Northern Ontario

There’s a brand-new clearing on the point above the rapids on the Attawapiskat River, 70 kilometres from Neskantaga First Nation. By the time Ontario’s planned Northern Link road is built to the edge of this river in 10 years, Neskantaga’s chief says those living in a permanent settlement here will be there to block the bridge and the highway into the Ring of Fire. “It’s going to be a village,” Gary Quisess says. “People are going to move away from the reservations. We’re so compressed with reservations, in the box. People are going to move away, back to the old ways where people lived separately, all over the place. That’s the way of our life, our culture.”