John Dunphy
Northern News Services
Published Monday, November 5, 2007

COPPERMINE - Lucy Maniyogena was eight-years-old when she first went trapping near the DEW Line station at Cambridge Bay in the 1950s. Her father plowed lanes for aircraft and did maintenance work at the base.

Maniyogena's family lived at one end of the quarters for the men working on the DEW Line.

She went to residential school for 10 months of each year until she was 13, as did her brothers and sisters. That year her mother had an affliction in her leg and she kept Maniyogena home so she could teach her sewing skills.

Maniyogena said her mother used to move from chair to chair around the kitchen because she could not walk and there was no such thing as a wheelchair available.

Here is part of the story she told as part of a recent public speaking assignment:"I remember when I was young, I had to learn to do both sewing and trapping to become eligible for marriage someday.

"My sister and I go on our first day of trapping on our own. This is in spring. The weather is sunny and warm. We are very excited and at the same time nervous. We walk five miles to the trap line. There is a very beautiful white fox on the trap. My sister and I admire the beautiful fox, and I say to her, 'The fox is so cute, she looks just like our little sister.' We do not want to kill it, but we have to in order to be good hunters. We hit it on the head till it's knocked out, because we don't know how to snap the neck."We bring the fox home in our backpack into the house and drop it onto the kitchen floor. We tell our mother that we caught a fox on our trap line. Our mother notices that the fox is not quite dead yet. It is making a squeaky sound.

My mother snapped the neck to kill it. She informed us that we need to make sure we snap the neck in order to kill it. She was very proud of us for getting our first catch and couldn't wait to tell our father what good hunters we were." Their mother one day was taken by aircraft to hospital down south. She told Lucy she would not be coming home and that Maniyogena would have to take care of the smaller children. She would not be able to continue at school. She was ready for marriage because she could sew and, better yet, she could trap too.

The mother never did return alive. The children at residential school were not allowed to come home for their mother's funeral.Maniyogena later moved to Kugluktuk. She married a man and had children, but her husband died in a fire.

She has a new husband and at least one child from that marriage. She was always ambitious to learn. She took every course offered at the learning centres in the community.

Management Communications was the last of the courses she had to complete for certification. Fifteen years ago she was hired as the financial officer for the housing association of Kugluktuk. Today she is the assistant manager of the Housing Association. She took the communications course in the 1980s and was unsuccessful because she did not have full understanding of the questions. This time, she wrote a superb exam and earned 75 per cent without asking one question of clarification during the two hours. She wrote the whole exam on computer.