We have a funny coincidence between us. He lost his dad and then I lost my dad. He lost his wife and then I lost my wife. Early 1990s, I was bringing my boy to Yellowknife for a leg operation. He had a home there and invited us over to visit. Walking toward his house, I noticed we had the exact same house. We started talking and realized we’ve got all these things in common. It was kind of uncanny. When my oldest son was moving back to the house, he said his older son was, too. I said, “Stop. You’d better not die. I don’t want to die yet.”
and that’s where he picked up a lot of his knowledge about how to work with caribou, skin caribou, fish, all the things that I did for them.
He made it a lot easier. He made me comfortable. I had something to look forward to in the mornings. Get up and get a phone call. It took a lot off my mind.
He had never skinned a caribou.
About two months after she passed, I started travelling for meetings again. This is when I started feeling for my kids. I started thinking back to how we grew them up. That’s when I started going through my mind about what I should say to them. I wrote a note to each of them about what I could have done differently, apologizing to them. Maybe I was not doing it the right way. I was trying to take care of everything myself, working, hunting, getting the food, fishing while they went to school. I did most of the work without involving them much. One of my older boys used to camp with my parents,
Another one, 17 or 18 at the time, used to go out with his friends biking. This one time his mom asked him, “If you go out and see a caribou, can you get it for us?” He looked at her kind of strange. “Yeah, and then what?”
Those things came back to me, and I thought maybe I should have let them do more than just watch and help here and there. I should have had them doing the nets, fishing, cutting the caribou. That was the main message and apology I was writing to the boys. The girls were a little different. They picked up a lot of the things their mom did because she’d have them help her cut up fish or meat, make dough or bread. When she passed away and they came to camp with me, they were able to do all that, so we were passing it on to my grandchildren. They’d be hands on, they weren’t watching. I was able to pick that up later on, that they should be hands on doing something, not just watching. The girls were able to do things because of their mom.
