This past week, my mom Susan was thrilled to tell me about a trip she took back to her ancestral home on the Nawashi River about 100 kilometers north of Attawapiskat. Nawashi is a minor river that empties into James Bay and it is located on the southern end of Polar Bear Provincial Park. My mom was born in a traditional setting on the shores of Nawashi and she spent most of her early life there with an extended family of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters and cousins. All of these people were part of the Paulmartin family who had lived on this river system for generations.

Mom had taken the opportunity during the spring goose hunting season to head out to Nawashi with dad and my younger brother Paul. Nawashi is a special place for us as it is the ancestral home for mom, our grandmother or Kookoom Louise and many other members of the Paulmartin family.

I have had several opportunities to visit Nawashi and I was fortunate to have visited this small river with my grandmother Louise about 15 years ago. She has since passed on. I recall my brothers and I perching her high on my snowmobile sled so that she could have a clear view of the land as we slowly drove up and down the mouth of the river. Kookoom was always happy to see the land where she had raised her family and during that visit she pointed out where her children were born along the river. I was happy to see the place where my mom entered the world. During those early years with her young family, the Paulmartins, like many other Cree living on the land, had no permanent settlement and every year they built new camps at different locations along the river.

When I spoke to mom about her recent visit to Nawashi, she reminisced about the life she led with her family.

By the time she was a few years old, my grandfather Xavier Paulmartin and his brothers had built a comfortable octagonal log home for the family. At different times and over several years, they had grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins live with them at the Paulmartin cabin on Nawashi. These people followed a very traditional lifestyle that relied on gathering food from the land.

Like most of my people at the time in the 1950s, they spent their winters near their traditional trapping grounds along the Nawashi River system and in the spring they travelled to Attawapiskat for the summer. In 1967, the Paulmartin family decided to move permanently into Attawapiskat. The move happened one or two family members at a time until finally the nomadic life on Nawashi was over. The family kept heading back to their place of origin but only on a temporary basis.

When mom saw Nawashi this year she was surprised that the world she remembered was completely covered over in new growth and fully grown trees actually grew where her family cabin had once stood. She managed to trace out the octagonal mound where the walls of the old family cabin had once existed. In the dense layers of moss and lichen, a corner of the old cook stove poked out. Mom remembered the stove.

As mom and my dad Marius explored the area, they also found the rusted remains of a small travelling metal stove which mom believes her father used when he went out trapping for days along the Nawashi River. Mom must have felt like an archaeologist combing over the land to note signs of a life long gone. She was surprised to see that the actual land had changed over so many years. Places where the family had lived on the tundra near Nawashi had been overcome by an ever creeping forest.

Life was much more simple for the Paulmartins back on the land in the 1950s and 60s. They followed a nomadic lifestyle that went with the rhythms of the seasons. The only worries they had involved the gathering of sufficient food for everyone and to keep a steady supply of wood fuel to stay warm at minus forty below zero. They relied on each other and they shared in the adventures and misfortunes of isolated life in the wilderness. It was natural for them and something the family had been doing since the dawn of time. The shores of that small northern remote river provided a place to take part in a peaceful and simple pace of life without the chaos, confusion and complications of modern society. These people had balance back on Nawashi.

Mom’s excitement of revisiting her past was tempered by a sadness she felt as most of the people she remembers from that time are now gone and as hard as she tried to find evidence of the original Paulmartin homestead there was little left to see. She commented that it felt like none of her family had ever existed on Nawashi at all. Still, her precious memories are in fact handed down to the younger generations so that their origins are not forgotten. I am happy to have helped her to do this.

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