Stories.

For Christmas my daughter got a subscription to StoryWorth for me...every Monday I answer a question she has selected for me, add any photographs I'd like to add, and submit it. At the end of the year, they will print two copies of a book, one for each daughter. 

It's been extremely interesting going back in time, especially looking through all the old photographs. I lived in a beautiful place in Northern Manitoba called Leaf Rapids. It was in the boreal forest, near the Churchill River, surrounded by many lakes and rivers. The community was built on an esker which is a glacial deposit forming a continuous, winding ridge formed by sandy deposits left by a stream flowing underneath the ice. The Town Centre, which held everything from grocery store, post office, pharmacy, school, theatre, arena, curling rink, hospital, etc., was supposed to be blue but the rust paint that was used never did change colour as there is no pollution in the community. The ravens are large, with a wing span of up to 6 feet. As much of the natural vegetation was not to be disturbed in its creation, the town received a Vincent Massey Award for excellence in urban planning and is still listed in university planning courses across Canada. My husband and I returned to my hometown to be married in 1988.

Though the town has been getting smaller since the coppery/zinc mine (25 km away) closed in 2002, there is such an interesting history (I lived on Nisku Bay):

Leaf Rapids' culture and history are well mixed with the Cree nation.  The Cree are one of the major Algonkian-speaking Indian peoples of Canada, formerly occupying an immense area from east of the Hudson and James bays west as far as Alberta and the Great Slave Lake.  Originally inhabiting a smaller nucleus of this area, they expanded rapidly in the 17th and 18th century due to the fur trade with the Europeans.  One example of the Cree’s influence on Leaf Rapids is the naming of our roads that are named in Cree after the native culture in our area. For your interest we have included a list of our roads’ Cree names and their translations:

• Keyask / gull
  
• Mukasew / fox
  
• Pipoon / winter
  
• Wapoos / rabbit
• Kinapik / snake
  
• Mukekun / wolf
  
• Sekwun / spring
  
• Wooswu / moose
  
• Mikinak / turtle
  
• Nepin / summer
  
• Umisk / beaver
  
• Wuchusk / muskrat
  
• Mistik / woodstick
  
• Nisku / goose
  
• Utik / deer 

Leaf Rapids has tried to ensure that economic development in this area provided the northern Manitoban Cree with a fair chance at the jobs created. A pilot project, the Ta-wow project, initially began just for this purpose when the mine and the town's existence first started. Some of the Indigenous peoples in the area still trap, hunt, fish, and harvest berries and traditional forest products for medicinal purposes. Others have integrated into other jobs.