Another teaching that I received was never to be afraid in the forest because nothing can hurt you in the forest, unlike here in the city or in the village up here in the community. You won’t hear any noise – you just hear the sound of nature. And then there was no animal who would try to hurt you, because if you pay respect or respect animals they won’t chase you or do you harm.

The animals won’t come up to you or come close to you, because they are afraid, and if you respect the animals, they won’t touch you – they won’t come chasing after you.

The attitudes are changing now that we live in houses. Like when a child doesn’t want to eat, you send him away from the table and say, ‘Well, if you don’t want to eat, just get down from the table and go in the other room.’ Well, you punish the kid for not eating. That wouldn’t happen when we were living in a tent, according to our way of life.

So that’s how an Innu child was raised and he or she would learn by looking, through example. He wouldn’t use a pen or take notes. The child would only use his memory to learn: by touching, by smelling, by hearing, that child will learn from his or her parents the Innu way of life.

That’s how the Innu would live. They would spend all year, all winter, here in this area, in the hunting grounds, and they wouldn’t think they were living a miserable life or in poverty or in difficulty, living a bad kind of a life – even though it was tough. Once they were in Sept-Iles or Uashat, on the coast, they would look forward to coming back to their hunting grounds, to come back again to live according to the Innu way of life.

Before coming back to our times, before telling how we live today, I would say the Innu pretty much enjoyed living their way of life because there was a lot of sharing involved. People would share their food and there was a lot of solidarity back then. And for that reason people would enjoy that way of life.

The Innu would help one another as well and they could tell where they were supposed to be at a certain time of the month, what area you were supposed to be in – and if they didn’t hear back from you, from your comrades or your friends, then you would start worrying and you would look for help or look out for … try to reach that person to find out if they were sick or needed food or if there was an accident. If something happened to these people, you would find out. You would try to find out. And that’s how people would live back then. Helping one another.