PART II
Anything above zero in this part of the north is tropical. At 52 deg. North and just below the tree line, by mid-Oct. ice starts forming in the lakes. By Nov., the kids are already playing hockey. So by late December, it is hard to find open water in any of the lakes surrounding this Reserve. So the bulk of the school year is winter, a little fall in Sept., and spring from mid-April to June.
Depending on loads, ice roads are open for 18-wheelers from Jan. to March. Fuel, building supplies, and other heavy grocery items use this lifeline in the winter.
The trip to Thunder Bay by winter roads takes 26 hours and can only be economical if you are transporting a new vehicle loaded with expensive supplies. The high cost of groceries in the north is well documented. When everything is flown in and sold by a single store, this is a recipe for very high prices (i.e., $1.00 a banana ).
We usually fax our orders to bigger towns outside the Reserve and have them flown in as cargo. It is the only way to get your groceries economically in the pre-Amazon years. As a rule, costs go up as you move higher up north. ( the Isolation Allowance is proportional latitudinally. Some very remote communities have higher Allowances than salaries )
Unless you are heavy into pork, beef, or chicken, there is a plentiful local supply of moose, caribou, and especially fish ( pickerel, whitefish, lake trout, pike ). You can buy locally from residents or fish or snare rabbits yourself. In the seven years I spent in these Reserves; I had virtually stopped eating pork or beef. One thing that struck me was the absence of backyard chickens or pigs.
There were also no locally produced vegetables, such as carrots, tomatoes, or greens. ( that is not to say that some people in other Reserves plant their own; I am unaware of any laws that would prevent them from doing so ). I get the impression that domestication is counter to the indigenous creed.
Reserves compete fiercely to attract the best teachers in these isolated northern communities. Besides salaries and allowances, each community offers other incentives such as any number of paid round trips home and paramedical and dental insurance. There are also paid conferences in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, or Regina. In addition, well-appointed teacherages have paid utilities. These electrically( or oil-furnaced ) heated apartments for teachers are the only houses not dependent on wood heat.
A substantial part of a typical household is spent on wood cutting, fishing, and hunting/trapping. Each year, a special 2-week goose hunting break allows residents to take to the woods in time for the annual geese migration up north. Schools are closed, and teachers take their March break. These activities are not just life-sustaining but just as important, they provide a cultural continuity of traditional practices the indigenous population had undertaken before the Europeans came. A Reserve’s purpose is to give a territory where these activities can continue, outside the mainstream’s regulatory requirements.
SCHOOLING ON RESERVES
In early 2000, the so-called ” Streaming” divided the high school courses into Academic and Applied. Students are required to complete 18 compulsory credits and 12 optional credits, 40 hours of community service, and a Literacy Test ( OSSLT ). These are the essential requirement for a Secondary School Diploma ( OSSD). In addition, there were fewer requirements for two other school leaving certificates, requiring fewer credits.
Both Ontario and Manitoba ( Education is a provincial jurisdiction; each province has its mandate ) follow provincial curriculum guidelines. These are enforced through a supervisory process from the provincial dept of education. I have taught all the applied science courses ( and academic ones in Manitoba ) and a slew of optional courses (e.g.., Family Living, Managing Personal Resources ) from grades 9 to 11 ( in Ont.) and grade 12 ( in Man.).
Despite different tribal affiliations ( Cree in Man. and Ojibwa in ON. ), there is a certain commonality in students’ demeanor. The casual student-teacher relationship is initially unsettling ( students call me by my first name, but they too with their grandmothers! ), but you quickly get used to it. Both are generally shy and difficult to engage with on a one-to-one basis.
My Manitoba experience was a more difficult one. As I said in part I, there were early red flags. I was already replacing a teacher who left late in the fall. There were also stories of some others who did not return after a Christmas break.
Getting groceries from off-reserve sources proved very arduous. Chaperoning school teams out to other jurisdictions in the winter (traveling on ice roads ) was an exercise in crowd control. But all these pale in comparison with an all too common confrontation with roaming hungry dogs ( these are domestic hungry dogs in search of food ). I have had to reconfigure my daily walks after being bitten on the back of my leg. You can’t rush out of your teacherage without checking how many teeth are showing in a waiting dog(s). An offer of an administrative position ( Principalship ) was out of the question as it would have killed me with stress!
The fallout resulting from the Residential School experience ( the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse perpetrated by the Catholic and Anglican clergy to the Indigenous, e.g., Indian and Metis population of Canada in the late 18th and early 19th century; the last of which closed in the ’60s) where thousands of abused school children have themselves now raising their school-age brood and grandchildren. One can only imagine the kind of conversation they are having at their dinner table. As a result, I found a general lack of interest in going through a highly disciplined high school education. Attendance is problematic, and adherence to rules is spotty. Writing a paper or doing an exam is like pulling teeth. They don’t respond well to deadlines.
A presumption of success in the tried and true co-curricular activities that I have organized in the past did not last for long. Investing hundreds of dollars to start archery, only lasted as long as it was a novelty. Laying down the rules for safety and inclusiveness was a recipe for a slow demise. The same with Zumba and Boxercise; the novelty wore off as soon as we began sweating. I quickly gave up the idea of Karate; discipline and structure do not win a following with them.
GOLF WITHOUT A GOLF COURSE
But one activity won me; it’s a reverse activity I joined accidentally. My teacherage faces the vast town square. Most fall afternoons, I see hordes of young people with golf irons hitting balls, driving them into the four holes in the far corners of the plaza.
The game follows the same scoring principle as golf. The winner is the one with the least number of ( iron ) shots, sans putting. It was the first time I played the game with a borrowed iron in the fall of 2000. ( and continued hitting balls in the frozen lakes in the winter ) I owed them gratitude for introducing me to this magnificent game, which I call the most significant sport invention of all time. The rest is history, as seen in the picture, ten years later.
After decades in a mainstream system, it was indeed a challenge to adjust to a heterodox structure. Some of the ones I employed were music during seatwork (typically indigenous drumming or current hits. Once, I remember playing Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head on My Shoulders.” I thought I would have a mass walkout on my hands! ). There were plenty of outdoor lectures and field trips.
One that we enjoyed immensely was catching a garter snake and nurturing it in the classroom ( more than once, the cleaners would call in the early evening: “Edwin, your snake is out; we are not cleaning your room until it’s put back in” and just before the winter, we would have a ceremonial release back in the wild. There were many snowmobile rides, spring outings, fish fries, and bannock ( Indian-inspired bread ). Finally, one that everyone remembers was an annual year-end bash of pizza and KFC, a chartered plane load from Sioux Lookout, shared by the community.
I was inspired by book donations from the Governor-General of the day. This gesture influenced me to start my own in my retirement. Today, with my wife Connie, we are carrying on an annual book donation to selected schools in the Philippines ( teacher sourcebooks, student workbooks, and select student books ). Each gift comprises between 300 to 350 books. We are on schedule in 2023 ( after missing the COVID years of 2020 to 2022 ) for our 7th school in our hometown.
Today, I think of those REZ years as important as any of my career years. Even though I no longer have continuous communication with both Reserves, I started a “Most Outstanding Student” award ( a plaque and a $200 premium ), and an occasional golf club donation keeps the lines open. Who would have thought I would be consumed by a sport I picked up during an innocuous fall day on a Reserve thousands of kilometers from the nearest golf course. Imagine the story I would have created if I ended up playing for the PGA. ( Yeah, right! )
One never knows what life experiences would add to a more meaningful life as we navigate our post-retirement options. But, one thing is for sure: sitting in the same box, living in the passions of your time in your secure comfort zone will not bring anything different—the proverbial “same-o, same-o” is not a good blueprint for building a future legacy.
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