A female face on aboriginal recruitment – Winnipeg Free Press
January 7, 2015
When Yvette Mattawashish was eight, she remembers playing in the ditches along the roads of her native Mistissini, a James Bay Cree reserve 900 kilometres northeast of Ottawa. “I used to crawl in the tunnels they’d dig to put in the big water pipes and culverts,” she says laughing now at the memory. “I’d curl right up inside them.”
Today, at 22, Yvette is one of only three James Bay Cree women trained and employed as an underground development miner.
And while the path she took to get there is typical in many ways to that of other young aboriginal women in the remote north, it is also extraordinary.
