A Snapshot of Moosonee today!
Our little water taxi barreled effortlessly up the Moose River, creating a wake behind us that exposed the rusty brown water. We were headed to the mouth of James Bay, the unofficial gateway to the Arctic Ocean. This was my reason for spending eight hours in a car, followed by an overnight stay in Cochrane, and then a five hour train ride through the bush of Northern Ontario.
Our guide, Wally, waxed on about life in Moosonee. He was a lover of the land. It was the end of August and he told us that in his younger days he’d be gearing up right about this time to head off into the wilds for six weeks to hunt geese. He estimated that he would need about sixty of them to feed his family through the winter. “And maybe a few extra,” he supposed. “You have to provide for the elders too.”
Wally told me that he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. He was proud to be an Indian.
“Um, isn’t that the politically incorrect term,” I asked. “Shouldn’t it be …” My words trailed off because I couldn’t remember if it was Native American, aboriginal, or what.
“Call me whatever you want,” he replied with a shrug. “Just don’t call me late for dinner.”
The neighboring communities of Moosonee and Moose Factory have a total population of about three thousand, native Cree being the vast majority. The area is quite beautiful, and for outdoor lovers it’s paradise. “We don’t have the rules you have down south,” Wally boasted. “We can hunt when we want. We don’t need a license.” I’m not sure if that rule applies to everyone, or only to the local Native population. I’m also not a hunter, so I couldn’t be bothered to find out. I was happy, however that our conversation turned to how animals need to be respected. “We use what we kill,” he advised me. They don’t believe trophy hunting.
The visit took place at the very end of the summer when the bugs aren’t supposed to be so bad. I found the mosquitoes to be unrelenting, so I can’t imagine what the real bug season would bring. I read somewhere that in certain months the school closes up for bug season. It’s that bad.
I wouldn’t want to spend time in winter up there either. I hate the cold in Toronto, so I don’t think I could manage shaving and extra 30 degrees off of the temperature. Wally said that winters were actually the best season to be in Moosonee. The town comes to life. People adapt better to the cold than they do the heat. Snowmobiles abound. The ice connects all of the surrounding communities, and of course there are no bugs.
Moosonee has an interesting history. Europeans first landed there back in the 1600s. It was a trading outpost where beaver pelts were sold. The Hudson’s Bay Company got its start there. Over the years, the surrounding areas became part of the lumber trade. A lot of pulp and paper comes from trees that grew there, and on the train ride up you can see how we’ve cut a swath through nature. For miles and miles, all you can see now are an army of young pine trees, row after row, orderly and vapid. It’s with great disappointment that I report that nature’s randomness is gone from Northern Ontario. The Group of Seven would be horrified.
In the 19th century, Moosonee was one of the most photographed places on earth (a fact I learned from an old brochure that a fellow tourist lent to me). Wally said that he recalls in years past, seeing the local floating dock inundated with so many tourists that it was practically submerged in the water. That’s not the case anymore. I can’t verify this stat, but I was told by someone that the annual headcount for tourists was around 200 now. We ran into six other people that weekend. Eight of us made up 4% of the tourist trade for that year. Whether that’s a true stat or not, it was quite obvious to me that these towns are declining rapidly.
The train, commonly referred to as the Polar Bear Express, stopped its Saturday service a few years back. The five hour journey from Cochrane starts at nine a.m. on the other six days. I didn’t see many tourists on the run that I made. Everyone looked pretty local, from what I could tell. Most people seemed to have a purpose for being there, be it the way that they dressed, or how they conducted themselves on the train. If they walked through the aisle, completely oblivious to their surroundings, in the same way that I would walk onto a subway, then clearly they had done this before. Others looked more like they were coming from somewhere. They had packages and shopping bags. And they were tired – as though being connected to the grid for a few days or weeks had taken its toll.
A curious sight to me were the number of people carrying boxes of Tim Horton’s doughnuts with them onto the train. Clearly Tim’s was a rare delicacy for these folks and it reminded me of years past when us southern Canadians would flock into the US to buy up anything and everything. We were called cross border shoppers – and our inconvenience in life was the border guards who inspected our purchases to ensure that we didn’t go over our spending limit. Here the inconvenience was the lack of a road. A long train ride through no man’s land was what connected Northern dwellers to those creature comforts that we take for granted. I imagined that some of these travelers were given orders from someone from back home. “And don’t forget to get a glazed maple for me!”
Moosonee has only one restaurant in operation, the Sky Ranch, which stopped serving meals on Saturdays (until further notice, the chalkboard stated). A local told me that the food there has gone downhill as of late. According to them, the owner is looking to close up shop and has just stopped caring.
There’s a shopping complex in town where you can buy everything from groceries to furniture. It even has a CIBC bank operation inside, plus a Pizza Hut and KFC stand. The prices for everything are outrageous, marked up of course to account for transport costs.
While there are no roads that lead to Moosonee, there were some vehicles in town. Most of them were muddied up on account of the dirt roads that run through the city. There is no concrete on the ground, except for a few feet of sidewalks around the town centre.
Moose Factory seems to have a little more going for the average tourist. Remnants of the Europeans who settled in the area back in the 17th century have been preserved. By that I mean, they have a few old buildings in a local park. They’re closed up now, and it doesn’t look like they’ve been open to tourists for quite some time. Even the information markers have been removed.
Wally said that things began to dry up when the government cut down on funding. I don’t know the details behind this, and he didn’t stay on the topic for too long. He was, instead, quite passionate that the community needed to take responsibility and to do something. After our tour, he was heading off to meet some children from the community to take them fishing. He felt the youth in Moosonee needed to be reacquainted with basic life skills. He feels that they are too connected to the Internet and video games. “They don’t know anything about their heritage anymore.” The youth in Moosonee are suffering the same problem the youth in many northern communities are suffering. There is nothing for them up there and many have either left, or worse, have been stifled by drug and alcohol abuse. Their culture has been taken away from them, either by apathy from within the community, or by force from the government. The residential school debacle is still very fresh in the minds of these people, as Wally pointed out to me during a driving tour of Moose Factory.
I saw a lot of young people just hanging around, not doing much. Most of them wore hoodies, even though it was hot out, much like the youth in any community does these days. I gather that this is a problem up there, to some extent, because the grocery store, the Sky Ranch and other shops had signs clearly posted, stating that hoodies were not permitted. They didn’t say anything about my goofy canvas hat. They also didn’t stop me at the train station one evening when I had the tripod and camera equipment out to take pictures of the water tower with the clouds in the background. A local police officer did pull up though to tell a kid sitting off in the distance that he wasn’t allowed to be there. The kid was wearing a hoodie, which he pulled further over his head as he quietly walked away. I will note that I could overhear the conversation and the officer sounded quite pleasant. He even told the kid to have a nice day, after ordering him off the property. It was certainly a nice touch, but I’m left to wonder how they’re going to solve the bigger problem.
There was a polar bear sighting in Moose Factory last winter. Polar bears are unheard of so far south of the Arctic Circle, and it’s not a good sign. “Global warming is hurting us bad,” Wally told me. Warmer winters have limited the number of days that the ice roads are open and remote communities further north rely on that access to get supplies. Where winter tends to cut a lot of us off in the south, winter brings people out up north – and it’s the ice, on which vehicles can travel, that does it. Warm winters have also had an impact on the animal population, which in turn impacts hunting and fishing. And, of course the polar bears are suffering too. They can get out to the ice so they can’t get to the seals. The bears are literally starving to death.
I feel just horrible about that polar bear in Moose Factory. It was spotted at the town dump and it had to be euthanized. Relocating it would have done no good as it would only return, and polar bears are notoriously dangerous. The article I read said that it looked emaciated.
Take the Polar Bear Express
More on Residential Schools
More on that polar bear
