HERITAGE

At its core, heritage is what we inherit from the past, what we value in the present, and what we believe is worth carrying forward. Even the province defines it that way, cultural heritage as what we choose to hold onto from our history and what we want to protect for whoever comes after us. So beautiful. And there's something distinctly Canadian to me about that idea, that heritage isn't something written down in a museum somewhere, it's lived, out on the land, passed hand to hand.

Growing up, heritage to me wasn't hunting. I didn't even know that was a thing people did. I knew fishing. That was it.

My mom and I lived with my grandparents when I was young, so by the time they moved up to McKellar Lake, I wasn't just visiting for a couple weeks in July, I was raised there. What we always called the cottage was really just their house, and my whole childhood ran through it, summer into winter and back again, year after year, the way so many Canadian childhoods do.

Summers had a rhythm to them. Raspberries picked straight off the bush and eaten standing right there before I ran back to whatever game I was in the middle of. Raiding my grandma's garden for whatever was ready that day. Fishing off the dock, over and over, because that was the one constant the whole season leaned on. Swimming until I was pruned, loons calling somewhere out on the water in the evenings. And every so often, a trip into Parry Sound with my grandma to thrift and shop at the health food store, my favourite way to spend an afternoon with her.

Then the lake would freeze and winter became my grandfather's season. Ice fishing with him. Tapping trees for syrup and riding out on the old Ski-Doos to check them, the red one and the yellow one, both from the eighties. I can still smell the memory of them running, that particular cold, clean smell of a Canadian bush winter that doesn't exist anywhere else.

It was on one of those rides that the moose happened. I was singing inside my helmet, not paying attention, and I slammed straight into the back of my grandfather's sled. No damage, just a bump and two people sitting in the snow trying to figure out what just happened. What happened was a moose, massive, standing right in the trail ahead of us, in no hurry to go anywhere. We waited. He watched us for a while, decided we weren't worth the trouble, and moved off into the bush. My grandfather and I just sat there in awe. I still think about how big he was.

The rest of my childhood filled in around those two seasons. A radio in my bedroom that barely picked up a signal. A satellite dish the size of a small car that somehow got us the Disney Channel, which felt like a miracle at the time. A typewriter I'd disappear into for hours, because I've always loved writing, long before I ever thought I'd be running a brand that required any of it. Tapes on long drives. Cousins showing up for their own stretch of summer.

Local friends who came up to their family cottages and became the kind of friends you only see three months a year but somehow pick right back up with, every time, like no time passed at all. A few campgrounds nearby that my parents took me to over the years, more lake time stacked on top of lake time.

That was heritage, long before I had a word for it. Water, dirt under my fingernails, a fishing rod, and family who built their whole year around the outdoors without ever once calling it that.

Hunting sat outside all of it. We hit a deer once up at my grandparents' cottage, and my grandfather dropped me off back at the house while he and the neighbour went to track it and, if it was injured, to put it out of its misery and take it to the butcher, which they did. That was as close as hunting came to my childhood.

It wasn't until later in my adult life that I found out my dad's family hunted. My dad legally adopted me as a child, he's Tyendinaga Mohawk, and some of his side hunted. Not him though. He and I only ever fished, mostly bass, sometimes salmon down on Lake Ontario. I grew up in Brampton, so we'd head down to Oakville or Burlington in the summer to fish for salmon. That, camping trips, and either St. Thomas to see my grandparents there or McKellar to see the others, that's my heritage too, even if none of it involved a rifle.

I didn't pick one up myself until 2018. Eight years ago now. And the longer I do this, the more I've come to realize that heritage isn't always something you're born into or something that gets handed down to you. Sometimes you start it yourself. You build it from scratch, maybe later than everyone expects, and it counts just as much. Sometimes you're the one who starts what eventually gets passed down.

Heritage is so many different things to so many different people. A dock and a fishing rod for some. A rifle passed down for others. A recipe, a language, a piece of land, a story told enough times it becomes part of you. It doesn't have to look the same for everyone who carries it. It just has to be true.

So don't judge someone else's path because it doesn't look like yours. Hunting was never meant to consume an entire identity. For those of us hunting under provincial licences, with tags and set seasons, there's a whole lot of life lived in between.

That's my experience, not everyone's. Indigenous harvesting rights can also operate differently from provincial licensing and season frameworks.

Eight years into this, I'm still mocked by people who've never met me. I'm still told I know nothing about hunting, that I'm a fraud, based on nothing more than someone else's opinion of who I am. That's not criticism. That's bullying. And I'll never understand speaking that way about someone you've never even met.

Everyone's path here looks different, and everyone's path deserves room to exist without being torn apart. Mine started on a dock in McKellar Lake, long before I ever held a rifle. That's a Canadian story, built the same way so many of them are, on water and land and family, not paperwork. That's my heritage. 🇨🇦

Outside Looks Good On You™

Until next time,

Dana