Ideas - Bringing a farm — and its philosophy — back to life

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Growing up with food insecurity, Julian Napoleon yearned to be a farmer. His great-grandparents once farmed on the Saulteau First Nations reserve in northeastern B.C. Over the decades, the farm was replaced by the bush, and the ideas of communal, seasonal living started to fade away. Five years ago, Julian moved to Amisk Farm to bring it back to life. This year the farm has produced food for over 300 Indigenous households, free of cost.IDEAS visits Amisk Farm to learn about rural food security, Indigenous food sovereignty, farming in the north, and what it means to come home and grow a new home in a radically transformed landscape. 

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. The lower field where my great-grandparents were farming, it had grown in with willows and popular saplings. And this was kind of a scrubby, secondary growth patch here. There was a bit of a natural opening. Five years ago, Julian Napoleon, moved home to Soto First Nation in northeastern British Columbia.

I just started living back here in a canvas tent to build a house, which I didn't know how to do, but to build a house. Once upon a time, his great-grandparents farmed this land. But over the decades, the farm disappeared and the philosophy Julian's great-grandparents lived by started to fade away to. Julian wanted to bring it all back to life. this kind of fall, and I just had hand tools, an old chainsaw, and started clearing. And the very first day, within 20 minutes of doing that work, a couple of the elders from my family just, like, showed up with their tools. And they didn't say anything.

They just started working beside me. We didn't talk until we were all so sweaty that we all just, like, simultaneously decided to sit down under a tree and drink some water. And then they're like, you're going to build a home here? Good. He knew he couldn't make a home here by himself. And I kind of like went around the reserve asking and like I assembled the most rag-tag crew

of people that had been deemed like unemployable by the band or, you know, by local businesses. And I said, you boys, like, and gals. There was a mixed crew. And they said, show up. I'll feed you hot food every day. And we might have to watch YouTube sometimes to, like, figure out what we're going to do, but we're going to build a house.

And by the end of it, we were just, like, building. Like, I remember when we put the last piece of tin on the roof, and we just all just felt this, like, shared celebration and achieving it. And one of those young men who was, like, 21, you like, looking right in the eyes, like, I could do this too. Yeah, you can. This is a Misk farm, and it kind of started as a dream,

and I was growing into a community. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad, and welcome to a Misk farm, just north of the 55th parallel. It's nestled by a river, 90 minutes west of Fort St. John, not far from the Alberta border in British Columbia. This place is an answer to questions Julian Napoleon

has been asking all his life about what it means to live in a community and how to reorient and move forward after radical loss and change. Ideas producer Pauline Holdsworth brings us this documentary. I mean, I always wanted to farm. It's funny, like if you ask you when I was a little kid, like what you're going to be when you grow up,

I was, I'm going to be a farmer. Always, always, always. And I think living a, kind of a childhood where I got bumped around a lot. And I didn't always have food security. And I think I kind of like envisioned a farm as like the ultimate form of like connection to place and instability and that abundance of food.

And I think I just like yearn for like I identified that. is a small child and yearn for it throughout my life. So my name is Julian Napoleon. I'm Daneza, Kree, and Ukrainian. I'm a father and an uncle and a son. I live here at a Misk farm in the heart of my traditional territory. And I really feel blessed and honored that I get to live this life here with all these people. And we have been able to grow food again.

I think beyond my great-grandparents' wildest dreams, we've distributed food into over 300 indigenous households this year free of cost. We've supported over 20 indigenous farm trainees in our food sovereignty training program. And I served hundreds and hundreds of hot meals. I visited Julian Napoleon on his farm on a bustling day at the beginning of fall. Construction on a commercial kitchen was underway. It's going to turn out like an episode of Red Green Show with these guys. And his crew was bringing in the harvest.

Well, we have the first big freeze on the two-week forecast right now. That's always a big kick in the butt for farmers. Is when you see, okay, we've got minus five coming, which means water lines put away and all crops harvested, garlic planted. Can you show me? what you have here. Yeah, the hoop house, I mean, it's been harvested mostly. The electric fence is off. We have a beaver problem. Amisk farm. Amisk is the Cree word for beaver. And so I kind of wanted to name this farm after the beautiful Amisk watershed that we're on, but also there's like

a mega beaver lodge there. And the first few years farming, they didn't know what was going on. They didn't care. And then they, like, developed a taste for kale. And it was like, they didn't like any kale. They liked, like, lacinata, you know, like the Tuscan black kale that was bred in Italy. They, like, really liked that. So they, like, literally harvested, like, 500 plants and stockpiled them at their lodge door for winter. And so I was like, okay, this is, this is a thing. It's like, Amis, we're really living up to our namesake, and that we're, like, sharecropping with the Amisk family here. And so we have been trialing electric fences,

and I'll admit I do trap and eat a few of them, but it's a give-and-take relationship, and we'll try to leave some stuff for them. And, you know, I took this away from them, so I owe them something back. Most of the food here is grown to give away, whether it's to beavers or to human community members. There's some gargantrish.

and zucchini, almost two feet long. Usually we have pigs. If we had pigs, that's where those would all be going. Like, these, these BMOs. These are huge. These are zucchini? Zucchini, like, I think people suffer from, like, zucchini burnout. And I think we're all suffering pretty serious zucchini burnout on the farm.

Celery, Ruta Bega, and radishes. These purple dicons. Oh, look at that color. They're just gorgeous. And a wide array of indigenous potatoes. All potatoes are indigenous potatoes. But we have been involved with the potato rematriation project with our dear friend Tiffany Travers of Forest Sister Farm,

as well as Jacob and Jessica and their family out at Tea Creek Farm and Kitwanga. And we've all, like, as indigenous farmers, have been like sharing and propagating kind of hard to find indigenous potatoes with wonderful stories behind them all and then trying to get them out to other community members to grow. When you were showing us the celery, I heard from somebody recently who had said that they paid $10 for celery at the store, which really speaks to what's happening with food prices.

Yeah, yeah. What are the kind of food prices here in this region? We're not as bad as the Arctic, but I would say we're sub-Arctic food pricing. Right? It's bad, but, more so than the bad pricing is like the poor availability you can't get fresh you can't get beautiful you can't get something that feels really special that you want to celebrate with people you love

I think there's like an upward cascade of things that happen when people start to really celebrate their food and and take it into their bodies and it's good for them it's good for the my body spirit you know all the cliche stuff but I think is true. Whereas you go to the grocery store in Chetwin and it's like dismal. Is the grocery store in Chetwin that other than this, that's where people would go? Yeah, yeah. Or like most people, they'll try to drive to a larger center. So a lot of people will go all the way to Grand Prairie in Alberta just to get groceries. So Grand Prairie, I mean, we drove through Grand Prairie on the way here. That must be like a

three or four hour drive from here. Two in a bit, yeah. And then also like we're super vulnerable to supply chain disrupt. in here. Like all the food in the wintertime is coming in on trucks. And it's happened multiple times in the seven or eight years since I moved home where like a truck won't make it due to road conditions. And that's like a once a week thing. And then there's just like absolutely no vegetables in town. Once a week, Julian and his farm crew give away fresh food to community members. The week I visited, he was preparing a moose meat giveaway for elders. It's an essential food here, but one that's also become harder to find.

The moose have responded to an ever-increasing amount of hunting pressure. The past decade has seen a real reinvigoration of, like, hunting in general, due to, like, some media personalities. And that really led to an unprecedented influx of urban hunters coming up here because, like, we're known to be one of the best hunting areas in the world. And, you know, for us, it's life. the annual moose is essential for every family. It's our lifeways.

It's pretty much our highest defining cultural practice. So it's been kind of challenging because the impact on the ground of that is that the moose now have shifted from normal behavioral patterns to extremely cautious, nocturnal behavior. So we actually just on Wednesday, we got back. My dear friend was visiting from Haida Gwai, and we spent 12 days living out in the bush trying to get a moose. And now they're in their mating season, so I'm calling. And I think I'm like a half-decent moose caller. I've called moose before. Can you give us an example of it?

Of course. You step right into that one. Well, I'll do, so like a bawling cow. I usually stick with cow calling. The bull call, many do it, but few do it well. The cow call, I think, is easier to get. But a bawling cow would be like a cow moose that is maybe getting pestered by a bowl

that she doesn't think has the genetics that are required for her progeny to have success in a world full of grizzly bears and wolves. The antlers, which is like a luxury organ, the whole thing about the antlers is it's showing your ability to thrive on the landscape and that's how much excess nutrition you can eat. Whoever has the most, you know, luxury organ

is definitely who you're hoping will sire your kids. Anyway, she's getting pestered by a small bowl. He doesn't have enough. And so she'll do the bawling cow call in hopes that a more worthy suitor might hear her plea and respond accordingly. And it sounds something like this. more or less.

You know, I've done it before and I've had a nice bull moose run in immediately and they're like calling back to me. But our time of this hunt is like, we're out there and we're doing it. And then every single time the bull waited until pitch darkness and snuck around us to wind us. We were just like sleeping in sleeping bags on the forest floor

in like the frost. and we had this very minimal kit out there, just like, we're going to do it. And we didn't even know that, like, this bowl had snuck within 20 feet of us. It was pitch dark. And then I, like, went to get a square of dark chocolate in the foil. It was like, crank, quink, quink. And it went nuts. It was right behind us, like, literally 20 feet.

Because in the morning, when it was light out, I tracked him. And he just did the largest. just and just erupted, thrashed a bunch of stuff and went running off and crashing through the forest. And we looked at each other. Oh, wow. So, yeah, but that was kind of our experience over and over again

is we had these moose running circles around us, and it was very humbling. You know, I've shared similar stories in the past, but it was once we completely let go. We hadn't given up, but we were holding on and we just like, let go. we just like took a rest the sun came out it was cooking hot and we're on the sandy beach on the banks of the river and right across from must you and we just knew there was a bull moose and they're literally breaking small trees

breaking as they do in their rut and sure enough he came out just like right in front of us and just completely offered himself and you know the moment that none of us love is like that taking of a life But there was something about it that felt like just such an offering. And that is our teaching. It's like if the animal wants to, it will offer itself to you. And your persistence and efforts and training and whatever you're doing, maybe they'll help you. But ultimately it's up for that animal. It's like very much a conscious being.

So I'm curious, what were the stories that you grew up with about your great-grandparents and what farming looked like here? Yeah, so my great-grandpa, Fred, who was the real farmer, he passed away the year before I was born. He was hit by a bus in Chetwin. He would grow kind of all over. Like, I wouldn't hesitate to call him a renegade farmer. And so this was like one of many plots he had around the reserve.

They went around on horse-drawn wagons. So he had like always some kind of like ram shackle kind of cart. He would piece together with whatever scraps he could find and would tow around the produce and stuff along this old wagon road complex that predates cars here. He would also like cut hay anywhere. So like one of his sons is now the oldest living. man that's a band member he was actually one of the fellows who showed up to help me clear my house building place he shared a lot of stories with me about yeah basically like anywhere where

there was grass he would like make them cut hay with scythe and bundle by hand because he like not only did he grow a lot of potatoes but he was like considered himself to be a cattleman and so right in the forest here he had about 30 head of cattle and it seemed like he was constantly creatively scheming on like anywhere that he might put by hay for them. So as a kid, I got to see him cutting hay the old way, you know, pulled by horse, and there's these blades that cut the hay down,

and there were strawberries in the field, like tons of wild strawberries. When he was done cutting hay, there'd be like strawberry juice dripping from the blades of his hay cutter. In the evenings he would hunt. So we'd be living off the land totally. This is Julian's dad, Art Napoleon. We didn't have electricity until I was four or five years old.

Cree was the primary language in the home, but they were trying to teach me English, the aunts and uncles, to prepare me for grade one. And so I grew up in two worlds. By the time I hit school, I realized, oh, wow, there's another world out there. Not everyone lives like we do. Hand-me-downs and moose meat and Bannock,

and spending half of our summers in the woods every summer at moose camps. You make your dry meat out there at camp, and it kind of becomes your multi-purpose institution, because not only is it your grocery store, it's kind of your church, it's kind of your medicine cabinet, it's kind of where you learn all about plants and berries, so you're learning the whole time you're out there. that's how I grew up.

So a little on the wild side, a little on the free-range side, a little on the traditional side. Julian grew up between two worlds in a different way, bouncing back and forth between southern B.C. where his mother lived, and up north with his father. Down south, it's just different. I just lived a very kind of conventional, non-indigenous life down there, which was wonderful. but we didn't have like a tight-knit large extended family group like you find in indigenous communities and as soon as I came here like we just have this like sprawling family that was like a unit you know of solidarity and support and I remember just feeling like that was something that had been like missing and I think that's probably not just my experience like I think as humans were meant to live communally. And so coming here for my first experiences as a young child, I just like latched

onto that. And like my first time I came here, everyone was in the Gawain, our creed word for meat rack, which is where we process and preserve moose meat. Everyone was in there and there had been a moose just harvested and everyone was feasting and celebrating. And I was just immediately a part of it all. There was no like othering. You said, ah, you're your art son. my nephew. Oh, you're my cousin. It's so good to have you here. And just to be drawn in and fed and to be part of something that felt such a deep connection to place. And I immediately just knew, like, yeah, this, I have a place. And this is it. And I have a community. And this is it. And all these things that I think are part of our natural human existence that have been undermined.

by modernity and technology were like really strong here in my child that the community was so small and tight knit and poor we were poor then no one had money people just like really still had a really strong land-based practice

and a really strong kind of standard of mutual support that was really honored and it's honored in our ancient laws like that way of being and you know in my life I've seen a lot of that erode. When Julian came north as a kid,

he started hearing stories about his great-grandfather, who was both a renegade farmer and a revered cultural knowledge-holder. And he got to learn firsthand from his great-grandmother. She held magic. Like, there's things about her.

I couldn't ever understand. But, yeah, she was that very same thing, like a full embodiment of cultural practice. Like, she lived and breathed it in a way that's gone now from this planet. You know, people say she didn't speak English. But, like, I lived with her for a bunch of my childhood, and through little slips. I came to understand that she spoke perfect English,

but she chose not to speak English. And she could speak fluently Cree and Deneza, which were her first language is. And she was just like the beating heart that held a family together. There's nothing more that she loved than just processing land-paced harvest or picking berries, you know, making dry meat, making moose hides. Like that was like our relationship. I would just like bring her something.

Bring her a bowl of berries. Bring her a grouse. Bring her a duck. And her whole face would just radiate, light and joy. And she would immediately go about processing it and cooking it. We wouldn't say anything. we would just kind of exchange vibes-based relationship. Pretty good.

When you think back to those early years with your great-grandmother and the stories that you heard about your great-grandfather, what are some of the kind of ways of being or philosophies that you think you inherited from them? Well, it's really hard to find the nuance, because there's this concept of, like, self-sufficiency, but, like, a community mindset of self-sufficiency, so, like, community self-sufficiency, like, that was what they lived. And then a very seasonally-based life, the season dictates, yeah, everything. Seasons are also everything to a farmer. And farming north of the 55th parallel means figuring out new ways of dancing with the seasons. The farm has crops you might not expect to see growing this far north, like corn.

It's known as the Gaspé Flint corn. And my understanding is that it's pre-contact, it was the northernmost corn bred by indigenous folks. I mean, it takes the name of Gaspé and Gaspizi, but it was growing far north out there. And I think it was growing throughout the Maritimes and into present-day Ontario. And it's really just like brilliant plant technology where they bred them to just grow about three to four feet tall and then immediately produce all their ears of corn. So we're like in a climate zone 3B in northeastern so-called BC. And we have a pretty short season here.

80 days is like a dependable. With climate change, we've been experiencing ever increasing growing seasons. But people generally will say you can't grow corn. here, and we got a really beautiful corn harvest. When I visited, Julian was drying corn to make tortillas. And make some tacos here with our own corn. Do you have a vision for what might go in the tacos? Well, you know, probably some moose carnitas.

We have a lot of tomatoes we harvested, so I'd probably make like a salsa fresca. And then a friend of ours is a goat farmer, so I make like goat yogurt. So I just like use that instead of crema. Maybe buy some store limes. Ooh, fancy. Gotta have it though sometimes, you know. It's like a little lime. It's so good.

The frost was inching ever closer. And Julian told me they were experimenting with how long they could push it. Yeah, it's kind of like a new frontier. Like I have no guidebook to follow up here for doing this kind of stuff in this climate. Like the further north you go, the more kind of experimental farming practice becomes. because like all of the guides and uh kind of conventional knowledge is based around a bit more of a natural diurnal cycle and then we get up here and like our day length in the summer growing season is crazy like we don't get light all night but there's there's a period around the summer

solstice where like it barely gets dark you know and stuff grows so fast and so like whatever the days to maturity are like these guidelines like don't apply here it's all this kind of trial and air. So Julian keeps learning by doing. As always, knowing there's only so much he can control. Is this the beaver dam right here? They try to build a dam here every year, yeah. But then spring high water blows it away.

But, you know, it's like, I think it's more of a meditation for them. Just like me, they got to learn to just let go, whatever they're holding on to you. And good things will happen. By the banks of the Amisk watershed in northeastern British Columbia. That's indigenous farmer Julian Napoleon. You're listening to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. This program is brought to you in part by Speck Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun,

reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a.coms are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cai to learn more. everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little.

You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.a. This is an interesting story down here actually this is asparagus a friend of mine katie peck who lives in the peace river valley part of their family farm when they first moved there they found this like historic homestead like probably a hundred years old down on the peace river and there was this asparagus that had naturalized growing there and that that ended up being within the flood zone once the sight sea was reached push through and so she like took it upon herself to like harvest a bunch of the asparagus seed and send them to different growers in her circle and so these ended up with me and now they're like

going off and next year will be the first year we're able to like get a huge harvest off of them because they did so well this year so yeah there they are uh survivors from the great flood and the legacy that that leaves on our landscape and growing here now in an interconnected waterway. Julian Napoleon's farm on the Soto First Nation Reserve in northeastern BC is embedded in a landscape that has been radically altered by three different hydroelectric dams. And this is, I mean, just on the drive here from Fort St. John this morning, when we passed the Sight C dam and the reservoir,

we passed the Peace Canyon Dam. We're not far from the WAC Bennett Dam. So this is a landscape that over the generations, I guess, has grappled with this a lot. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. All the villages of entire nations are underwater in that reservoir. Entire nations. The idea for a third dam on the Peace River first surfaced in the 1950s. The province settled on a location just outside of Fort St. John. They called it Site Sea. Much of this land would be flooded by the proposed site.

sea dam on the Peace River. That kicked off years of debate before the project was shelved. But in 2010, the BC government put the idea back on the table. David Cadman can't believe he's hearing this all again. It seems like things never go away.

They just come back in another form. The possibility of it really happening again kind of came to the table when I was down at UBC and living in Vancouver. But, yeah, it's always been. like a fear, I guess. Like we always knew as a child and stuff, like, well, one day they might try to do this.

Construction began in 2015. Despite legal challenges from local First Nations and farmers, BC Premier Christy Clark vowed famously to push the project, quote, past the point of no return. Ken and Arlene Boone, third-generation farmers in the Peace Valley, who stood to lose their home and their farmland to the flooding,

became two of the most visible faces in the fight against Sitesi. They started selling yellow wooden stakes to raise money for a legal challenge. Soon, there was a sea of yellow stakes on the Boone's farm, each with the name of a different supporter. Well, the stakes were right along the bank here. Yeah, all along this bank, so, you know, that would have still been high and dry. One of those stakes bore the name of then BC NDP leader, John Horgan. It was purchased in his name when he was the leader of the opposition.

Then, in 2017, the NDP came to power. John Horgan became Premier, and he went ahead with the project. Although Site C is not the project we would have favored, and it's not the project we would have started, it must be completed to meet the objectives our government has set. Yeah, we gave it back to him. I think we were down for one of the First Nations court proceedings, and we drove we drove a few stakes back in the lawn and ledge and it was all stakes from the various NDP who had been in opposition when they thought it was a good idea to buy a steak and then of course when they became government that didn't seem like such a good idea to them anymore and so we drove their stakes back into the lawn and ledge and the First Nations had one

of them great big checks to give their money back because it's a hundred dollars a steak So, well, and you've got to have some fun along the way, you know, it's, you know, it was a bit of a gimmick, but we did a lot of gimmicks. And apparently they didn't work, but we tried. When you fight so hard for something and then the fight is lost, it can break your heart and spirit. Ideas producer Pauline Holsworth visited the Peace Valley in October. 2025, just two months after the final site sea generating station became operational. So because this is my first time being here, it's hard for me to kind of imagine or picture what this used to be. So, okay, so it kind of gives a sense of where we are when you look to look at a

driveway that goes down into the water. So looking south towards where the Peace River used to be, We had 140 acres cultivated land on the south side of the highway before you got to where the Peace River was right at the... Those 140 acres of farmland are now underwater. To create the reservoir for the site-seed dam, B.C. Hydro flooded attractive land along the Peace River and its tributaries. The reservoir is now 93 square kilometers, about five times the size of the city of Victoria.

They started flooding on August. 25th last year. It was on a Sunday and they finished filling this reservoir by, what was it, about November, I don't know, 7th or so. It became a very surreal landscape and like a surreal

feeling, observing it in slow motion. It's just hard to believe that it was actually going to be gone forever. You know, like almost incomprehensible to think of, of, of a, yeah, landscape change on that scale

and the permanence of loss. Hard to wrap a little human mind around. I mean, the wildlife were really sent for a loop. And the one we noticed the most, the one species we noticed the most, that was the most confused, was beavers. You'd see beavers all over the place out there and swimming in all different directions.

And like you'd see a beaver way out in the middle, swimming the length of the reservoirs. Like, I think they just didn't know what to do or what was going on. Of course, their beaver houses and bank houses where they lived are all getting flooded. Their food caches that they'd worked on all year were all buried underwater, useless to them.

And, yeah, so they didn't know what to do, I think. We'd see beavers fighting, you know, up Cache Creek because they were getting into turf conflict. I guess, on where to settle down. And we've noticed this year, I mean, so there's still beavers out there, but a lot less beavers. I think a lot of them died last winter. You know, they just didn't know how to deal with the winter

and no home, of course. For Arlene Boone, the flooding has profoundly destabilized her sense of home. This was my grandpa's property, and grandpa came here in the late 40s and started purchasing property, and he built the house in the late 49. and so I'm third generation on the property here, yeah. So lots of memories.

What do you envision home meaning for you going forward? At this time, my home is where I can't live. The calendar inside the Boone's now abandoned home, still reads October 2022, the month they moved out. Now they live in an old schoolhouse on the property and look at their former home every day. They can't live there because of the risk of erosion.

But this is why we can't stay in our house, is because BC Hydro has said that this will just continue over time and work its way back. And the house is just too close. to the edge here. Arlene showed me a place where the soil under the ground had eroded five feet back, leaving a fragile

piece of earth hanging there with nothing to support it. So this is just like when the water is high. She now walks along the reservoir edge every morning. Are there ways that you've been trying to find sort of new routines or new rhythms with this very

changed place? Yeah. So. Going for morning walks is trying to find my piece with the water. I don't believe that humans truly have the capacity to, like, take away the beauty of nature, like, despite our heroic efforts at achieving it. I just, I'm, like, a firm believer in that the earth has, how could I say it? It just, it has a strength and a capacity that exceeds us.

at least I'd like to hope that you know not that we don't have to do what we can to be good stewards of lands and waters but I think humans are like really prone to a pretty egotistic perspective Julian described the decision

to go ahead with CITC as a breaking point in his life the classic narrative of like the indigenous youth who like feels the heavy burden of trying to be a land defender right and it's a it's a combative stance often and like I don't know if like anyone else could relate but like when I was a young adult I like felt so certain of things for some reason like I was like this everything was absolute and I felt like I knew what was right and wrong so I was

kind of like, bull-headed in a way you could say, and like very much in it, you know, in my own way, like, I'm a soft person, but like very much in my spirit was like a fighter spirit, and there was always this certainty. And then when the NDP got in and ended up still pushing through Sight C, yeah, that was a total breaking point for me. And when you fight so hard for something and then the fight is lost it can break your heart and spirit and i've seen it happen to many people i witnessed it in my own father in his struggles when he was a leader here trying so hard to protect special places and uh essential places for us yeah well even before sight see, I was, you know, a bit of a troublemaker.

I tried to stop a few things. I did things behind the scenes and things out in the open, like demonstration camps, actually evicting people from an area that they weren't supposed to be in. That kind of activism, and always at the negotiating table, fighting against industry at least for some kind of mitigation or environmental standards that go beyond the norm of what they offer. And so we were sitting down with companies to brainstorm these things

well before they started these agreements called interim agreements. Interm agreement measures. That was just a way, I think, to quiet people to keep them from rebelling. Let's give them some direct award contracts and some benefits so they'll not protest. And that's the time I left.

And so when I got back, I was shocked to see that that was an ingrained practice now. And then, of course, I was also helping during Site C. I did attend the protest camp and stayed with them and attending all the meetings to strategize on how we're going to stop these people, letters, articles, and we lost anyway. and so I don't even know if protests work anymore. But for Julian, this breaking point became a turning point. Once again, it meant letting go.

I guess something inside me fundamentally shifted, and that I realized that I shouldn't be so certain and absolute. And that was when I really shifted to less of an individual focus, or like, could even call it an ego-based focus. to like that real deep yearning for community and community-based work and like direct hands-on work that was like a shared process, not an individual process, not like me going to do another talk in front of people where I just have a microphone. He spent several years working with a Caribou stewardship program run by Soto and West Moberly

First Nations, protecting newborn caribou from predators and doing habitat restoration work. That includes the creation of a new provincial park that protects almost 200,000 hectares of caribou habitat. The caribou and my people are like inextricably linked and that we have this like history of dependence upon them. There was a time where they were so abundant that they were like one of our primary food sources and then they kind of went through this process of like navigating the pressures of development on the landscape.

and they lost so much, and so did we, along with them at the same time. And now, through working together with them, we've been able to achieve protection of this vast area that I have to mention is, like, one of the most spiritually significant places of our prophecy, of our people. Our ancestors spoke of time in the future of great challenge when we would have to retreat to our own safe haven where we would be safe and our needs would be met and it just so happens that that's

in the home of the caribou, that's our place too and that land that's now protected it covers this secret place of our prophecy. In my life it had received like when I was a kid they wanted to do some exploratory drilling up there for oil and gas and I remember and we had hundreds of people at a blockade camp

to stop them from going in because all our elders said we have to do this and I've never seen my community so mobilized and everyone went and lived out there for months I remember being there and feeling like that was maybe like the highest when we were all there united and living off the land out in the bush

that was maybe the highest achievement of like my grand vision of like community Julian also learned something from his years living with the caribou about how he wants to live. I felt this kinderness with them. They're so gentle and graceful and all these things that I could hope to be and to live. live so closely with them to, like, live relationally with, like, a herd of caribou. It was an incredibly quiet and deep and, like, remarkable and transformative time. And I think I took that time living up in the mountains with a caribou to kind of imagine, like, if I look back through my journal and my notebooks, like, everything that's here was a dream then in my writing.

Julian and his partner now live on the farm with their one-year-old baby. in the house Julian built with his community when he first moved home. Lately, he's been thinking a lot about how to build the kind of rural community where his child might want to stay. You just go through, like I went through a phase when I was in grade 12 or like, you know, coming out of high school or I wanted to get like as far away from home as possible. I wanted to be in the city.

It's drawn in like a moth to the bright lights. and yeah and it's just like it was it was a decade decade lost but you know he had to I had to do it and and I think that a lot of us that kind of grow up in small rural communities

I was just talking about this last night you know now that I have a kid I'm like what could I do what's the best way I could be like a loving supportive parent or how might I parent in a way that like my child would want to be here and not want to run away or like not be like longing for more or something else and obviously if they want to walk a different path I'll support it but but I couldn't help but hope that they would want to be here with us

to me that kind of raises questions about how do you build sustainable resilient rural futures Yeah, it takes a lot of people. It takes a whole community, right? And no single person could come anywhere near to meeting all the demand of the work that it takes. So I think, yeah, for me, like, I feel like the best I could do is just like a living practice. I just try to like live it and embody it and then, you know, hope that others might find some interesting. inspiration in that and then to try to like live with with joy that's why I was too reflecting on last night it's like what the best strategy I could think of to have my son inspired to be here and live a similar lifestyle is to to demonstrate an authentic joy in it all I said wow yeah dad was always so happy doing this Maybe I could be happy doing this too.

I don't know. It has to be authentic, though. Kids can see right through that shit. You were talking down where you by the river about this sense of maybe yearning or longing that a lot of people have. That perhaps comes from a lack of belonging or community or some sense of being grounded. the sense of kind of always reaching for something that's out of reach. And I wonder how you think about that and how we as a species find some way to maybe sit still or to meet that yearning or longing in some way.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's like the great work of life you're touching on. you hear all them laughing? That's the crew and they're all just laughing. That's everything. Do these folks want to say hi? Do you think? Hey, would you guys be willing to say hi? Hi. Come introduce yourselves. I'm Emmy. I'm the farm manager here and I've been working here since the springtime in May. How about you? My name's Gracie. I'm a farm hand and I've been working here since the middle of July. Gracie has been amazing. She is indigenous. She has strong family ties here on our reserve.

She originally came in to do the training program. My auntie lives out here in Moberly Lake, so I got a few family members that live around here and grew up here. But yeah, I was just visiting her for the summer and decided to look for work while I was here, and yeah, ran across from this. She just like immediately took to the work. So to finally have a young woman, indigenous woman from the community that wants to be here and farm with us for her livelihood is such an incredible win for us. Like my partner and I were so happy to have her. She's really, really just stepped into the role in a big way.

You're a farmer now. Yeah. Work full time here. Did you ever think about yourself as a farmer? before this? Was that on your radar? Oh, no. No, not at all, but it is like really fun. I enjoy it a lot. Gracie is one of three people working full-time on the farm, alongside Julian and his family. All three of them live here. It's wonderful to have them. I'm very, very grateful. They're dedicated and they see the vision to you and want to be a part of it. And that's all we could have ever

dreamed of is like having some other folks that want to do this with us. I think that ties into your earlier question about like the purpose of living and um i really think we're communal creatures like we're meant to live intergenerational as well which is like the other wonderful thing is having my dad come back and live like he lives there in his little off grid cabin and he's here julian's dad art who's the former chief of soto first nations spent 21 years living away he's put out six albums and he spent nine years hosting a cooking show show on APTN called Moose Meat and Marmalade. Then he decided to come home and join his son's farm.

He had these ideas related to like food sovereignty, food security, and I had similar ideas. So that was part of the lure to come home, was to work on that, get back in touch with the seasons and the cycles of the land, and then we, to reinvent our, to resurrect more our seasonal round calendar. You really have to pay attention to the land around you and what it's providing at certain times of the year. And then you just kind of get in tune with it. And after a while, you stop paying attention to the clock.

So that's been weird for me as part of me wants to embrace that. Wake up when I want to have coffee as long as. I want on my deck watching the sunrise, but then realizing, oh, damn, I agree to do this damn gig here, and I, yeah, it's a balancing act, and it's weird probably to be having to go through this at age 64. I jokingly, I think much to his dismay, call him our elder in residence. Now that he's a grandpa for the first time, this is his first grandkid, and he has a bunch of kids, but that's his first grandkid.

It still feels new, to be honest. I don't feel that much different. I'm fascinated by him. He's a cute little bugger. He's like stepping into that role in a wonderful way, which is great because he holds so much knowledge as well. Like he's fluent in Cree and is an excellent Cree teacher. He brings that also deep knowledge of like our indigenous law.

and these upper level Cree terms that kind of embody Cree law concepts like Mia Patasuan, which is like to live your life in a good way, that very much is kind of the purpose of life, which is being generous, giving to others, and not just other humans, but like the whole living world and the spirit world and the earth, just being a good person in your community, treating others with respect and kindness, conducting yourself honorably, and very much just having that giving spirit of generosity. That's kind of the seed that was planted, and then now, yeah, we're living it. From a Misk farm in Treaty 8 Territory,

surrounded by drying corn, yellow aspen trees, and a hint of frost in the air, that was Julian Napoleon. And this is Art Napoleon, from his album, Kreeland Covers. Here's his version of Tracy Chapman's Talking About a Revolution. This episode was produced by Pauline Holzerger. Special, soke, soke, soke, soke, soke, soke, soke, soke, soke, yeah, ma'amou, for introducing us to Julian Napoleon, and to Chris Wadskow for editorial guidance. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Technical production, Sam McNulty. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.