Anishinaabe elder looks to build momentum for community's return to traditional homeland in Ontario

An Anishinaabe elder is gathering support and building momentum for his community to return to their traditional territory in northwestern Ontario. 

Temius Nate held the first meeting of the Miminiska Group in Thunder Bay in late March with about 30 members. They are the descendants of families who lived on Miminiska Lake near Eabametoong First Nation, about 350 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay. 

Nate estimates 80 to 100 members of the Eabametoong First Nation are eligible to join the Miminiska Group, including 10 members who left more than 50 years ago. They now live in Eabametoong, Thunder Bay and other communities in northern Ontario. 

"It's where I was the happiest in my life and I'm still the happiest when I go back there," Nate says. "It's my home and I'll do what it takes to keep it."

Eabametoong Chief Solomon Atlookan said the parties are "working on the finer issues and details," but is not yet commenting on the Miminiska Group's intentions to return. 

Eabametoong's chief and council officially recognized Miminiska Group through a band council resolution in 2009, but the resolution says the group must formally apply to the federal government to be recognized as a new band.

Indigenous Services Canada also encouraged the group to apply to be recognized as a band in 2019, but the group has yet to do that. 

"This group has expressed their desire to reclaim and relocate to their traditional area around Miminiska Lake in northwestern Ontario in the past," a spokesperson wrote in an email to CBC News. "To date, Indigenous Services Canada has not received a formal request for band separation from this group." 

Nate said he has no intention of following that process. 

"We want to be a band but we don't want to have a reserve," he said. "As a reserve, the government owns the land and you're boxed in there like an animal on a farm. That doesn't do any good for people wanting to do business with us. We don't need Indian Affairs to tell us we're a band."

It's unclear how the group could achieve band status without following the process set out by the federal government. 

Nate recalls the Indian agent first landing at Miminiska in 1959, informing the large eight or 10 families who lived there that they had to move to Eabametoong so their children could get an education. He said none budged.

The agent returned over five years, Nate said, bringing pallets of canned meat, then vouchers for goods at the store in Eabametoong. Families made the 40-kilometre trek to the reserve and came back. Finally in 1964, a member of his family was elected to Eabametoong council and almost everyone moved.

The children and grandchildren of many who lived on Miminiska Lake still return, mostly in the summer.