Christmas is a stressful time of the year. It has always been that way for me. From the time I was a child I have more or less endured the coming and going of Christmas. Back home in Attawapiskat in the 1980s when I was a kid Christmas revolved around a lot of alcohol, drugs and general tragedy. My family did their best to make this time of the year happy but it was never easy.
Christmas is a stressful time of the year. It has always been that way for me. From the time I was a child I have more or less endured the coming and going of Christmas.
Back home in Attawapiskat in the 1980s when I was a kid, Christmas revolved around a lot of alcohol, drugs and general tragedy. My family did their best to make this time of the year happy but it was never easy.
On one hand there was all the hype about what we should be getting for Christmas in terms of the latest new toys and gadgets and this information came to us through the television and local store.
‘Let’s try to live a simple and meaningful life in 2011’
This year just before Christmas, while I was travelling in some bigger city centres in southern Ontario, I noticed just how crazy this holiday season has become.
There were long streams of traffic going from mall to mall and every store I visited had lineups of people at the cash. A normal part of this shopping frenzy seemed to be made up of screaming moms and dads and crying kids.
Recently, I viewed a documentary titled ‘Reel Injun’ a production by Cree film maker, Neil Diamond, who is originally from Waskaganish, Que., on the James Bay coast.
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.
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.
Recently, I have heard news that greatly affects the First Nations of Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory in northern Ontario. This news involves the discovery of a 100 plus year old diary by Daniel MacMartin, a treaty commissioner who represented the government of Ontario.
His diary provides a new perspective on the signing of Treaty 9.
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.
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.
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.
There is this new duck on the lake here at my far north wilderness camp. I am sure that Shee-sheep, the Cree word for ‘duck’ is a mallard and so I decided...
I have been working in media as an Indigenous journalist, columnist and videographer for more than a quarter century at this point. This has been such an...