Xavier Kataquapit

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.

Six First Nation trainees are ready to start work in the mining sector thanks to a partnership program between Matachewan First Nation, Northgate Minerals Corp. and Dumas Contracting. The graduates of the Underground Miner Training program, which was provided under the Matachewan Aboriginal Access to Mine Jobs Training Strategy (MAATS), were honoured at a community gathering in Matachewan First Nation, May 26.

I woke up one morning in a half dazed fog. I was in the woods at a cottage in the wilderness where normally the forest was quiet and still. There was no wind this night to rustle the leaves in a nearby stand of poplar trees or to blow through the tall pines surrounding the building. It was the early morning, in those dark hours just before the first signs of twilight. My friend Mike had woken me up and I popped up in bed with a focus on the window. He was wondering about a sound. Then it broke the silence. It was a hard knocking sound deep in the woods.