Twelve years on dialysis treatment

Constance Lake’s Joseph John George misses his family in Hearst since moving to Thunder Bay 12 years ago for dialysis treatment.
“Some of them have moved away to different towns,” George said. “I’ve got a cousin here.”
Although George misses his family, he enjoys visiting with friends in the city as well as dropping in at the Dew Drop Inn on Red River Road for the occasional meal.
“It’s OK,” George said. “I’m getting used to it.”
George receives his dialysis treatment three times a week at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, but when he first arrived in Thunder Bay he used to receive treatment at the McKellar General Hospital.
“I’ve known Thunder Bay and this area since I was a kid,” George said. “I used to go to school here (at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School) in Fort William.”
George was born in 1939 and still remembers growing up in Pagwa River, a community located along a Canadian National Railway line where many Constance Lake band members once lived before being relocated to Constance Lake.
“That time it was a very busy place,” George said, recalling three grocery stores. “Everybody was trapping, busy.”
George’s father worked for the CNR section gang at Pagwa River and a Pinetree Radar Line station had been built near the community in the early 1950s as part of an early-warning system to provide advance notice of a Soviet Union air attack over the Arctic Ocean.
“We moved to Longlac way back then,” George said. “He (his father) was a busy man. He used to buy fur at the same time from Native people.”
George still misses the trapline he used to have back home.
“I used to be a trapper before,” George said. “We had a trapline there in one spot named Lynx (an old CNR stop station) – we were there for 35 years.”