Interviewer: Your personal experiences with the First Nations community – would you like to tell?

Kerry: Yeah, sure. So I don't know a lot about my family, but I do know that my grandmother was part of First Nations and she grew up in Winnipeg. And so did my grandfather, although my grandfather – his family is European, of European descent. But what I do know is that when my grandmother was young, so she was about 17 or 18 years old, she was pregnant and she was kind of, I think, banished from her family because of that, she wasn't married. And so she left Winnipeg and she went up North to the Arctic to Tuktoyaktuk, which is in the Northwest territories. And it's right on the Arctic Ocean. And she worked in a hotel there. 

My grandfather left Winnipeg when he was 17 as well, and he got a job working for the Hudson Bay Company. He was a fur trader and so he was sent up North, and he lived for a few years in a place called Aklavik, which doesn't exist anymore. The community was moved from Aklavik. They created a new community called Inuvik. It was because of the ice flow, they couldn't have the town in Aklavik anymore. And so he lived up there, and he has a lot of very interesting stories. And he spoke some of the language of the people there, because he had to in order to do business with them and purchase their furs and sell them goods. 

He often had to go up to Tuktoyaktuk to meet the planes, because the planes would bring in the goods like the Hudson Bay blankets, sugar, and all of those sweets and things that he would sell. And he met my grandma when he was staying at the hotel in Tuktoyaktuk. And I think he kind of fell in love right away. I don't know if she felt the same or not. But the next time that he went up there, a friend of his who had a dog sled team, he asked him if he could borrow the dog sled team. And he met my grandma and he took her on a date, and she sat in the dog sled, and he had her wrapped up in blankets. And he had just purchased new mukluks. Mukluks are leather – they're like a slipper, but they go up higher on the leg – and the way that he tells the story is, when you first purchase them they're very slippery on ice and you have to kind of wear them down a little bit, and then they're not as slippery. But these were brand new ones, and so when he got on the back of the dog sled he went to take off to go across the ice, and he slipped and fell off of the dog sled. And the dogs kept running of course, and my grandma was in the basket and she was talking to him and he wasn't responding, and he was trying to run behind and catch up. And she happened to look behind her and see him running behind, and so she took the sled and tipped it over so that the dogs would stop running, and he caught up. So that was the first time that my grandma and grandpa had a date. 

And she soon moved to Aklavik to live with him. And so my dad has a half sister. And they moved throughout the North and then ended up living in Fort Nelson, which is in Northern British Columbia. And then soon after that my grandpa stopped working for the Hudson Bay Company and they moved to Prince George. But yeah, that's just a fun story that I like to share about my family.