Joyceh's blog

Spring up north can be both a happy and uncertain time. I think it largely depends on where you grew up. I grew up in Winisk, which is located on a flood plane only 33 feet above sea level. While we were very happy about the goose hunt come spring, we were an apprehensive lot as a community when it came time for spring break up. You see we didn't know if we would get a flood or not from year to year. Most communities don't even think twice about that kind of potential devastation. I think about it every year, especially on this day. You see on this day on May 16 in 1986, my reserve was flooded and two people were tragically killed. The ice jammed up river from my reserve, and when that dirty brown water came ripping over the banks carrying everything with it, our whole town was wiped away in an instant. Entire houses were picked up and swept inland into the tree line. People, thankfully, had had canoes parked in their yards ready as a precaution and use them we did. I remember the unfortunate few who didn't have boats. Some of them had climbed onto the roofs of their house and were swept away with the torrential flood waters. Others had climbed trees to avoid getting crushed by the ice chunks and freezing waters. It was total chaos. I saw all kinds of debris rushing past our canoe and remember watching my mother screaming hysterically for her grandchildren and wondering to myself how many would die or if anyone knew outside of our community that we were in it for the fight of our lives. We didn't know until almost a full day later who had survived and who had not returned. The MNR had received a distress call from our community and had dispatched choppers to come to our reserve and rescue people from the wreckage that was formerly our home.

There’s something to be said about hearing the language of your birth spoken widely and freely wherever you go. I’m mentioning this now because I’ve been away from the people who speak the same dialect of Cree as I do for ages.

I’ve got to say I was impressed today to learn that the Ojibway exclamation Howah! is defined at urbandictionary.com as is the Cree exclamation Jishtug!

When everything is working fine, you never really notice how great you have it… until it all goes wrong. Some weeks ago, I started having lots of trouble with my left eye. One day, I suddenly became aware of what felt like a tiny particle just under my left eyelid, and it was there all the time. Every time I would blink I could feel it. I bought lubricant eye drops to flush out my eye. I remember wiping my eye out and then blinking. It was still there. I flushed it again. Still there. After about three tries I gave up on it thinking I had over stimulated my eye with artificial drops.

Even though it bugged me, I let it slide for a few days. After a time, it actually started feeling worse so I finally decided to make an emergency eye appointment. One of the reasons I did it was because I’ve had a scratched cornea before (stupid me changed out of my glasses into my contact lenses outdoors and scratched my eye with a dust particle once) and it was bugging me in the same way so I thought I might get it looked at… just to be sure. The eye doctor told me it was just dryness and that there are many people suffering with eye dryness at this time of year who have been in to see him. He gave me a bottle of gel eye drops and sent me on my way. I used that bottle up until it was finished just like he had prescribed, but I still felt that darn particle under my eyelid.

I woke up this past Saturday morning with a monster headache and I was grouchy. I was a mess of sweaty and didn’t want to be bothered. It was 10:30 am and the mercury was already almost hitting 30 Celcius. Man oh man. I felt like it was going to be a cruddy day and it hadn’t even begun. I think I spent about one hour just keeping quiet and trying not to snap because of the crazy heat and my throbbing head. Finally I decided it wouldn’t hurt to drink water and lots of it. First I drank one and then two and finally three glasses all in a row. I felt all sloshy in the stomach but I still had my headache immediately thereafter. I retreated to the couch to sit it out and see what would happen. It took a full 45 minutes for the fog and the throbbing to clear from my brain then I knew it was going to be OK. It was at that point that I decided to carry a re-usable water bottle with me everywhere I went for the rest of the weekend. It worked well. It’s been unusually hot outside, so yeah, you may want to carry around a good, healthy supply of water to keep you functioning well too. Just sayin’!

What a summer we’ve had so far! SEVEN has won two youth leadership awards in the last two months. That’s really something. When SEVEN was formed, we never thought about anything other than helping other youth for the simple reason that we want to make our world a better, happier place to live in. We also wanted to make darn sure that the world knows where our youth stand on issues that affect them. We never thought that would lead to being noticed and given awards for the work SEVEN does. So today, we get calls, messages, emails and visits from other youth, people who work with youth and people who just like to read our magazine telling us what an inspiring collection of stories we have printed and distributed and that they had no idea how much diversity and colour there are in the individuals who live in our territory until they picked up a copy of SEVEN. Hearing people come to us saying ‘thank you. It’s about time someone had the wherewithal to say what needed to be said’ is probably one of the most satisfying compliments we’ve heard. But really, I think what rocks my world most about working with SEVEN are the young people that we have been fortunate enough to interview or print submissions from. The diversity in their lives is as rich and varied as the types of subjects they present to our readers. We’ve had a wide variety of youth who have come forward to talk about how their experiences with everything from unemployment, teenaged parenthood and coming out as a gay in their First Nation to stepping out as a model in the fashion industry, being a highly competitive and high-functioning athlete or life as a volunteer in the community dealing with serious land management issues.

So SEVEN finally launched its inaugural radio show on WRN. It aired on May 27 at 7 p.m. It was really something to have to put together. My background is in print journalism, so capturing audio via interviews, engineering the audio once captured and whatnot is not really my thing. It's also didn't come naturally to me. LOL The journalism part was easy so I knew which bits of audio to keep and what to edit out. It was everything else I wasn't so good at, like ensuring the voice recording equipment was set to recording levels so as to ensure the quality of the interviews was optimal and knowing how to use the editing software once I had all my interviews completely. Fortunately, I'm not the type to give up in the face of adversity. In fact, if someone tells me I can't do something I really like making them eat their words. It's a pretty satisfying feeling. What I've learned in my lifetime about taking on new challenges when faced with a tight deadline is to just relax, take a deep breath and then start taking the problem apart in my mind and then going from there. I've also done the opposite: start freaking out, hyperventilating and throwing a spectacular tantrum when the solution doesn't present itself easily to me. You never really get very far with the tantrum. It just makes you feel helpless and frustrated. I think it's all in the mind. If you say "wow a good challenge! I'm up for it!" and then you go from there, you will be able to pick the problem apart and you will be able to do it faster then if you were treating the problem as if it was a threat to you. I'm happy because I feel healthier and stronger after this learning experience. The radio show was interesting, we had a youth from Attawapiskat who writes really great music and sings.

It seems like the sky was the limit when my parents were young. The age of industrialization had arrived and all these new products and services that made life easier in a wide variety of ways began appearing onto store shelves – a few at first and then suddenly there was an explosion of products and services, and the flow has not stopped since it started.

I’m sure, for a time, they thought life could only get better. I shouldn’t say that. Mom told me that the Elders had said “that’s not natural and it will not bode well for our world in the future.” They were talking about the environment, and of course no one listened to them.

Fast-forward to yesterday where I was listening to the NAN Chiefs Meeting via live web stream on Wawatay Radio Network and I suddenly remembered the warnings that the “un-educated” Indians had once issued as I was listening to the presentation on Climate Change. The world is overheating and has done so by 2 degrees Celsius since the arrival of large-scale industrialized activity, reported NAN’s lands and resources director to the delegates of the chiefs meeting. She also said the world’s leading climate scientists said that if we (the collective efforts of the world) can hold the average global air temperature increase to 2C (3.6F) since pre-industrial times, we have a chance of surviving more or less intact.

Already we see that climatic, weather and temperature trends are changing, and that these trends, which include flooding, environmental degradation, water depletion, and pollution, are likely to become more frequent over coming years.

Am I alone? Am I the only reserve kid who never got sat down by her mom and dad to get the big talk about money?

I love my mom and dad. Nay I idolize them because they did amazing things in their lifetimes respectively. My mom raised 10 kids and still is one of the strongest participants and volunteers at our community church. My dad worked seasonally for YEARS. In fact, at 74, my dad shows no sign of slowing down. He still works at the provincial park office for the Ministry of Natural Resources and he still goes out into the bush to go trapping, net fishing and hunting. They are formidable people each in their own right. I respect them because they showed me unconditional love, were tough with me when the situation called for it, and helped me grow into the person I am today by offering me guidance when I asked for it.

However, I am writing today because I’ve had to sit myself down and give myself a talk about my spending habits. They’re bad. I have five, count them, five credit cards, a line of credit, a mortgage and a car loan. I’m drowning in debt. I have a toddler and am a single mom and should have a plan in place if, God forbid, anything should happen to me and I am no longer around for Riley (my aforementioned son). I do have life insurance and he’s my beneficiary so he’s covered.

So I was sitting in on a group meeting last week where we discussed ways in which we could help to preserve and maintain our languages (Cree, Ojibway and Oji-Cree) when my heart became inflamed with this insane desire to make sure my 22-month-old son is as fluently Cree-speaking as his Grandfather Mike (aka my hero and father).

Before I say more on our languages, I'll be a nerd for a moment and go over a Statistics Canada report published in 1996 on Aboriginal languages with you: During the past 100 years or more, 10 of Canada's once-flourishing Aboriginal languages have become extinct, and at least a dozen more are on the brink. WOW. That's pretty scary right?

Statistics Canada also said this: As of 1996, only three of 50 Aboriginal languages Cree, Inuktitut and Ojibway had large enough populations to be considered secure from the threat of extinction.

OK well, I hate to say this but I don't think we should be complacent that our languages will continue to “flourish” because we have a "large enough population to be considered secure." The only way our languages will continue to flourish is if we as individuals CHOOSE to use our language at home, at school, on the bus, or wherever we happen to be.
As I was writing this I was listening to Elder Greg Wesley give an enthralling interview (totally in Cree) about language use and our youth. Know what he said? He said it’s not our children’s fault they can’t speak their language. It’s their parents and their community leaders who aren’t putting enough importance to its use, he said. Ouch George! This is a pretty hard-hitting statement.