Indigenous people want to revive a community dispersed more than 50 years ago

Temius Nate organized the first meeting of the Miminiska group in Thunder Bay at the end of March, bringing together the descendants of families who lived around Lake Miminiska near the First Nation village of Eabametoong, about 350 kilometers north of northeast of Thunder Bay.

Since the community disbanded more than 50 years ago, its members have settled in Eabametoong, Thunder Bay and other Northern Ontario communities.

But Mr. Nate dreams of returning to live there.

It’s where I’ve been the happiest in my life and I’m still the happiest when I go back, it’s my home, and I want to do everything to preserve ithe explains.

Eabametoong Chief and Council formally recognized the Miminiska band through a band council resolution in 2009, but the resolution states that the band must submit a formal application to the federal government to be recognized as a new band.

Indigenous Services Canada has also encouraged the group to apply for band recognition in 2019, but the group has yet to do so.

This group has in the past expressed a desire to relocate to their traditional territory around Lake Miminiska in northwestern Ontario.wrote a spokesperson in an email.

To date, Indigenous Services Canada has not received a formal request for band separation from this group.can we read.

Temius Nate said he had no intention of going through that process.

We want to be a band, but we don’t want to be confined to a reservehe explains.

As a reserve, the government owns the land and you are locked there like an animal on a farm. It does not help people who want to do business with ushe adds.

It is not clear that the group could obtain band status without following the process established by the federal government.

The nostalgia of a lost community

Nate recalls the day the government agent first landed at Lake Miminiska in 1959, telling the families living there that they needed to move to Eabametoong so their children could get an education, initially without success .

The agent returned for five years, Mr Nate says, bringing first tinned meat and then vouchers to redeem for goods at the Eabametoong store.

To obtain these products, families had to travel 40 kilometers to Eabametoong and then back to the community.

In 1964, a member of Mr. Nate’s family was elected to the Eabametoong council. From then on, almost everyone moved.

The children and grandchildren of many who lived at Lake Miminiska still return, especially in the summer.

On the site of the former community, there are many remains.

A 15km trapline set back from the shore remains, the house and church that Mr Nate’s father, Edward, had built still stand near where he is buried.

Mary Lou Baxter and her sister Flora attended the first meeting of the Miminiska group.

Now in their 50s, they were among the first generation of Lake Miminiska families to grow up in Eabametoong.

But each year, at the end of the school year, they say that they looked forward to returning to live at the lake with their grandparents.

Flora remembers her mother telling her throughout her youth that Eabametoong wasn’t really her home and she has an ambition to help families return to Lake Miminiska.

She was telling me that my house was actually at Lake Miminiska, that we had been brought here, that we had been movedremembers Flora.

Mary Lou says she plans to move to Lake Miminiska if a community settles there.

Expected economic potential

If his group succeeds in returning to Lake Miminiska, Mr. Nate believes that the grandchildren of those who have been forced out of the community will inherit the economy he was promised in his youth.

When he was a child, an engineer told him that by harnessing the energy of nearby waterfalls, enough electricity could be generated to power Toronto and Montreal.

Now, with roads and power lines heading to the Ring of Fire mining field, northeast of Eabametoong, Mr Nate sees an opportunity for those promises of prosperity to come true.

With information from Jon Thompson, CBC