Xavier Kataquapit

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.

I noticed in the news recently that there seems to be a move from denial of climate change or global warming. It looks like people are finally waking up to the fact that we humans are contributing to a situation that is causing change in the climate and weather patterns.
Sadly, we have wasted a lot of time and missed a lot of opportunities to do our part to fight global warming. People seem to be coming out of denial now because the changes in weather patterns are just too obvious to ignore.