Jocie's Blog

 Before my experiences in Australia with the Aboriginal people there, I had a few adventures with the Indigenous people of Canada.   I wrote about my journey to Gil Island almost twenty years ago, when I was in Hartley Bay.  Every day was an adventure that year. I deeply wished my husband was there to share it with me, but was fortunate to meet so many new, interesting, and adventurous people.  I think it was in Hartley Bay that I first became aware that the world was not as big, or as scary, as I had previously believed.  The people and my time there all contributed to a growing confidence in myself, and helped me gather the courage to step out, again and again, throughout the rest of my life.     2001-Gil Island         Living on an Indian Reserve on the rugged coast of BC was a lot more interesting than you may think. Life had lots of color, and there were many real characters!   The r...

  Perspective         When I went to school in the sixties in Fernie, B.C., I was taught a little poem by my history teacher:   In fourteen hundred and ninety- two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.                 My school credited Christopher Columbus with discovering the Americas, and must have skipped the part where Leif Ericsson (eldest son of Eric the Red ) crossed the ocean almost five hundred years earlier, or possibly I wasn’t listening?   And the Chinese?   North Americans have always ignored the enormous role the Chinese played in the settlement of this country.   We charged them a head tax at the turn of the 20th C. to come in and slave on the railway and the gold fields.   But I think they were here before Columbus. When I visited the B.C. museum in Victoria, after a short stint in China, I couldn't get over the resemb...

Rubbish - it is an enormous issue world wide.  I was just waking up to the issue when I originally wrote the main bits of this in 2001.  Remember,.. don't take anything I say as gospel, it is all just my view at the time.. and I was pretty, probably still am, quite naive as to the ways of the world.  There are so many layers to life.    Garbage         Hartley Bay is the first place I have ever been that had no roads.   There is no need for streets or avenues as there are no cars or trucks to drive on them!   Besides, to make a road you need solid earth, and the whole village is built on muskeg. The only way you can access Hartley Bay is by floatplane or boat and while the boats are big, they carry no vehicles other than ATV’s or quads. However, the fact that there are no roads doesn’t stop the locals from including the term in conversation.   I heard about the road to the lake almost th...