Vol. 49.3 – Growing Up in Makkovik

Growing Up in Makkovik - Ola Andersen

But as far back as I can remember, almost every household had a Them Days magazine in it, and I find it so amazing, living in Cartwright, It was, founded by Doris, and that’s like one of the many great things that happened or came from Cartwright. So I think it’s, it’s fitting that you guys are here.

Ola Andersen, 49.3

Ola Andersen: When I was teaching, myself and a teacher from here, Wendy Martin, we tried to incorporate as many Labrador stories as we could. And we used Them Days a lot in our teaching. And we read the kids Them Days stories, because a lot of young kids didn’t realize the importance of them days and how the stories are carried on. And we can learn a lot from looking at the stories.

Margaret Beyere: What do you think of the Them Days magazine?
Ola Andersen: I absolutely love it. I try to read as much as I can, like with my busy schedule, but I can remember one summer–I usually spend July in Makkovik fishing with my dad and brother. And I can remember one summer, I went around Makkovik asking people for Them Days: “Do you have the Them Days magazines?”, and we read, myself and Dad and my partner, we read every Them Days magazine that we could get our hands on. We were like steady reading, but it’s just, it’s really hard to put all the pieces of the stories together, like trying to keep it in your memory, but I think it’s an awesome connection to the past and looking forward to the future. But I know, intricately woven into the stories in Them Days are bits and pieces of little information that you can piece together for like family trees, for things that happened in Labrador. I know that from Them Days magazines, I talked about like, I use it as a teaching tool, and I got my kids in my class interested in Them Days, and they continued to read. But like just for Cartwright, for example, the Italian Armada was here. We’re talking about stories from up on the radar base. We’re talking about Clarence Birdseye, and flash freezing was invented here.

We’re talking about first Girl Guides in Cartwright. We’re talking about the residential school in Cartwright. So all those bits of information and stories about that are really important to be told and to be preserved. But as far back as I can remember, almost every household had a Them Days magazine in it, and I find it so amazing, living in Cartwright, It was, founded by Doris, and that’s like one of the many great things that happened or came from Cartwright. So I think it’s, it’s fitting that you guys are here.

Adam Hill: Would you say you’d have a favourite story from Them Days?
Ola Andersen: My favourite stories would have been the story about Miss Lindsay, stories about Christmases past, like from all the communities that I’ve read, and the Italian Armada when they were here, I found that airplanes and aviation really interesting. So I know that over in Burdett’s Brook, there’s remnants of an old plane crash, and I can remember it’s a story about kids in the residential school looking out the window and hearing that plane come around and it eventually crashed. I can remember reading that story to my kids in my class, because if you’re talking about local stories, I think you would grab the attention of kids more than a story from a faraway land . So yeah, the stories, the people, the openness, and actually, when you think about it, the people in Labrador had a huge percentage of literacy levels for reading and writing and telling stories, probably better than a lot of Canada at that time. If you’re talking like in far-back times, people could read and write, and they were determined to do it.

Margaret Beyere: What do you think of Them Days marking their 50th anniversary this year?
Ola Andersen: I think it’s amazing. Right now, personally, I’m just so consumed with my own writing, it’s hard to figure out things that are going on in the outside world, but myself and Patty Way are really great friends, and we made a pact for Christmas gifts. So we made a pact that our gifts to each other cannot be material things. It’s like written things or little bits of information. So what she does is she looks through her collection and sees if she has duplicates, and she’ll give that to me, and then I’ll give her back a piece of writing or a piece of history about Makkovik, because we’re related. So we kind of share written pieces of information rather than material things. We share history instead of material things for Christmas gifts. So when I did graduate with my masters, her gift to me, was in an envelope, and it was my family tree on my mom’s side that she took, like, years and years to piece together, yeah, yeah. She couldn’t find this one missing link, and she finally found it.

Adam Hill: So tell me about the importance of remembering these stories.
Ola Andersen: My goodness, the stories are a window into our past, and it’s not too far back, how fast things have changed in Labrador. And I think it’s the people who took photographs, people who tell the stories. Storytelling is a way to keep us grounded in looking at our past and realize that how much, in Labrador, we were pretty much all alike, living the same kind of lifestyle, but in different areas of Labrador. Labrador is so vast and connecting people with all those stories from the north to the south to the east to the west, it’s amazing what this magazine has done.

Margaret Beyere: What do you hope future generations may learn from experiences of the past?
Ola Andersen: I think whatever is old is new again. So when we’re thinking about ways of living and just basic foundational things for living, respect, sharing, collaborating, storytelling, taking care of our environment. My job is in stewardship and education, so making sure we take care of our planet. I’m really focused on the earth is here for a reason, so we need to try to preserve it and give back. And I think a lot of that would come through the stories from Them Days. I think if we piece together and pick certain articles from Them Days and use them as a teaching tools, the sky’s the limit at what we can do with preserving our planet on a global level, but preserving Labrador knowledge too.