By Xavier Kataquapit
I never quite realized how hard life was when I was growing up in my home community of Attawapiskat on the James Bay coast. At the time in the 1980s, our Elders saw the community as becoming modernized and more comfortable compared to what they had known a few decades before.
Our summer mornings when there was no school had a routine. My dad Marius would wake with the dawn just as he had always done when he grew up on the land. My mom Susan would do the same and in the blue light of the early morning we would hear them in the kitchen brewing a new batch of strong orange pekoe tea.
We had a three bedroom home early on and there were nine of us children and two parents. Mom and dad had their room, my two sisters had theirs and the rest of us seven boys packed into one room with bunks and a twin bed all squeezed in together with barely enough room to walk.
We never wanted to rise as early as our parents, so we lay in bed as long as possible. As soon as we heard the tinkling of them stirring their porcelain tea cups, after adding canned milk and sugar, we knew that breakfast was on the way. Mom would cook a large pot of oatmeal and stir in canned milk she diluted with water. Dad would eat some toast or a bit of leftovers from the day before and then he would head out to start work outside. It was at that point that they both started calling into our bedrooms for us to rise out of bed. ‘Oo-nish-kah Eh-koh!’—‘Wake up! Now!’
Our morning routine was a busy one. There was no running water so going to the bathroom meant using a honey bucket. The number of people meant that the five-gallon bucket quickly filled up. If it was full, mom would task one of the older boys or girls to take it to the outhouse behind our home to empty. Remember now, this was the late 1980s and we had no indoor plumbing or running water.
Mom had heated a bit of water for us so that we could use a large wash basin to wash our hands and faces. We all rushed to the bathroom as we knew that being the last would mean having to wash up in grey soapy liquid. The last person was also tasked with having to empty the grey water into a waste bucket and to dump it outside at a designated spot in a drainage ditch just next to our home.
We all sat down to eat thick oatmeal porridge and had a cup of tea. Our aim was to fill our cups and bowls with milk and sugar, but mom always rationed us just enough as no one was allowed to eat in excess. We weren’t starving for food, but our parents were not wealthy, and we had to budget wisely.
I am the third youngest in my family, so myself and my two younger brothers were often exempt from any of the chores mom wanted everyone to do. Someone was tasked with the honey bucket, someone for the bathroom grey water and another to help her with a huge metal bucket of water to heat on the cooking stove for the daily laundry. Another chore fell to someone to heat another batch of water to clean the dirty dishes from breakfast.
Once breakfast was over, we would all leave the house to go about our day. Mom would stay behind and start the monumental task of doing laundry for all 11 of us. When the large metal pot of water was hot enough it was used to start the first load of laundry in her wringer washing machine in the non-plumbed bathroom.
The hot water had to manually be poured into the wringer washer and then manually drained at the end of the cycle into buckets to be carried out by hand to a drainage ditch. Mom took the wet clothing from the water then fed each item through the wringer to rinse. Once the first load was done, if one of us happened to still be around, she would ask us to help her carry the wet clothes outside to hang on the line. After an hour or two in the summer sun she would reverse the task and take the dry clothes down from the line. She did this all year round every day even when it was minus-30 degrees.
This was a chore that she would repeat multiple times daily as the laundry hamper never emptied. As she washed, more dirty clothes kept appearing. Dad often wasn’t around in the mornings as he was already working outside and was joined by my older brothers.
They were busy too as they had to restock our supply of firewood for the coming winter, clean the yard, maintain hunting equipment and the 24-foot freighter canoe and repair and service a snow machine to be ready for winter. They also had to work on an outboard motor, chainsaw and the run-down used truck used to move things around the community. There was no option to hire mechanics, visit a service station or run to a hardware store. Every hunter and trapper like dad had to figure out how to maintain everything with what was available and with their creativity.
In 1990, Attawapiskat was finally updated with a community wide water supply and drainage system, thanks to the Liberal and then New Democratic Party governments of the time. It meant a world of difference for housewives like mom as her daily workload was lightened. There was still plenty of work to be done but at the very least we were done with complaining about who would have to empty the honey bucket.