Last night I dreamed about the canoe in the sky...
Kuei!
My name is Laurie,
I'm an astronomer and member of the Innu Nation.
I grew up in Quebec, Eastern Canada, not far from here.
This land and the sky are very important to me.
They are part of the Innu identity.
People used to travel great distances through the seasons,
relying on hunting and fishing.
As they moved around the land,
the stars moved in the sky.
In the late Autumn,
the Sun sets earlier and earlier and nights are growing longer.
I like seeing the reflection of the sky on the water.
It's like a mirror of the world above us.
And yes,
there is a canoe up there in the stars
with very special paddlers inside.
Learning about this canoe taught me many different things.
Long after sunset,
when the sky is quite dark,
you can watch these three bright stars neatly lined up.
People used to see these stars as part of a larger group,
the Wolverine spirit, Kuekuatsheu,
steering an enormous canoe.
The Wolverine is not alone,
in the North,
at the front we see a small furry animal,
Ucheck, the Fisher.
This Celestial Canoe is gigantic,
much larger than any canoe you've ever seen.
Canoes on Earth move through the water,
but this canoe moves through the sky,
more slowly and more predictably.
As Winter arrives,
the Wolverine makes its appearance earlier and earlier each evening.
By the time the nights are at their longest,
soon after sunset,
the Celestial Canoe is now floating on the horizon.
It will remain visible all night.
In the modern world,
we care about minutes and seconds,
but here what matters is the cycle of seasons and the changes in nature.
If you watch the canoe,
night after night,
you'll notice something...
The Wolverine appears higher each night.
A canoe on Earth slows down when it turns strongly in the water.
Similarly, at the beginning of the night when the canoe in the skies
starts tipping towards the horizon,
it announces that the days will also slow down and get longer.
Spring is coming!
For centuries, our ancestors used the Celestial Canoe
with its Wolverine in the back and its Fisher in the front
to measure time.
People used to share this ancestral knowledge between friends and loved ones,
but not anymore.
It's only recently that I was lucky enough to read about it.
I'm worried that all of this will be completely lost if we don't hold onto it.
Perhaps it should be taught in school.
I am glad I could share this story with you.
Each of us can do our own part to keep this knowledge alive and pass
it along to future generations,
so that we can all navigate our way back to the sky.