When the Winneway dam was built in 1938, Walter Poison was 20 or 21. He is one of the few Elders still alive in Winneway who worked on the dam in those days.
On and off for six-and-a-half years, Walter worked at various gruelling jobs earning 30 cents an hour, 10 hours a day. “Was it hard work?” we asked Walter in his living room as he rocked in his chair.
“Oh, that’s for sure,” he said laughing.
He spent days on end breaking rocks and loading them into a bucket Later, he would travel by canoe or snowshoes to each of the half-dozen reservoir dams upstream from the main reservoir, making sure everything was in order. “We travelled from dam to dam and in the spring-time we opened them all and in the fall we closed them,” said Walter, who is now 78.
By snowshoe, the trip took four or five days. “There was no ski-doos those days.”
Walter finally left his job at the dam under trying circumstances. “The last time I worked there I came in the fall and asked for a job,” he remembered.
“Someone quit and I took his place. One day the boss came to see me and he said, ‘You’re going to Trout Lake tomorrow.’ “I had two kids. ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘My kids are sick. They have the measles.’ He fired me. That was in January.
“So now what am I goi ng to do?” Walter asked himself. “Sand Point was where I was brought up. I had a long tobbogan. I had a tent. I tore it up for tarp and I wrapped up my stuff and the kids. My wife was running after the tobbogan.
“We got to Laforce by supper-time. We stopped by a farmhouse. They had everything on for supper already and invited us in. We had a pretty good meal there. We got to Moffet at 9 p.m. where there was a boarding house.”
A room was available. Walter put his three dogs in the stable. The ordeal finally came to an end the next day after the family crossed Lac-des-Quinzes and arrived at Sand Point, where rations could be procured.
Just last summer, Walter went back to Sand Point where he spent much of his younger days before the community moved to Winneway.
Life at Sand Point was good, Walter recalled. “We just lived there quietly. I think about it sometimes… I wish I was still there.”
“Today there’s no bush”
Isaac Hunter, the father of Winneway Chief Jimmy Hunter, remembers the flooding that drove him and his family from their ancestral land as a young man.
It happened in 1936. Isaac lived at Rapid-7, a few miles away from the present site of Winneway. They were not consulted about the flooding of their lands by a hydro-electric project “We only knew when the water was coming up,” said Isaac, who was 16 at the time. “We knew they were doing something there.”
When Isaac was young he spent most of his time in the bush. “My dad took me out of school. I only remember I went to school two years.”
Isaac and his wife, Helen, are both healers. In their kitchen they showed us items used to treat various ailments. Red willow was used for sore eyes. Colds and high blood pressure were treated with the cedar dwarf spruce and choke cherry tree. Helen said she has almost cured a diabetes affliction using traditional methods.
After the flooding at Rapid-7, the people moved eight miles to a site called Sand Point, where they spent the next 25 years. The hunting and trapping way of life was severely hurt by the move.
We asked Isaac if people continued to trap at Sand Point “Not too much,” he said. “There were no trees there.”
In 1960, they moved again to Winneway, where another hydrodam had been built back in 1938. Isaac himself had briefly worked on that dam as a labourer when he was a young man.
A lot has changed in the last half-century, he said. “At that time in the bush it was different. Today everywhere you go you see somebody. A long time ago you go three months and you see nobody—not even a game warden,” said Isaac.
“I know there were more animals. I know there was a lot of muskrats. Today there is none. Same thing with the moose. There used to be lots of deers.
“Today there’s no bush. Today when you go out there, there’s no bush. All you see is stumps. Everything is different”
(Elders interviewed by Alex Roslin and Will Nicholls)
