Attawapiskat, a year, and the space in between
The James Bay coast is where I consolidated my clinical skills, over 20 years ago. But it is the friendships that stay with me. That, and the lessons learned: the importance of community, of humility. And humour.
I decided to come back last year to help during a particularly bad wave of the pandemic. I thought I would see a lot of bad cases, so I reviewed my ABCs. But my most useful contribution may have been to transport vaccines up to coast to Attawapiskat, in a simple but sturdy container. I recorded temperatures every hour. I hope the vaccines worked.
The James Bay Coast—the Weeneebeg
Vaccine transport
The Attawapiskat Nursing Station—a half a day charter flight from Kingston
A year later, there are still cases in Attawapiskat—150 miles up the coast from Moose Factory, a coast that is fluid with rivers etched into it, a bit like a vascular bed, draining its contents back into some grand reservoir, gushing forward with determination if not hope—but fewer than last year. I think the vaccines worked.
The suffering here is perennially palpable. If we think we are in crisis in mainstream Canada, this would be laughable here, in a constant state of being and survival. Milk has increased by 50 cents for a litre and a half. Not as bad a gas, but gas is not as essential either.
Prices for essentials—in 2021 and 2022
Empty shelves at the local store
Water is expensive too. Double the price of gas. Funny, on a coast perennially etched and transformed by water—the Bay has always seemed sooo circular to me, maybe the result of an ancient asteroid impact, forever defining the landscape—but what do I know.
At least there are no boil advisories (here) (at present).
Continuity of care—2021 and 2022
And this year I brought my wife. Correction: the community was gracious enough to invite my wife. This may be an important step. As a curator of European art at the National Gallery of Canada, she has been looking for a way to contribute to reconciliation.
The path ahead does not look easy and the onus is clearly on us—people of mainstream Canada—to listen, and give back, and learn. If there is a recurrent lesson here, up the coast, it is this: everything is connected. I try to remember this, especially at this unique time of human history. There is a tendency to look inwards at this time, at our parochial realities, wanting to protect our immediate communities. But the pandemic has other plans: if we do not forge partnerships—globally, nationally, hell, within our own province—we may not see the end of this.
A field is reclaiming where a church once stood
The muskeg, looking out towards the Bay
