Attawapiskat evacuees transfer to Kap

Attawapiskat residents who were evacuated last month due to sewage backups were recently transferred closer to home while their houses continue to be repaired.
More than 30 Attawapiskat evacuees were transferred to Kapuskasing on June 17 after spending more than five weeks in Fort Frances, a northwestern Ontario town located near the U.S. and Manitoba borders and far from their homes along the James Bay coast.
Attawapiskat Deputy Chief Gerald Mattinas said although the hospitality in Fort Frances had been “pretty good,” he and his fellow community members were beginning to become homesick.
“We hardly know anybody here in Fort Frances, even though we have First Nations people in the nearby community,” Mattinas said while in his Fort Frances hotel on June 14. Fort Frances is located beside Couchiching First Nation.
“But when you look at it, this is not our territory because we’re from Mushkegowuk. We’re missing some of the things we could do in a known community. In Timmins, there are more Aboriginal people around that do more of the traditional things that we do.”
Mattinas noted that some of the evacuees with medical needs had trouble getting their proper prescription since being in a different zone complicated medical file transfers.
After a contractor told the First Nation the homes would not be ready until mid-July at the earliest, the residents made the request for the transfer.
Some missed home so much that they made arrangements with family back home to either stay in their homes or to build a tent-frame or cabin structure as a temporary shelter until the houses are ready. More than 30 of the original 71 evacuees were flown to Attawapiskat on June 13.
Mattinas said the First Nation was told Fort Frances was the only community that both had the capacity and was willing to take in the residents. At the time, other residents of Attawapiskat and Kashechewan were being evacuated to Kapuskasing, Greenstone, Geraldton, and Thunder Bay due to the threat of flooding.
But since those evacuees returned home, Mattinas said the federal and provincial government had been reticent in transferring the evacuees back to the northeast.
“We’re more connected to (the northeast) in the way of territory,” he said. “The government does not understand that.”
Since Attawapiskat has family, business and hospital connections to cities like Timmins, Sudbury, Kingston and Toronto, being back in the northeast would make travel easier for the residents.