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ALKAVIK
Aklavik resident Renie Arey said the best years of her life were spent living on the land learning from her grandmother how to prepare dry meat, drive dog teams and get ready for the winter.

Renie Arey, right, enjoys being on the land with her great granddaughter, Abigail Arey, middle, and Crystal Koe. - courtesy of Facebook

"It was good them years living out on the land. It was healthy for everybody ... There was no such thing as meat in the stores. There was no meat or anything. You had to hunt," Arey said, adding during the winter they got water from melting ice. "Today it's different, we all live in town."

Arey spent the first few years of her life living in the wilderness outside of Inuvik until, at the age of seven, she was forced to attend a residential school. Still, she said every spring her dad would take her and her brother out to connect with nature.

"It was great to be out of the residential school," she said. "You had the freedom to do what you like instead of being in a classroom."

Arey said the family would usually go muskrat trapping during the children's time off. On one trip, she said she remembers her dad got upset with her and her brother after speaking to them in their mother tongue.

The problem arose, she said, when he had told her in their language to retrieve a certain kind of meat that they had stored on an elevated platform.

"I didn't know what he meant so I asked my brother 'what did he tell us?' 'I don't know,' (he said). So we had to go ask my dad what he said. He said 'you're not a white lady you're supposed to understand'."Arey recounted, adding she told him she had forgotten the language because they didn't get to speak it anymore. "Sometimes when we tried to speak it others would look at us mad like we were talking about them so we rarely spoke in school in our language."

Arey was 16 when she left the residential schools. Since then she has worked with elders to regain the language she lost during those years.

Grandmother to four girls and "a lot of boys" Arey has tried to pass the traditional knowledge she learned as a young girl on to the next generation. Arey has carried on some of the cooking techniques her grandmother, Eileen Okpik, taught her. Her family's favourite recipe is smoked muskrat, she said. Meanwhile, every spring the family still goes out into the bush, she said.

"I'm very proud of them because so far my grandchildren are learning from their parents what they learned from us," she said.

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