Connecting with Rivers: Reflections from Moose Cree Youth Ocean Skye Phillips

When I first joined the project, my friend Denika and I stayed out in the bush for two days with WCS staff. During those two days, we helped the team and learned how to use the equipment, such as temperature loggers that track the water temperature throughout the year. We also got to use a small remote-controlled submarine to try and find one of the underwater receivers that had been lost due to extreme water and sediment changes caused by hydroelectric development on the rivers.

The receivers collect signals from sturgeon that have been implanted with special tags so the scientists can track their movements. When I finally got back on the river with the team last spring, I got a chance to watch them implant a tracker into a fish, which I also got to release back into the water later that day with Dr. Connie O’Connor and Jacob Seguin from WCS. It started with me holding the sturgeon with some special gloves that send electricity through the fish and make it go to sleep. This does not hurt the fish in any way and is actually safer than using anesthetic. This was probably one of the coolest things I have ever done in my life!

I also got to set up nets with WCS scientist Claire Farrell and Justin Simard – another Moose Cree youth. Some of the nets ended up breaking so the team and I spent a good two hours tying knots to fix the nets so we could go back out on the river and set them again. That’s how it goes when you are working on nature’s rivers.

It takes a lot for me to go away from home and do these trips to the bush to help with the project. But once I actually get out there, all my anxiety goes away and I just focus on the beautiful landscape of the southern part of the Moose River. The only thing that sort of clouds this experience is seeing the changes the hydroelectric generating stations are making to the environment around them. Often, we are working right below the Kipling hydro dam and it’s crazy to see how a dam can affect so many things around it. The one thing I noticed at Kipling is how fast the water level changes because of the station. The water levels get so low that you can walk across to an island that is in the middle of the river, and so high that you can’t even walk on the shore.

This project has also offered me some other great experiences, including going out with some other Moose Cree youth in the early spring on the Kapuskasing River to do some water quality testing. In August last year, I got to go on a trip to Sudbury and Oshawa with Claire Farrell and Annie-Marie LeBlanc and a group of five other youth. During this trip we went to Laurentian University in Sudbury to look at their environmental facilities and do some activities with insects that live in the water that you can’t really see unless you look closely. We also learned from some of the university students doing different types of research.

After that, we traveled down to Oshawa, where we got to meet some really incredible people: Keisha Deoraj and Nina Simmons from the Aquatic Omics Lab at Ontario Tech University. Keisha and Nina took us on a tour of the Ontario Tech University and Durham College. We got to sample mucus from small fish and used microscopes to look at fish eggs up close. After we did the science part of the trip, we headed to a bowling alley and huge arcade and spent time getting to know one another.

Getting to do this type of work makes me feel so good and happy inside -- I have never felt so passionate about something. I love all the opportunities that the different experiences come with. I'm so grateful to Claire Farrell and Jennifer Simard for inviting me to be part of this project back in 2019. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t think I would have found my life passion. I’m looking forward to doing more in the future and once I get my degree to be an environmental technician, I hope to come back to work for my band, hopefully WCS, and most importantly for these amazing rivers.