Boozhoo, Giidaakunadaad ndizhinikaaz. Makwa ndoondem. New Credit ndoonjibaa. Michi Saagiig Ojibwe Anishinaabe-kwe ndaw.
Hello, I am called Giidaakunadaad. I belong to the Bear Clan. I come from New Credit First Nation. I am a Mississauga Objibwe Anishinaabe woman.

Hi, my real name is Giidaakunadaad. I come from the Bear Clan and I belong to the Anishinaabek Nation which is in the family of what is now recognized as the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. Our people come from along the shores of Lake Ontario. We’re part of a larger family or Nation called the Mississaugas, we’re one family within that Nation. Most of those families occupy the shore of Lake Ontario in what’s now present day Toronto, Peterborough, all the way up the Lake.

So I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about nibi, in our language is water. I was asked to talk about the water out in what’s present day Toronto and things like that. You need to know that I don’t live in that area because of colonialism and the reservation system. Now I live about an hour and 15 minutes from that area at a place called Reserve 40A which is Mississauga New Credit Reservation.

I don’t have a lot on the history of water, but for a good probably half my life I’ve been facing elders, knowledge keepers around the country to learn, Anishinaabe -how we understand our water, our land and our environment. The things that I wanted to share was about our ethics, values and conduct with our water and that Anishinaabek view: Water is not a resource, it’s actually a source of life and we understand the water to be in everything and water is one of the main sources of life, for us to have life, that gives us life.

Some of the things I wanted to share that I know is not really part of what people think and understand or practice everyday, but one of the things is to everyday, to acknowledge water as a life source. I think that as an Anishinaabek woman, it’s embedded in our roles, responsibilities and duties to advocate and care for our waters. So as women our role as inherent leadership, and as a Grandmother, our role, is being difficult to do -to practice our role. Because of what’s happened in the country, where we’ve been relocated and our governance systems and our family structures have been really, really harmed, I guess to put colonialism in a nice way, that’s affected all facets of Anishinaabe life.

I have two grandchildren, one is three years old and his name is Ziibii, river, when you translate it. I have a granddaughter and when I think about what am I doing today - people have popularized our Seventh Generations sort of thinking - but it is a real way of thinking and doing and being. Whatever I do today, whatever I do, whether it’s positive or negative, is going to carry down and impact my great grandchildren, positively or negatively. And that’s an everyday thought that I have. I don’t make that thought or the actions that should belong with it, I don’t minimize that, I take my role today as a Grandmother very seriously.

When we think about in this country, what happened to Indigenous people and what continues to happen to Indigenous people, I think about what my grand child should have in the name of Reconciliation because we’re in the Reconciliation era in this country. I think about, if Canada and Canadian people want to be reconciling things then they need to replace those things that were taken, and some of those things were our waters systems, our water and our lifeway.

To give you an example of how the plays out today is that I do not have, as an Anishinaabe person that can trace their line to the Credit River, I do not have the authority or the right to access my river. There’s private property interests, there’s conservation authority interests, there’s provincial park interests. When I think about that, I think, if I don’t have that right today, my grandchild doesn’t have that right either, and that we need to be doing things that make sure that he can be given back his ways of life. That he can go, participate, engage with and learn from the water. And I mean that in a practical way in that as Anishinaabe people we have a moon, Sucker Moon. I imagine the suckers run up the Credit River and I wish I could have unfettered access to the river at those times to take my grandchild down and he could partake in those activities that his Grandfathers always partook in, which might mean, fishing the suckers, drying the suckers, those kind of things.

When you start thinking about that you start finding out how much loss, we’ve lost as Indigenous people and how when we’re thinking about reconciliation we’re not really reconciling anything. We’re saying sorry but we’re not doing the things that we need to be doing.

So it’s not just about my grandson and it’s not just about I myself as an Anishinaabe person. Because I don’t live in that area, I wonder are the people who we’re sharing that land with, are they care-taking that land are they care-taking that water in the way that it needs to be taken care of. That’s what the Treaties were about, the Treaties were about sharing and how in that sharing we were going to mutually benefit. Indigenous people were going to benefit along with the Newcomers. If we’re going to share the water how are we mutually benefiting.

We’re not really benefiting right now and I’m not talking about financial. I’m talking about a lot of things in that, how is my grandson benefiting from those agreements that were made between settler grandfathers and my grandfathers. When they were making those agreements they were supposed to benefit our grandchildren, now I’m a grandchild of one of those agreements and I’m not really benefiting from that in that can’t practice my original institution. I can’t practice my original pedagogy, which is, we’re water and lake people. At New Credit where I live now today, where they relocated us, there’s no significant body of water, there’s a small creek here but so many people are enjoying our lake.

So Anishinaabe has been here for Millennia and we were able right up until, I'm going to say 200 hundred years ago, we lived on the land here sustainably, we never had conversations about sustainability, we never had conversations about drinking dirty water. You would never ruin a source of life. I think today, the way our Anishinaabe ethics and value system works, it's not just for us. I believe all people, all people, need to change the way we think and utilize our water.