Xavier Kataquapit

My Kookum or Grandmother, Louise Paulmartin, often told me when I was young that “the world was getting crazy.”
She reserved the comment for when she heard news from the southern non-Native world about a calamity or crisis like a war, a terrible flood or if she might have viewed some violent or horrible news on the television. Of course, as a youngster, I never realized what she meant. When I became a teenager I merely attributed that comment of hers as a result of old age and being out of touch with the modern world.

Babies are a big responsibility. They need to be helped with everything and fussed over 24 hours a day in the beginning. Children are very important in First Nations and often, in remote Native communities, many members of the town will assist in raising them.
We Cree welcome newborns no matter how, when or why they have come into this world. A newborn is often cared for by the parents, grand parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and friends. Everyone pitches in to help out.

Everywhere I travel these days, I feel the effects of global warming. Weather patterns are changing, ice caps are melting, glaciers are receding and it is all becoming very obvious.
I first started hearing about a change in climate from some of the Elders from up the James Bay coast about 20 years ago. More recently, I have learned through news from the worldwide scientific community that a phenomenon such as global warming is upon us.

On a bright sunny morning recently, I found my long-lost great grandfather John Chookomolin’s grave, in an English cemetery just outside of the historic city of London.
His white-stone commonwealth cemetery headstone glimmered under the strong spring sun on a lawn of well-tended grass. I found him in an ancient part of the cemetery where the grave memorials were pitted and roughened with age and stone borders had moved, cracked and in parts disappeared.

I am happy for my mom. She got a great gift this hunting season with a helicopter trip back to her traditional family home on the shores of the Nawashi River. This place is special to my mom and I understand that.
Susan, my mother or nigawi in the Cree language, was born and raised on the land along Nawashi. She is the most recent link for my family to the traditional life that the Cree lived for thousands of years until the coming of the European.