Intertribal Life Newspaper -

I grew up at Big Trout Lake, an isolated village in northwestern Ontario. When I was a child no one there spoke English, and I spoke only the Oji-Cree language until I was 12 years old, even though my father was originally from England. My dad had been sent there as a minister, so I grew up in the church. Every time the church doors were open, I was there!

I'm the oldest in our family, and I have a younger brother and a younger sister. There was no school in our community at the time, so my dad taught us by correspondence at home. Now that I think about it, I don't know exactly how he taught u...