Xavier Kataquapit

Recently in the news there has been concern for the people of Fort Albany and Kashechewan First Nations due to the flooding. This type of danger is an annual worry that has to do with the damming of rivers by large floating chunks of ice.

I am proud to be a First Nation person. I am about as pure bred as an Aboriginal person can be in Canada as both my mother and father were born on the land in their traditional territories. Visibly, I look like a Native Canadian. I even have long hair and I keep it in a pony tail. I feel comfortable with my long hair as I have been growing it for the past 20 years.

These days there are all kinds of ways for people to communicate. When I was a teenager there was the telephone, regular mail, fax and the trusty old bush radio. People found out about news concerning friends and family through these technologies. Then everything changed.
Suddenly in the 90s computers began to appear and then came the Internet. As with most people I was dazzled by these new media and technologies. At the time I was finishing high school and these new communication tools were opening up a whole new world for me and so many of my friends.

I grew up on the James Bay coast where thinking about what I ate was not something I considered much. The only time anyone I knew thought about food had to do with where to find the cheapest sources of nutrition around. This meant an abundance of natural foods that were mostly centered around wild meat like Niska (goose), Atik (Caribou), Namess (fish), Sheesheep (duck) and Waboose (rabbit). Occasionally in the summer we Cree up the James Bay coast supplemented our diet with wild berries we picked from islands in the Bay.

I am sitting here watching the rain sprinkling down from a grey sky onto the lake. It is a quiet rain. There is very little wind and that adds to the laziness of my morning.
I am nestled in the midst of a vast wilderness and kilometres upon kilometres of pine tree forests. I imagine the rich green forests and all the foliage welcome this rain. The lake will be a little chilly for a few days so my daily swim should be refreshing. That is OK.
I love swimming in northern lakes. The more isolated they are, the more pure and unpolluted.