Interviewed by students at Northern Lights Secondary School, in Moosonee, Ontario
"Do you ever … make moosehide slippers? Do you still do that?"
Yeah, I still do that. I teach. I teach at Northern College, here. They made slippers one year, they made mitts before Christmas, now they want to make mukluks-
“Oh, you make mukluks?”
Yeah, mukluks. I make parkas too. The work that I do, teaching kids how to bead and all that, that’s a skill that I have. People don’t have it. They’re not taught in schools or colleges or universities to do that, so aboriginal people have to go ahead and do that. So there have been some changes: people are more receptive now to our way of life.
"I was excited going away that morning to the residential school on a float plane. When we landed on Anderson Island a truck pick us up. We went on a little plane. We got picked up by a dump truck. That’s how they pick us up at Anderson Island and took us to the residential school. I really remember the way my mood changed. It’s like everybody was quiet."
Clarence Hester
The gun is very important: how to handle [it] before those kids to go hunting. You tell them, no guns in their hands, “You follow me. This is how you do it...."
- Full story coming June 28th
Ronnie Wesley
"When you are doing something that makes you happy; if you are keyed into your heart and soul, you’ll know. Something tells you to stay. Or be somewhere else and I think the opposite is true too. If you are unhappy, you know it, your whole being knows it. Your heart knows it, your mind knows it."
- Full story coming June 21st
Mary Lou: "I can remember collecting pots and pans. We brought them to the school for any kind of extra metal that you had... My mother used to get, from the Red Cross, wool and they would knit socks and all that kind of thing and send that to the men overseas. She did a lot of knitting. And my father he went door to door selling war bonds. So everyone was involved. Even the children were all involved."
Bob: "Yeah, because you used to buy war saving stamps as children at school."
M: "Yeah. I don’t remember ever cashing those in, do you?"
"We moved away from the old, original way of living... and we’re not allowed to fish, to hunt because we’re away from the reserve. I started to feel worthless. I sat around with my friends and we talked about not being able to hunt, not being able to do anything, and we start stealing. That’s how I began to get in trouble. We went and broke into a box car at the train station... We were hiding those things from our parents, eh, and we thought, ‘As long as they didn’t know, we were okay.’ But I could feel that we were doing wrong. "
"I was in a treatment centre for alcoholism way back in the the early, early 1970s. That question was asked to me, “What is the most important thing in your life?” and I thought about it, and it turned out that I would have spent more time with my children... But when my first son died of leukemia when he was ten, I really wished I would have spent more time with him. And recently my youngest son died, the one with Down Syndrome. And what a difference my approach to life was with him than with the first son who died."
