LITTLE CURRENT—Odahnese Taibossigai has enjoyed a whirlwind path that has seen her travel from Toronto, where she was born and raised, to Nashville where she roomed with her cousin Crystal Shawanda, to Utah where she began learning her barbering skills, but Manitoulin is where she spent a lot of time growing up.
“My mom was a single mom,” she explains, “so, I would go stay with Godfrey (Shawanda, her uncle).”
“Crystal wanted to move to Nashville in 1998. When they were looking for roommates, I said ‘I’ll go.’ That was a fun adventure; I was there for three months.”
Ms. Taibossigai has always been fascinated with hair styles and would spend hours pouring over magazines. As she began to plot her way forward in life, she set her sights on becoming a barber and began to look for a school. “It was either Paul Mitchell or Vidal Sassoon,” she said.
She set about researching the two options. She first looked at the Vidal Sassoon School in Vancouver, but the financial bar to that path was set far too high. “Tuition alone was $20,000,” she recalled, and trying to find affordable housing in that popular city was impossible. “Funding from my band would not even cover the cost of a room, and that was 2004,” she recalled.
The Paul Mitchell School in Palmetto, Utah proved to be a more accessible option—and then there were the wild horses and mountains. “I fell in love with Utah,” she said. “I just applied and I got accepted and we drove down.” She completed her schooling there and went on to remain there for eight years.
Going to school in Utah was an interesting experience. Being so close to California, the school attracted a lot of “rich kids” who were less than serious. “It was just like something to play with, I think, you know, because they were rich,” she said. Many, she surmises, were just there to find a rich husband.
Ms. Taibossigai went on to have a baby, but her parents declining health brought her back to Manitoulin. “I was here to take care of them,” she said. Little did she know that both would be gone within a year.
“I came home and then right away, my dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer,” she said. “Then my mom, she just mysteriously passed on Easter that year. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.” Her mother was a nurse and had been teaching Ms. Taibossigai palliative care before she passed.
Following the passing of her parents, she moved to Ottawa in 2018. “I had a five-year plan,” she said. Ottawa’s drug problem was an eye-opener.
When she returned to Manitoulin this past year, she began the process of setting up her business and approached the owners of the Anchor Inn securing the basement shop where barber Doug Hore did business for more than half a century.
“I did a soft open this past November,” she said.
Ms. Taibossigai was welcomed into the location by none other than the “fiddling barber” himself. Mr. Hore, whose fiddle playing was almost as familiar a sight and sound to Islanders as that of his clippers, was delighted to pass on his clippers to a new generation.
So, why barber and not hairstylist?
“I wanted to be able to cut my son’s hair,” she laughed. But turning a bit more serious, she said that a Blue Jays baseball game in Toronto inspired that decision. “I dated one Native guy there, and he watched baseball. There was this one baseball player with the coolest hair, Donaldson, I forget his name—he was a Blue Jay. He was an actor, too (Josh Donaldson played the Viking warrior Hoskuld in the popular ‘Vikings’ series), but he always had the coolest hairdos, with the hair tattoos. That grabbed me, I said ‘I want to do that too.’”
Ms. Taibossigai received a lot of support from her family moving back to the Island. Her brother, Dane Bebamash, invested in her business. A bearded mannequin head in the corner of her shop bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Bebamash.
In setting her hours, Ms. Taibossigai said that she tries to take people’s work schedules in mind and matches it with her own circadian rhythm. “I’m a morning person,” she said.
The barber shop is open Wednesday to Saturday from noon to 8 pm, and then Sunday from 11 am to 7 pm.
