Christmas has never been a normal affair for me my entire life. This year it seems that no one will be able to call this a normal Christmas.
The opioid crisis in Canada has resulted in many thousands of deaths over the past decade. Personally, this crisis has affected me from the people I’ve known who have fallen into this dark well of addiction. We all know people in all of our communities across Canada that have either been severely damaged or killed by the use of opioids.
I have never really been that political and I don’t think most Indigenous people are. We come from a very natural history in terms of living, communicating and working with others. Our introduction to the European way of doing things, commercialism, capitalism, ownership of land and resources, religion and how the foreigners saw reality was very different from what we knew and practised.
Remembrance Day went by and once again I found myself in sadness for those who lost their lives in war. In the Cree language we have no word for ‘war’, the idea of conflict that involves hundreds or millions of people. Instead we call it ‘Mah-shi-keh-win’ which translates to ‘fighting’. We use the same word to describe two people fighting or to talk about either of the world wars. The Great War and the Second World War took the lives of millions of people as did subsequent conflicts and wars throughout the 20th century.
I am sitting here listening to the birds outside and I can hear a squirrel or chipmunk scrambling around a few feet away on a tree. The wind is sweeping up the fallen leaves outside and I can hear the scream of a chainsaw off in the distance.
Tah-gwah-gun, or the fall season has always been a time of foreboding and worry for every culture in the northern hemisphere. It means that winter is on the way and for my people, it meant that we must prepare if we are to survive and endure another freezing season. In many ways this particular fall demands that we need to prepare for dealing with historic developments. With the turning of this season there are other changes on the horizon that are somewhat threatening.
As much as I would like to follow the recommendations for the pandemic, it is getting difficult after several months. At first I was comfortable with following the suggestions of staying away from public places and having to avoid visiting my favourite restaurants, fast food joints or places for a quick coffee. I knew that with the dangers of a new virus lurking around, mixing with the public more than essential meant I was putting myself at risk of exposure at every turn.
Last week, I had an opportunity while visiting a northern cottage to sit outside and contemplate the night time sky. Normally, in the summer this is almost always impossible as either the weather is not favourable, the bugs are too numerous or a full or partial moon throws too much light to see many stars clearly. On this night, all the conditions were perfect as there was no moon, the sky was completely clear of weather and the biting insects somehow had miraculously disappeared.
I come from a large family with eight siblings. My mom Susan and my dad Marius certainly had a lot of challenges in caring for such a large group of children. These days as I find myself with some time during this pandemic I drift back to an earlier time when I was a child at home in Attawapiskat and I think about all the work my parents had to do to raise us.
We humans are definitely good at adapting. Although the going has been tough, in the middle of a terrible pandemic with Covid-19, we are all for the most part dealing with it. I see people out and about now at stores and offices with masks on, being careful with each other and staying two meters away. Things are opening up slowly and we are adapting to a new normal.
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