Non-Aboriginal Canadians get set to experience KI

Forty-three average Canadians began making their way to Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) on June 17 to experience life in the remote fly-in community for a week.
The visitors had accepted the public invitation by a group of KI youth, who began the initiative and originally had a goal of having 25 Canadians come into the community.
One of the youth, Justin Beardy, said he is humbled by the response of so many Canadians wanting to visit his home community.
“I didn’t think this was going to blow up like this,” the 28-year-old said. “It totally snowballed into this really huge event. I thought it was going to be a small thing so this is totally exceeding my expectations.”
The KI youth organized the transportation, accommodations, meals, and activities for the visitors during their stay.
Beardy said he and the other youth had two main goals when they came up with the initiative. The first was to dispel the negative stereotypes of Aboriginal people in the north.
“A lot of Canadians have this conception that we have an easy living that’s for free, but that’s far from the truth,” Beardy said.
The other goal was to empower the other youth.
“(We wanted) to get the youth to come out and have the initiative and commitment to make this possible.”
One of the visitors is Annie Atnikov, an Ottawa schoolteacher who is originally from Quebec City.
Although she had introduced Shannen’s Dream to her school and took part in a march to Parliament Hill as part of that campaign, Atnikov had very little first-hand experience with First Nations communities.
“I’ve been teaching about First Nations and reserves and inequality for five years now, and I’ve never been on a reserve,” she said while waiting to board the plane to KI. “So it’s time for me to experience what I’m teaching and see for myself.”
Having lived the fast life in the city for years, Atnikov is fascinated by the land and the KI people’s connection to it.
“I just feel that there’s a real connection to the land that’s missing in our ideology of life at the moment,” she said. “That’s what I’d like to learn.”
Notable visitors include Idle No More co-founder Jessica Gordon, Thunder Bay-Superior North MP Bruce Hyer, and three walkers of the Journey of Nishiyuu, in which a group of youth who walked from their reserve in northern Quebec to Ottawa last winter. The rest are average, non-Aboriginal Canadian citizens from Toronto, Ottawa, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, among other places.