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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A group of Yellowknife youth caught a glimpse of living off the land in the depths of winter earlier this month, when Ecology North had them join a Dene elder on his fish-netting run outside Dettah.

Nathaniel Hamlyn, centre, kneeling, and fellow members of the Youth Ecology Club take a close look at fish netted by Dettah elder George Tatsiechele, who showed the youth club members the traditional skill of ice fish netting on Great Slave Lake, near Dettah, on March 7. - photo courtesy of Shannon Ripley

"For a lot of us, the actual moment of pulling out the nets from the holder, and starting to see the fish come up and how big they were, and the whole process of taking the fish out of the nets was really neat," said Shannon Ripley, program co-ordinator for Ecology North.

Ripley hit the lake with members of Ecology North's Youth Ecology Club on March 7. The club takes its 10 to 15 members out on similar activities every month, thanks to funding from the Yellowknife TD Bank. The bank's Friends of the Environment Foundation contributed $4,000 to the Youth Ecology Club program last year.

"We liked what we saw," said Patrick Scott, chair of the foundation committee in Yellowknife.

"We were particularly excited about the focus they wanted to put on doing some work with youth in terms of environmental awareness, and ecological skills," Scott said, referring to traditional aboriginal life skills.

"Traditional aboriginal culture has always been perceived as holistic," said Scott, which is in line with the idea of minimizing the "footprint" of human activity on the natural environment.

"The impact on the environment is very minimal," he said. "So learning traditional skills and learning how people treat the environment in a traditional way is good knowledge."

The Youth Ecology Club's 10 members and 10 volunteers joined Dettah elder George Tatsiechele on Great Slave Lake, just off the ice road, to pull in netted fish from under the ice. The elder described the traditional practice of fish netting as it has long been performed in Great Slave and surrounding lakes, and familiarized youth club members with the various species to be found.

"It was a really good experience for the kids. And because of the wind it would become one of those days you wouldn't forget," Scott chuckled.

Scott and Ripley recalled temperatures that afternoon hovered between -15 and -20 C, but 60 km/h winds brought them to below -35 C with the windchill.

"It was such a blustery day, and everybody was bundled up in their parkas," said Ripley.

"I was excited, but wasn't the only one excited to see all of the different species," she said, recalling the group witnessed Tatsiechele haul up at least four different species of fish in a catch of 25 to 30. They included whitefish, inconnu, one burbot, and several lake trout - one of them weighing about 20 pounds.

"Once the fish are outside, they get to be about the consistency of a two-by-four," she laughed.

The elder pulled about two-thirds of his lengthy net out to harvest the catch, which would be distributed to elders in Dettah and Ndilo, Scott said.

"He had a really good catch," he said.

Once on the lake, a ceremonial funding cheque was delivered to the ecology club from Yellowknife's TD Friends of the Environment Foundation.

"We did a formal presentation with one of our big presentation cheques - as formal as you can be out on a lake on a windy day," Scott chuckled.

The foundation is one of 49 "friends of the environment" chapters that Toronto-based TD Bank has set up in communities throughout Canada. Local foundations raise funds from account-holders in the communities they serve. Community groups can apply for funds devoted to projects focused on protecting the country's wildlife and environment.

"Our attitude is the communities in which dollars are raised - are the best people to decide how those dollars should be spent," said Aurora Bonin, manager of the TD environment foundation for Western Canada. "As opposed to myself (in Vancouver) or someone in Toronto deciding," she added.

"It's really important that people who are there can earmark those dollars."