Returning home to the rez was the best decision I ever made

In the eleventh month of the pandemic, my 26-year-old marriage collapsed. 

I had been souring on Toronto for some time, having left home at the age of 17 to go to York University and never returning other than to visit. 

I was tired of living in the big city with the traffic and the noise and the sky-high prices. My marriage falling apart hastened the resolve that was growing in me – I just wanted to go home. 

Home is the historical and storied Haudenosaunee community of Six Nations of the Grand River, 100 km down the highway from Toronto, where my duties and responsibilities as a Mohawk Wolf Clan woman reside.

So in November 2020, my daughter and I packed up as much as we could carry in our car and drove to the home I grew up in. 

It turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made. 

My grandfather built our house in 1920 with the help of his brothers and several of the neighbourhood families whose grandchildren still live close by and with whom I went to Indian day school. My dad and his twin brother were born in this house. 

My grandmother Edith Anderson Monture, who was the first Indigenous nurse in Canada and an American army corps nurse in the First World War, designed the house's layout and every room is perfectly square with lath plaster under 100 years of layered wallpaper. Over the years it's been modified and modernized. 

The house sits on 40 hectares of land, of which a quarter is untouched woodlot. This was originally a working farm and we still have an old barn that used to house 10 head of cattle, plus store a lot of hay. 

Coming home to the rez was strangely a bit of a culture shock and yet extremely comfortable — like putting my moccasins on after a long day in heels. 

I am forever grateful my employer is flexible such that I was able to continue working from home, dealing with the terrible rez Wi-Fi but I never missed a day during that transition. 

Like dealing with the rez Wi-Fi, being back on the territory required some pragmatic adaptation and flexibility for my urban-raised daughter and me. 

For one thing, the majority of homes do not have drinkable running water at Six Nations. Yes, we did get a water treatment plant and yes, it's operational but hooking your house up if you're currently not on the system costs anywhere between $8,000-$10,000 depending on how far your house is from the water main.  

At the old farm house, we have a cistern that gets filled once a month as we do all the cleaning and bathing with trucked-in water. Rez connections are such that I text one of my cousins and he brings it on demand. Once a week, we fill two 22-litre water jugs for drinking water at a water supplier on Chiefswood Road (also another cousin).