In the beginning…
The discs turned out fairly unscratched sounds and the beat increased to a frenzied rhythm. Some feet were itching to try out the unusual music. Some ears were sensitive to anything different. Whatever the music was, it was new and unheard.
The disco lights seemed appropriate and the youthful energy in the crowd couldn’t resist. Some teens started to dance slowly, somewhat out of sync and a little unbalanced. Then a roar went up as “someone” started dancing strangely, almost robotic, his hands and feet seemingly out of touch with reality and yet, somehow the beat was matched step by step by these new moves. Suddenly, the dancer started revolving around and around on his back, gyrating wildly and jumping back on his two feet and doing some sort of eclectic manoeuvre ending soundly with the last beat and chord of the techno song.
I thought to myself while watching, that this guy had some sort of potential and wondered if he would be any good at the local radio station. I approached him while he was wiping the sweat off his smiling face and asked him if he was interested in working at the radio station. Ernie Webb replied, “Sure, I’ll give it a try.”
A few years earlier, I was on an orientation tour of educational institutes in the Ottawa area. At the start of the meeting, there was a guy who couldn’t stop talking about computers and how much better off we would be if everyone had one. Much later on, we had a chance to talk about what we wanted to be in the future. He figured that somehow, computers would some day be mainstream and in every household and they would assist us with just about everything. So the emphasis was about learning computer languages for the first part of our session.
The other wannabe students rolled their eyes and declared that there was no use for a computer in medicine, administration and in ordinary classrooms, that computers were just too complicated and too hard to use to be practical. After all, didn’t we already have faxes and electric typewriters?
Intrigued, I approached this soon-to-be Microsoft admirer, who told me that he was getting into computer sciences and journalism; that he would put the two together and make some sort of magazine for the people. I thought that Will Nicholls just might have something going there.
A few years later, I bumped into a guy with a F3 Nikon, the latest and best camera to hit the market, which became the normal type of camera for professionals. I wondered just how someone so young could afford the $1500 price tag for just the body of the camera. I was already very interested in photography, having made my own prints for several years, albeit amateurishly, so I asked him just how he managed to get a hold of one so early on in his tender years.
He told me he was studying to be a professional photographer and that the school board had helped him buy the camera, since it was just as essential tool as the textbooks, and how could he study photography without a good camera? A few hours later, talking ASA (ISO today), aperture settings, backlighting and just the right temperature settings for lights, Neil Diamond and I parted for unknown futures. I left earlier than usual, just missing a dangerous shoot-out between local Montreal thugs and the police, but that’s another story….
Fifteen years ago, Ernie and his wife Catherine, Will and his computer, Neil and his camera introduced the first Nation magazine in black-and-white to the rest of the Cree world. History was never the same, as it became recorded over the years, sometimes with notoriety and occasionally infamously. The news and our world became readable to the rest of us in Eeyou Istchee through the eyes of dreamers like Ernie, Catherine, Will and Neil.