The Village

My second blog post, "The Village", takes you to a remote fly-in Oji-Cree village named Windsor House. Through an excerpt from Part 2 of "Money Boss", where I share the story of Rager's visit to the village, and the horrible living consitions. The post offers a glimpse into the cahellenges faced by these communities in 1976, long before the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Why is Rager visiting the village? The Grayson district manager, Mr. Reed, sends Rager to Windsor House to develop an ‘action plan’ – a token gesture – to address a number of concerns raised in a letter written by a now ex-nun named Marie Brunelle and copied to the regional director general in Toronto.

In her letter, the nun describes the horrible living conditions in the village, the drinking and violence, abandoned houses, a history of residential school abuse, and the corruption within Indian Affairs – where district officials take bribes from an air charter company owner and do as little as possible to help the villagers.  However, rather than address the problems, Mr. Reed compounds the problems, allows officials to continue to take bribes, close the school, and is more concerned with his reputation – and ‘God forbid’ that his superior, the regional director general, will be upset, or worse that what the nun has written will leak out to the media.

As with Rager, I too did visit a similar village in 1976. I too worked under a district manager like Mr. Reed.

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From the vantage point of a plane flying at eight thousand feet, the Ojibwa village was lost within the vast boreal wilderness. And then, as though by a strange alchemy, Windsor House suddenly appeared: two small islands connected by a walkway in the middle of a lake, with a connecting river snaking its way to Hudson Bay. On the larger island – the “mainland” – were the houses, cabins, band office, Hudson’s Bay Company store and warehouse, and the vacant houses and cabins that the Anglicans had abandoned four years earlier. Four inches above the ground were the numerous walkways that zig-zagged between houses and buildings. On a rainy day the ground turned into mush, making the walkways the only means of walking without being covered in mud. Almost everyone in the village lived on the mainland, except for the two clerics who lived on the smaller island. Emile Island was named after a dead bishop who once visited the island in 1895. It held the Catholic church, mission house, and the closed co-op sawmill. Twice a day the lay brother would ring the church bells, but few parishioners ever bothered to attend service – only the old and dying or those with nothing better to do. There was not one tree left standing on either island; they both appeared as though they had been sprayed with defoliant.

Throughout the village were dogs running wild and millions of black flies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and horse flies, all waiting for – almost expecting – the lonely man who descended from a floatplane not certain of what he might accomplish.