The calendar year that will soon be ending has provided, typical for Manitoulin Island, an endless supply of news for your community newspapers to report for you to read and also for the ongoing historical record of this unique place.
One recent paper, by way of example, gave an update on the current efforts in several Manitoulin communities to prepare to host several Eritrean refugee families who will come here from camps in neighbouring Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. On the same front page, we were able to report on two elementary school-age girls from Wikwemikong who had left that same week for Sweden to attend an international children’s conference on global warming where they were to participate in the weighty matter of drafting a children’s declaration that would be (and has now been) submitted to the United Nations Conference on Global Warming in Paris, the event that ended last weekend with the nations of the world pledging to cooperate in limiting the global warming trend and its associated effect on the environment, worldwide.
That particular paper comes to mind but virtually every week, Manitoulin Island offers up news that is significant and important on much more than a local level.
The Expositor’s and Recorder’s website www.manitoulin.ca bears this out for these stories are read online around the world. (In 2014, the website hosted 1.6 million page views by 600,000 plus unique visitors and we are on track to exceed these numbers this year.)
At the community news level, things have been busy as well. We mourned the passing last spring of Erma McAllister, who penned Spring Bay Rural Route for nearly 40 years. In fact, Ms. McAllister loyally submitted the news every week, right up to the week of her death.
These are clearly, big shoes to fill but after a while Dorothy Sloss took up the torch and so the Spring Bay News, as it’s now headlined, carries on. Thank you Dorothy, and thanks also to several people in neighbouring Providence Bay who have worked diligently to ensure the continuity of the Prov Bay News. Cheryl Sheppard is another newcomer who has taken on the Prov Bay beat and she is assisted by Ingrid Blay. Earlier this year, Nathalie Gara-Boivin had taken on the task from Gloria Sandercott so the community news from Providence Bay carries on, just as it has in these papers for more than 136 years. Dorothy Sloss and the succession of Providence Bay writers are each to be commended for volunteering to keep this tradition alive, and thanked as well.
They join Pat Hall, this newspaper’s stalwart scribe who makes certain that Tehk Talk arrives every Monday, by fax, handwritten in her easy-to-read style. Thank you Pat.
Just last week, our friend Rose Diebolt (who makes the time within her busy schedule to send the always-timely recipes for her Rose’s Recipes column) told us two ways to use cabbage. Rose continually, and in the nicest possible way, reminds us to eat foods that we should be eating and in the process, provides really interesting ways to prepare them. The cabbage recipes (from the December 9 paper) are a great example. Thank you Rose for doing your very best to encourage us in healthy cooking and eating.
On the sports side (exercise is also a healthy pursuit) there is very, very little information on how local athletes are performing that is not included in Andre Leblanc’s Page 7 staple, Ice Chips and Canoe Quips. His style is also very encouraging to young athletes and it is an honour to have this kind of thoughtful news in the paper week after week. Well done, Andre.
The agricultural industry on Manitoulin Island is certainly the charter industry here, one that continues to be of vital importance. Brian Bell is Manitoulin Island’s Agricultural Representative from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and his weekly column, Farm Facts and Furrows, is designed to alert the farm community about timely information farmers should have and where to find it. It’s often useful and interesting for the non-farmers among us too. Good job, Brian.
Our community libraries are expanding into real cultural hubs but their core business remains the lending of books. Two librarians, Debbie Robinson from Assiginack and Claire Cline from Central Manitoulin, go above and beyond their “day jobs” in sending interesting reviews of books in their libraries under the headings, respectively, Assiginack Library News and News from the Mindemoya Book Mice. Marian Barnett, board chair of the N.E. Manitoulin Public Library, has also taken on the reviewer’s role for her library.
Thank you all for letting us know about many of the “great reads” available locally to anyone with a library card.
Shelley Pearen is from Ottawa but her Manitoulin Island roots run very, very deep. It is Shelley we have to thank for the well-written historical snapshots of Manitoulin Island, particularly in its early days of European settlement. Her own literary historical works (the most recent is Four Voices, which tells the story of the 1862 Manitoulin Treaty from the perspective of four historical figures, three First Nation people and one of European ancestry) addresses Manitoulin’s entire cultural spectrum.
Recently, Shelley has been contributing fascinating observations made by the first Europeans visit to many parts of Manitoulin Island: the surveyors whose task it was after 1862 to set out townships and survey where their roads would go. Shelley has been compiling this information from these pioneer surveyors’ notes and each part of the series deals with a particular area that we now recognize as a modern municipal entity, or at least part of one that has at one point or another become a blended entity. Thank you, Shelley. Your passion gives us a view back to where we’ve come from.
Thanks also to historian Alexander (Sandy) McGillivray, author of the Little Current Story as well as many of the entries in the Manitoulin Genealogy Society’s first volume of Remember Me, the planned collection of biographies of as many as possible of Manitoulin Island’s veterans from the earliest days to the present. Sandy is always able to come up with the correct answer to a query about what was going on at some time in Manitoulin Island’s history. Thank you, Sandy.
The young women who write the news from Manitoulin Secondary School (Sandi Kuntsi – Kids in the Halls) and from Wikwemikong High School (Aurora Ominika-Enosse – Writings on the Walls) do a stellar job. Sandi, who writes every week, is a true reporter and, similar to Andre Leblanc’s sports column, she misses very little. Congratulations and thank you, Sandy and Aurora.
Manitoulin’s biographer, Petra Wall, has been contributing stories of the interesting lives of Island seniors, one per month, for more than a dozen years. Through these interviews, we can readily see how it was for young people who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, began their own homes and families in the 1950s and now look back on years of accomplishments, great and small. Petra does a wonderful job of presenting these stories and they are much anticipated each month.
The newspaper industry is nothing if not labour intensive and this extends to people in the community who, by way of doing their jobs, also, help very much in the publication of the news. These include the postmasters and rural route drivers who distribute the paper to subscribers week after week and the retailers who make space to sell single copies. It also includes the community service officers of our three Manitoulin Island police services who provide us with their news. Thank you to you all.
And thank you, loyal readers of these Manitoulin Island papers. We all do our best to give you a well-rounded picture of Manitoulin Island. As Manitoulin evolves, as things change, so does the nature of the stories.
It is a very organic institution, the newspaper publishing business, and there is nowhere we would rather be newspaper people than right here on Manitoulin Island.
Best wishes to everyone for a Happy Christmas and for the best of 2016.
Sincerely,
Rick, Julia and Alicia McCutcheon
Kerrene Tilson
Robin Burridge
Michael Erskine
Dave Patterson
Marilyn Harasym
Rebecca Wright
Carly Gordon
Tammy Albers
Debbie Bailey
Rosemary Debassige
Steve Richards
Wendy Holt
And from the Western Manitoulin office,
Tom Sasvari
