Are you thinking of visiting Canada? Wherever you travel, it’s important to learn about the country's history, cultures, and perspectives. Canada is home to many diverse races, who uniquely have these 3 things. However, to really know the roots of Canada, learning the perspective, culture, and history of the Canadian Indigenous can play a key role in understanding Canada.

Canada's captivating landscape is the source of my reflection. Through my Indigenous culture, I embrace that landscape; while the Sun shines, the knowledge, history, and strength are absorbed through my skin. In return, I reflect this light through dance, music, and the grey world of politics.

Photo courtesy and copyright Janie Kataquapit.

I’m alive today because of the love my Mooshum (grandfather) had shown me unconditionally. He was a survivor, stripped of our culture and ceremonial teachings by the Canadian residential schools.

However, they never took away his knowledge of the land, language, and love for his people.

Spending time on the land with my Grandparents. Photo courtesy and copyright Janie Kataquapit.

These past few years, I have been on a journey of learning and reconnecting with the things taken from him. It’s important for me to continue forward on this journey of learning and striving towards the culture I know he wanted to practise. It was taught in Canadian residential schools that our teachings, dancing, and ceremony was blasphemy, considered evil. 

So, in memory of the Indigenous children who never made it out alive, along with the culture my Mooshum lost, I embrace this way of being. Through my culture’s teachings, ceremony, my music advocacy, and Indigenous politics, I shine this light, leaving no room for shadows.

Dancing at Cambrian College's Powwow. Photo courtesy and copyright Cambrian College.

Life lessons I live by are the 7 Grandfather Teachings. To summarise, it means to live your life through Humility, Respect, Bravery, Wisdom, Truth, Honesty, and Love. Through various ways, I implement these teachings as much as I can. Dancing is a way to honour that, through Powwows, a cultural gathering where Indigenous tribes come together to share different styles of dance, singing, drumming and traditions. 

Tired after dancing at North Bay's Friendship Centre Powwow. Photo courtesy and copyright Janie Kataquapit.

The Mens’ Grass Dance is one of many dance styles Indigenous North Americans have, which I practise often. The grass dance is a blessing to the land. We move the way long prairie grass flows through the northern wind (Creator). It's our role to clear the way, and bless the land for all other dancers, people, and spirits. 

This is one of the many ways I’m shaped through culture, with it interconnecting like a tree from the teachings I follow. Physically displayed through dance, onwards to sound, vocally arranged to music. 

ImagiNative 2023

Music is another form I share my culture, truth, and feelings through. What inspires my drive, what fuels my fire? It’s my dream to see Indigenous First Nations thrive before my time on Earth goes. With that, entailing the dismantlement of broken treaties, systematic oppression, broken promises, and inadequate funding. Indigenous advocacy through music is how I’m able to share this worldwide, because music is a global phenomenon that people of all ages, races, and cultures practise.

Original Photo Collage

Like a recipe, there's a list of stages I follow to make a music video. The first half is the song creation. I begin by producing the beat, writing the lyrics, performing the vocals, mixing, and then mastering the track. The second half is the video. This process involves imagining the idea; I translate that idea into a storyboard, then I bug my mother to film the shots, and I finish it by throwing it all together, hoping for the best. However, despite the chaotic creation process, I was blessed to take a step towards my dream by showcasing two of my music videos (p. 96) at the world's biggest Indigenous film festival, ImagiNATIVE 2023, hosted in Toronto, ON.

Photo of my premiered showcased music video

The Life of Water is one of two music videos showcased at the festival. It's about the water crisis we face in our northern communities. The lack of clean drinking water, especially in my home Attawapiskat First Nation, is the focus of this song, shining that light on what is often overlooked by Canada.

Water advocacy is very important to me. One day, I want to see Indigenous communities all over Canada have access to clean drinking water. My mooshum is the one who started this fire in me to advocate for clean water. There was a period of my life where I really lost myself. I isolated myself from the ones I loved; I believed that no one could accept me because of the guilt I was carrying. I dropped out of college, I lost the ones I loved, I fell deep into substance addiction, and hurt the ones I cared most about. 

Life felt like something I couldn't bear anymore. 

My Grandparents at their house. Photo courtesy and copyright Janie Kataquapit.

During Christmas that year, I travelled back home to Attawapiskat. I brought with me the mindsight I was instilled with, that no one will accept me, as I was returning back. Yet as I arrived home, I could feel this overwhelming sense of love and acceptance from my Mooshum, unconditionally. Even though Residential schools took away what one would consider the normal way of showing affection, just sitting there with him was enough for me. He was proud of me, even though I had nothing to show for it. That lit a fire in me, and I really wanted to make him proud for real this time. However, my Mooshum passed away before I was able to do that.

Growing into who I am now, in his memory, I strive towards a better future for my community, and one day I wish to see a better future for all Indigenous communities throughout Canada.

When I was youth co-chair for a COO Chiefs Assembly. Photo courtesy and copyright Nishnawbe Aski Nation.

Indigenous politics is another way I strive towards my dream for all First Nations in Ontario. Through youth councils of various Indigenous Political Territorial Organizations (PTOS), I use my voice to drive positive change. As a youth council member, the utmost importance to me is delivering the needs and wants of Indigenous youth to Chiefs, Indigenous Political Organizations, and Government. That entails travelling into various communities to hold gatherings, activities, workshops for the youth, and asking them questions. For example, 

“What's the change you want to see in your community? How do you imagine that coming to be?”

“Who are the ones you see handling that work?”

Photo of our youth council with NANs’ Executive Council. Photo courtesy and copyright Nishnawbe Aski Nation.

Of course, sharing the youth voice means also sharing my own. Toward Chiefs, PTOS, and Government officials, I’ve been given the chance to advocate for the changes I want to see. Like a broken record, I share that I want to see clean water in our communities. I see this coming to be through adequate funding for updated water treatment plant (WTP) infrastructure, standardised training of WTP workers for testing filtration, and true legislation on the abolishment of mines in treaty land that neither the government nor mining companies can break. 

I also want to see Canada work with First Nations, and provide a space in Parliament for First Nation representatives. 

Though this perspective is my own, the common ground shared amongst us all here at Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) and Chiefs of Ontario (COO) is that it’s important for us to build a better future for our youth. They are the ones who will pick up that mantle, and be here while we are gone. Speaking for myself, I want to see Indigenous youth flourish in the calling they choose, and live a normal life, and not have to live a life fighting for the bare minimum a human deserves.

Dancing at Nipissing University & Canadore College welcome back Powwow. Photo courtesy and copyright Nipissing University.

Over hundreds of years, there have been initiatives to erase our Indigenous culture, teachings, language, and way of life. 

In the present day, through dance, music, advocacy, and politics is how I keep my culture alive here in Canada. Reconnecting to what was once taken from us is important to all First Nations people, because the Indian Act had criminalized the practice of our culture. 

Photo after our youth councils meeting with PM Justin Trudeau. Photo courtesy and copyright Nishnawbe Aski Nation. 

The history of all this erasure to the present day shapes who I am, and why it’s so important to me to practise my culture. However, without my Mooshum, without my family, without NAN, COO, or my fellow youth council members, I would not be where I am today. I would never have had the courage to Grass Dance again, the voice to make music, or the courage to advocate for clean water in a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

Spending time on the land with my Grandparents. Photo courtesy and copyright Janie Kataquapit.

Ultimately, whether you are Indigenous or not, our perspectives, identity, culture, and soul are shaped by those around us, and the land we call home. You're that reflection; however you share that perspective, it all matters.

When you visit a new country, to gaze upon the land is to gaze upon its people. When we gaze upon ourselves, we reflect that image through history, culture, perspective—and I think that's beautiful.

Ramon Mahegkan Kataquapit is Mushkegowuk Cree from Attawapiskat First Nation; and Taino, the Indigenous people of Puerto Rico. Along with the Nishnawbe Aski Nation Oshkaatisak Youth Council, he sits on the Chief of Ontarios' Ontario First Nation Young People's Council, and the Endaayaan Youth Council in North Bay. Balancing being on the councils, Ramon is also a Canadore College Student and independent music artist, raising the core theme of indigenous advocacy and personal self-expression.

All photos courtesy and copyright Ramon Mahegkan Kataquapit, except where noted.