Xavier Kataquapit

A lesson from Cuba

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:38

I recently came back from a vacation to Cuba. In the three weeks that I was gone, I managed to lose about five pounds. It was relatively easy to lose that weight.
Not only is food scarce in Cuba, it is also expensive and tourists usually have to eat in restaurants and resorts. I was not staying in the country on a resort package so I had to find restaurants that served good food at a fair price. Merely looking around the city of Havana for places to eat made for plenty of opportunity to walk.

The magic light box

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:37

Television was never a big part of my early childhood. In the early 1980s, TV was a new phenomenon that had just been introduced to our community merely a decade before. Even though mom and dad furnished our living room with a new television set we had nothing to watch.
CBC was the clearest channel we could receive and it was fuzzy. TVO provided regional programs from Ontario. These two channels offered plenty of educational programming but we yearned for the big blockbuster movies we often heard about.

Reading The Future

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:37

A friend of mine came to visit recently to ask for help with a new piece of technology. Her son had given her a Kindle, an electronic reader or ereader. She needed assistance in setting up her new device and was seeking some answers on how to load the latest books. I was happy to help and I spent a few hours on my own learning how the device operated.

Kookum said it was a ‘crazy world’

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:37

My Kookum or Grandmother, Louise Paulmartin, often told me when I was young that “the world was getting crazy.”
She reserved the comment for when she heard news from the southern non-Native world about a calamity or crisis like a war, a terrible flood or if she might have viewed some violent or horrible news on the television. Of course, as a youngster, I never realized what she meant. When I became a teenager I merely attributed that comment of hers as a result of old age and being out of touch with the modern world.

Mother nature's wake up call

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:37

I have been travelling and on the road lately. I don't keep on top of my email as much as I would like when I am moving around but I do watch the news every day. I was shocked like everyone else at the terrible tragic events that occurred in Japan this past week. It was bad enough that the country got hit by an earthquake and then a tsunami, only to be topped off by the failure of several nuclear power plant facilities.

The babies are counting on us

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:37

Babies are a big responsibility. They need to be helped with everything and fussed over 24 hours a day in the beginning. Children are very important in First Nations and often, in remote Native communities, many members of the town will assist in raising them.
We Cree welcome newborns no matter how, when or why they have come into this world. A newborn is often cared for by the parents, grand parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and friends. Everyone pitches in to help out.

Memories Of Easter

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:37

Over the past hundred years, spring has developed into a religious experience for we Cree. It all started in the late winter in March when the local Catholic church reminded us of the days of Lent that begins the 40 days of fasting. My parents were brought up surrounded and deeply influenced by the Catholic Church from the time they were born. They had been baptized at birth and the first few years of their lives were spent in Catholic residential schools where they were indoctrinated into the religion.

Shape up or ship out

Create: 12/01/2015 - 19:37

Everywhere I travel these days, I feel the effects of global warming. Weather patterns are changing, ice caps are melting, glaciers are receding and it is all becoming very obvious.
I first started hearing about a change in climate from some of the Elders from up the James Bay coast about 20 years ago. More recently, I have learned through news from the worldwide scientific community that a phenomenon such as global warming is upon us.

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