childhood. In the early 1980s, TV was a new phenomenon that had just been introduced to our community merely a decade before. Even though mom and dad furnished our living room with a new television set we had nothing to watch.
CBC was the clearest channel we could receive and it was fuzzy. TVO provided regional programs from Ontario. These two channels offered plenty of educational programming but we yearned for the big blockbuster movies we often heard about.