5  Métis in Lethbridge A Conversation with Elder Roderick McLeod

MONIQUE GIROUX: Could you start by telling readers about yourself and your kin: where you grew up and where your Métis family is from?

RODERICK MCLEOD: I was born on August 15, 1936, at Vancouver General Hospital. My mother and dad lived in a small lumber town called Giscome, British Columbia. It was twenty-nine miles northeast of Prince George, on the Canadian National Railway line. Giscome was a company-owned town, with a population of about four to six hundred people. The road from Giscome to Prince George, although only twenty-nine miles, could take anywhere from two to four hours, depending on the time of year. The spring was just terrible. Parts of the road were corduroyed,3 and some places had Caterpillars to pull you out when the flooding was going. The summer brought very bumpy roads, and the dust made it difficult to see when meeting oncoming traffic. We often had to stop until the dust settled. And then, in the winter, the roads weren’t sanded like they are these days; the steep hills into Prince George made the trip impossible. I had grandparents in Vancouver (George and Josey Hutton, from Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire, England),4 and so my parents decided that my mother should stay with my grandparents so she could be near a hospital to have me.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Were there no midwives in Giscome?

RODERICK MCLEOD: No, there wasn’t, no. And so my father (John Edward McLeod) was born on a Hudson’s Bay post, called Rapid River post (on July 2, 1885). Rapid River post is not too far from Lac La Ronge, now called La Ronge, Saskatchewan. My father spoke Cree and I strongly suspect Michif because every once in a while he’d use some French-type words.5 His father, Angus McLeod, was an interpreter and then a clerk.6 He was born at Rapid River post as well (in 1847). He spoke eight different languages. When Angus and the family were in Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, they just spoke Cree around the house. All the trappers spoke Cree, both white and Indigenous. When Angus and his family moved to Prince Albert so the children could have schooling, my father didn’t speak English at all. He had to learn English. Angus McLeod’s father (my great-grandfather) was John McLeod from the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. He was a fisherman for the North West Company. My grandfather Angus’s mother was Mary Mckenzie dit Rivière. She was able to get Métis scrip.7

MONIQUE GIROUX: Where was her family from?

RODERICK MCLEOD: She was Métis, and, I don’t know, she came from of course First Nations, probably Cree. Yeah, so on the other side, the Mckenzie side, that’d be on my dad’s mother’s side, Roderick Mckenzie was the first one to come out to Canada. He worked with the North West Company and was first stationed at Attawapiskat in Ontario and then later on at Pic (a North West Company post on the northern shore of Lake Superior) and then Thunder Bay. When the Hudson’s Bay and the North West Company amalgamated in 1821, he was sent to Île-à-la-Crosse, where he finished his career. He had a dozen children. His wife, her name was Angelique, came from Lake Nipigon. That was one of Roderick’s postings. They were married for fifty-six years, so he was really devoted to her. She was a daughter of a chief. Everyone hates that story; people say their ancestor was a chief (and it’s not true), but in this case, it was recorded by the Hudson’s Bay Company and by others too. Some of Roderick and Angelique’s children worked with the Hudson’s Bay Company. One of their children, Samuel, became a chief factor, which was not too usual for a Métis because of the power they had. There were only twenty-nine chief factors in all of Canada. They were in charge of a huge territory, right across Canada and right down into Washington and Oregon State. That was a big responsibility. A chief factor would get paid quite well and would also have shares in the Hudson’s Bay Company. When Roderick retired after fifty-six years with the Hudson’s Bay Company, he didn’t go back to Scotland—never did go back to Scotland. He retired and lived in a place they called Caberleigh Cottage.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Where was that?

RODERICK MCLEOD: In Manitoba. Elizabeth Arthur wrote an article on Angelique’s children.8 But there’s no mention of the feelings of Angelique or anything that she said at all. Nothing. You know, having twelve children but not saying “this is my favourite” or “this is a terrible loss I had.” There was just nothing about what she said. And it seems to go all the way through the history of Métis women. Have you ever heard of Reverend Evans, going way back to the 1840s or something?

MONIQUE GIROUX: No, I haven’t.

RODERICK MCLEOD: One of my relatives on the female side helped him translate the Bible into Cree syllabics. This was one of my female relations who helped him. But there’s very little on the female line.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Why is that the case?

RODERICK MCLEOD: I think it was just part and parcel of the times, for one. And probably in some cases, it wasn’t just that but because they probably just spoke their native language, not English. But the thing is, when Roderick McKenzie married Angelique, it’s written, just a snippet in Arthur’s article, about “a silver set in an elegant home in Toronto.” And that’s something from Roderick. That silver set would be used on a Hudson’s Bay post. The big thing was that Angelique would have had a lot of power because they were in a separate room, and they were served with linen and silver and the whole lot, and she was there. So they were very high up. It wasn’t until about the time of George Simpson’s wife coming over, that was kind of right near the start of when white women started coming in, that’s when the prejudice started.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Before that, Indigenous women would have been seen as desirable wives.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, so this is what I’m gathering. I could be wrong, but I’m not hearing too much about the female line. Have you read the book Many Tender Ties?

MONIQUE GIROUX: Yes, by Sylvia Van Kirk (1983). So there are scholars who are writing about Métis (and other Indigenous) women and addressing the way that they’ve been left out of historical accounts.

RODERICK MCLEOD: And the worst part of it is that women did such wonderful things. Mary (Mary Mackagonne, a Cree woman), the wife of Peter Fidler, she really helped him a lot. (Their descendant, Eliza McLeod, née McKenzie, was my paternal grandmother.) Peter Fidler, he didn’t know the customs and whatnot. Even if the woman came from another area, they would soon get to talking with the other women and would get to know the customs. And they were the ones who made all the moccasins for the fort. They were the ones who were out there snaring rabbits and fishing and keeping them alive when big game was scarce.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Can you tell me about why your parents ended up in Giscome?

RODERICK MCLEOD: My father started a homestead in 1906 in Shellbrook, Saskatchewan. The reason they moved to Shellbrook is my grandfather, Angus, left the Hudson’s Bay Company to work as a free trader. He backed the Liberal Party heavily. He thought that he would get some type of a post out of it, a government post out of it. I don’t know what he expected, maybe on a reserve or only the good lord knows, but he lost everything. That was in Prince Albert (Saskatchewan). So then my father and my uncle Buck, William Roderick, went into homesteads near Shellbrook. They had adjoining homesteads and worked together. Then my dad got married to my mother in 1917. My mother remembers going out to the homestead in a Red River cart and could remember the squeaking of the wheels. Then he had his crops wiped out in 1922, 1923, and 1924. Some people had moved from Shellbrook to Giscome, British Columbia. They wrote and said there were lots of jobs out there. That’s why he moved.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What happened to the crops?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Hail.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Three years in a row?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Well, hail and something else, I guess. Poor crops. So he moved out there, and he was forty years old. He worked in the Giscome sawmill doing different jobs, and then he became a lumber grader, which wasn’t a supervisory job, but it was very, very important that lumber came by him. Just like a sidewalk. It was a huge, big mill, used to cut about 140,000 board feet a day. He was grading, and every board had to be turned over and graded, and that’s where a lot of the money was made because if you graded it down, it’s lower-priced lumber. But if your grades were on and you were able to pick all the good lumber, then the company would make much more money. He worked until he was seventy-five. He had a terrible limp because of being in an accident with a steam engine while thrashing in 1903. There were only three people who ever got a pension from the mill, and he was one of them. He never missed a day.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What was it like being Métis in Giscome?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Well it was kind of a funny thing because we didn’t use the term Métis, or “half-breed” as it was then. It was just an unspoken law around our place that we never mentioned that at all, even at home. Never mentioned “half-breed” or “Métis” or anything. But my father would quietly teach me things like tracking, bird recognition, bird flights. He would tell me about how some birds would flap three times and then drop and then up, and he taught me about berries and herbs. So I’d learn quite a bit like that. And he taught me how to call geese and muskrats. And we had a big garden.

MONIQUE GIROUX: He found ways to teach you these things without telling you that this was Métis knowledge?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, he never said that, but he told me some of the stories, like about Wiisakaychak.9 But I don’t remember him telling me about being Métis, and he never spoke Cree, never spoke Cree for years. I guess since he left Saskatchewan.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Were there other Métis families in Giscome, or “half-breed” families, that you were aware of?

RODERICK MCLEOD: There were, and the strange thing about it is that the superintendent, the owner of the mill was Métis. The whole town was owned by the company. The superintendent lived in a house on a hill, and it looked right over Giscome. He could see what was going on, of course, and had all kinds of power. Everyone was in awe or fear of him. He could hire and fire and help set wages. He had people go up to him and ask for wood, time off, whatever it was, and he was a prominent person in the town. And the two men who were in charge of the bush, the bush bosses, were Métis. Everyone knew they were Métis, but no one said anything, at least to their faces. They had a lot of power because it was a huge, big lumber area, and they would ship out forty boxcars of lumber a month, so that’s a lot. And so they had all this power. But no one mentioned that they were Métis. And then a friend of ours was Métis, and when the Second World War started, he left. He never came back for five years. There were a couple of Métis like that, and then there were some other families there who were Métis but just called themselves French. And anyone who was kind of dark in those days, they were always called French, and everyone accepted it. And then, at school, every student was required to fill out a school form with information like age, home address, grade, and racial extraction.

MONIQUE GIROUX: And did you?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Oh yes.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What did you put down?

RODERICK MCLEOD: I just put down part Cree because I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t even mention it at home, I don’t think. I was scared stiff about it, but I just did it.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What made you decide to put it down if you felt like that?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Well you had to.

MONIQUE GIROUX: I know, but you could’ve lied.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, I guess I could have, but I didn’t, and so we never really talked about that sort of thing. People were very, very racist at that particular time. There was a railroad going right through, and the men who worked on the railroad were usually Slavic; they’d be Ukrainians and Poles and Bulgarians. And they were really looked down on. Really, really looked down on, and they were called terrible names. But it was terrible for Indigenous people. First Nations were looked down on, and Métis were looked down, or half-breeds, as they were called. They were really looked down on as being inferior in every way, shape, and form. And stereotyped as lazy. I learned early that it was not wise to say you were Métis because you would be picked on or marginalized. It was really, really bad, so you just didn’t mention (being Métis), both then and when I was in the air force. You didn’t know what type of harm it would do you; that’s all.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Right.

RODERICK MCLEOD: And then of course they found out later. If you got drunk, then it wasn’t because you got drunk like the rest of them; it was drunk because you were a half-breed or an Indian, as they called us.

MONIQUE GIROUX: You were seen as representing all your kin regardless of the situation.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, oh yeah, and when people got angry. As long as you were on the good side of people, you didn’t seem to have much problem. When I worked at the camp in Atlin (British Columbia), it was very prejudiced too, and they would talk about First Nations. They would call them very bad names. And right in front of me.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Did they realize at that point that you were Métis?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Oh yeah.

MONIQUE GIROUX: They didn’t care that they were saying offensive things right in front of you?

RODERICK MCLEOD: No. They just sort of put you in the same bracket. Métis were all just the same (as other Indigenous people).

MONIQUE GIROUX: Can we talk about your life in Lethbridge? When and why did you move here?

RODERICK MCLEOD: I had been divorced for some years and was living in Vernon, British Columbia, working in a placer gold mine in Atlin in the summer. This was a few miles south of Yukon. It was an old mining town started in about 1898. It’s still being heavily mined. I received a phone call from my daughter, my youngest daughter, Una. She was living in Diamond City, just outside of Lethbridge. She said, “Dad, you’re working up in a mine, and you’re working up there for six or seven months of the year. Why don’t you move out here so you’ll be close to the grandchildren?” So I did. Una got the house. She picked it out and I did everything by phone. Got the house and moved out. It was an old house.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Where was it?

RODERICK MCLEOD: In Diamond City. And if it wasn’t for the termites holding hands, it would’ve fallen over, but it was cozy. Then at that particular time, I was off in the winter; I did different jobs around. But in the winter, I happened to read the paper, and a notice said that a Professor Russel Barsh was doing research on Métis in the area.10 He had a student by the name of Ellen Gibbs who was going to assist him, and it was going to be held at the Lethbridge Public Library. I went to the library, met him and Miss Gibbs, and then I met some Métis. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Métis Local here.11

MONIQUE GIROUX: What year was that?

RODERICK MCLEOD: It’d be 1997. Probably that winter after I’d moved out to Diamond City. So I went down to the Local to do research on my family because I hadn’t done it. They had some great books there, like Gail Morin’s books. I did the research there, and then I got my Métis card. When I was down there doing the research, I also sent for my own books. Then in the winter, I’d go down there and volunteer. I became heavily involved in the Local and then became an elder. We had barbecues sponsored by Sobeys or Save-On-Foods. We’d do stuff like that, as well as meetings and outings. I just gradually got in and started attending the (Métis Nation of Alberta’s) Annual General Assembly. I also began building a display of Métis artifacts. I took my display around to schools and such and slowly built it up.

MONIQUE GIROUX: So the Métis Local (in Lethbridge) was important for you in terms of connecting and finding that aspect of your identity.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah it was, and you know, for the first time, I sort of felt like, it really made me feel really proud and good—once I started doing research on the family, what they’d done and then just being proud of who I was and knowing about the history and being able to answer questions about my family and history.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Did you try to connect with or learn more about your Métis history before you came here?

RODERICK MCLEOD: I’ve always been proud of it, but it was difficult because other people were reluctant when I would meet them years before in British Columbia to show it. It was always sort of a hidden thing. When I worked up in a camp (in Atlin, British Columbia), they were very prejudiced too. I worked there, but all the crew, they were very prejudiced. And my own family as well. They didn’t want to have anything to do with Métis culture and history. I brought up books and documents, and they weren’t interested at all. But now, of course, I’m really, really proud of it, and it’s slowly opening up a bit.

MONIQUE GIROUX: You’ve also been involved in many other Indigenous organizations in Lethbridge.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah. While volunteering with the Local, I happened to meet the executive director of Aboriginal Employment, an organization that funds schooling and helps Aboriginal people find jobs. With their support, I was able to go to Lethbridge College to take a child and youth care course and then a night school course on fetal alcohol syndrome. I then worked for Family Ties Association for many years and took on a youth full time (in my care). This youth has been with me for over fourteen years. And then I belong to the Aboriginal Council of Lethbridge, and I was instrumental in starting this housing right here (the Aboriginal Housing Society). Although a lot of other people did the big heavy work, I was always great at coming out with bright ideas. They would come out by doing the hard work. I also served on several boards—Métis Local 2003 as an elder, the Friendship Centre, Opokaa’sin, and the Aboriginal Housing Association. And I do volunteer work as a recruiter for the Bold Eagle program and go to Canadian Forces Base Wainwright to speak about Métis history and culture for about 150 Indigenous youth army recruits. Then I worked at the university for quite a few years.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What kind of work were you doing there?

RODERICK MCLEOD: At the university? I was doing Métis history and culture, that type of thing. I would put up my display on different days, and then I would go in and invite students. It was just volunteer work. Then later they hired me at the college. And then, I did a bit of work at the university, got called in every once in a while. Martha Many Grey Horses, she used to call me up quite a bit, and Elizabeth Ferguson, who worked there before her at the Gathering Space. I would go to different functions and openings.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What kinds of challenges have you faced as a Métis person in Lethbridge?

RODERICK MCLEOD: The main difficulty is that people at all levels of society don’t have a very good understanding of who the Métis are. I spend a lot of time explaining who the Métis are. I think we don’t have enough Métis working with the Local. We’ve had very few Métis in that there were a lot of people who were interested, did a lot of really good work, but we didn’t have that, we don’t have that many that it’s got that sense of history or sense of feeling and stuff. They’re kind of looking at it more like a club. It’s called an association, which is going to be changed fairly soon. We’re going to be just a Métis nation. But they don’t have that same deep feeling that we are a nation of ourselves and whatnot. They don’t seem to have that.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Why do you think that is?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Well, they just don’t know. They don’t look it up; they don’t study it. They don’t know any of the stories, or none of them have been handed down. I had quite a few handed down to me in a quiet sort of way. But many don’t have that kind of thing.

MONIQUE GIROUX: There’s been a disconnection with the culture for a long time.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, there has; there really has for a long time. And then, like you were saying, some of the challenges, you know, I talked to a young person, and he said, “It’s kind of hard going into a Métis meeting because of so many old people there.” And I said, “You know, I really agree with you.” I’ve always been a great believer because the Indigenous way is a circle, a balance of young and old, with everyone included. I told him, I said, “I don’t blame you at all. You go in there and look at all the people and see liver spots through their gloves, and you want to have more young people there and that balance.” And it is the youth who will carry on the traditions of the Métis people. So we’re really lacking in the youth, and we’re lacking in the culture and everything that we should be having. It’s hard to get the right people to teach the right things. For example, they said they had someone to teach Michif years ago, and we were all excited about it and whatnot. And the person would come down. I got a hold of the person who spoke Michif, and he said, “No, everyone’s got this wrong; all I do is teach the children a few words like ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye.’” And that’s all he did. People also don’t understand Métis culture. They’re trying to use First Nations things. There is certainly nothing wrong with First Nations things, but we are not First Nations. So there’s a real lack of feeling for what it is.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Having lived in Lethbridge for a couple of years, I sense that Métis are often not recognized and not acknowledged here. Have you gotten that sense?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Oh gee, really a lot. You go to places, and it’ll say that it’s for Indigenous people, or they would say Aboriginal people. And you’d go there, and there isn’t one word mentioned about Métis. As a Métis person, you don’t know if you are eligible for something or if you can participate. And this happens over and over again. One time, our president had to send a letter to the mayor of Lethbridge saying that we are a part of the Indigenous community. Of course, she used Aboriginal at that particular time. So this would happen, and then we ran into the same thing when we were dealing with social services. I made a complaint, and they invited me up to speak to the board. And I told them, I said, “You have things out here. Are they for Métis?” And they say, “No, they’re for Aboriginals”—because they don’t, they couldn’t understand, and it’s always confused me because people, especially with their education, they don’t understand. I don’t expect them to know all the history of the Blackfoot people. I don’t expect them to know everything about the Métis. But you should know the difference anyway if you live in the area especially and if you are educated. I was in a school with my display, and one of the teachers came over and asked me what country I came from. And I had one instructor from the college, when he heard Michif, he said, “Oh, that’s slang French.” It kind of hurts a person’s feelings, you know, all these different things.

MONIQUE GIROUX: That’s something that people one hundred years ago in Manitoba talked about. This idea that they had to have their “French fixed” when they were speaking Michif. So it’s continuing.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, oh yeah.

MONIQUE GIROUX: That seems to me to be a pretty big challenge, and it’s something that Métis people have said for so long, that they don’t “fit” in First Nations spaces and don’t “fit” in white space. So what you’re saying here is that this has continued in Lethbridge, in terms of people not knowing, Métis people not knowing whether they are included in spaces that are intended for Indigenous people.

RODERICK MCLEOD: And then I had a person, she meant really well, but she was on the stage, and it was at a big function. And she stood up there all the time with her hand like this, which is a sign for “thank you,” but you don’t hold it there for forty days and forty nights. She did this all the way through, and it’s not our tradition to do that. And they think that, you know, sweats and smudging is part of our culture, and it’s not, although sometimes people still use it. It’s hard to define a lot of things about Métis because of the huge area we cover. We’ve developed different ways of doing things in different areas. Sometimes if we’re close to a reserve, we could be following a lot of their ways. Same with religion. People say, “Well, what religion do we have?” And I say, “Well, it depends on the area because we’ve got everything from Jehovah’s Witness to Anglican and Roman Catholic, Methodist.”

MONIQUE GIROUX: Which is a really important point if you understand that the Métis are a nation, right? There is variation within a nation. It’s not just cultural; it’s also political.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Well, yes. And many times, we’re left right out, not invited to things at the college and university and at public meetings. In many public meetings, officials, when speaking about Indigenous people, do not mention Métis. It’s not people going out and saying, “We’re going to get those, we’re going to cut people out or do something [or band against them].” They just don’t know. A lot of times, we have to sort of go in there to say who we are. And then it makes us look, it’s hard to do some of these things without looking confrontational over it. It’s been a bit of a fine line. A while back, I was consulting at the college. They had four of the movers and shakers there. They said that Métis shouldn’t be included. And they were all what I thought were lifelong friends. That’s when I stepped down and was badly hurt over that.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Yeah, for sure.

RODERICK MCLEOD: But we received a lot of good; we’ve really done a lot individually in the city over the years, you know, on different boards and doing different things, you know, with the early agency and interagencies. We’ve done work at the Friendship Centre too. It was a Métis and a First Nations lady that started the Friendship Centre. We’ve done a lot like that. And again, like I said with housing. And one of our past presidents received the Distinguished Alumni Award at the college. We’ve done quite a bit.

MONIQUE GIROUX: You’ve made an impact on the community for sure.

RODERICK MCLEOD: And we’ve had at least two bank managers who were Métis in town. So that was kind of a good thing. We’ve had teachers, professors. But I think what we have to do is show ourselves more in the community. If someone does something within the community, get their name in the paper, you know, if they’ve done something. Or the group itself. So we’re acknowledged more out in the community. So we’re seen more. A lot of people, we just, I don’t think we’re understood. People don’t know who we are, and it causes us problems. But it is difficult to sort out or try to correct without, you know, it soon becomes argumentative.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What would you like to see moving forward? What is your vision for Métis in Lethbridge in the years to come?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Well one thing that I’ve seen over the years is that the Alberta Métis Association receives funding, and each region, they get funding. But none of the Locals get any kind of funding, whereas the Genealogical Society has its headquarters in the same city of Edmonton as we do. Each one of their branches receives money, but we don’t receive funding.

MONIQUE GIROUX: So you’d like financial support for the Local.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, we really need that. The Friendship Centre, for years it received $170,000 a year. It doesn’t cover everything, but it gives you that core funding.

MONIQUE GIROUX: What do you think the Local would be able to or want to do with that funding?

RODERICK MCLEOD: Well, you know, the thing is, it’d be cultural things. The Local would (be able to) hold more events that they could invite the public to, and they could bring in, say, fiddlers. They could have fiddle lessons, jigging, beading, storytelling, history and culture, and Michif language lessons. We do have some of these activities, but it needs to be done on a larger scale. We’ve got to bring out people who really know what they’re doing. We also need more youth. Right now, we have a lot of funding in the office, but it’s for “capacity building,” so we can’t spend a penny on cultural things. It’s just for capacity. We have $400,000, $100,000 a year. We’re grateful for it. It doesn’t sound like we are or at least like I am, but we are. But what I would’ve thought, if we could’ve gotten at least $20,000 of that for events, then we could’ve carried on cultural activities. You need money to do these things, to get equipment, and leather, and beads, and all these different things. And the same with fiddle playing; as you well know, you need strings and all the other things.

MONIQUE GIROUX: My understanding, then, is that you want to see both education for the larger non-Métis community and also community building within the Métis nation.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, and I think maybe this new funding that we do have will help. Because what’s really helped a lot is, we have a website, and we have two people in the office every day, which we haven’t had for years. That’s really something. That was one of the big complaints in the community because we didn’t have anyone (in the Local’s office). As thankful as we are for volunteers, volunteers aren’t the best at running an office. Because they work two days, then they’re away for six months and someone takes over and changes all the filing system and no one knows where stuff is.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Right, so you don’t get consistency.

RODERICK MCLEOD: Yeah, and we have to get more local funding and whatnot.

MONIQUE GIROUX: Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we end?

RODERICK MCLEOD: I think for us to go forward, like I mentioned before, we have to get out there and do better public relations. And we must, must receive more support from the region and from the headquarters. You know, we’re the farthest away from everything; right down at the bottom of the province. For someone to come from Edmonton, it takes a full day more or less to get here and a day back. It’s quite a bit (of time). We’ve done some wonderful things over the years, and I know we can do more. We’ve got nowhere to go but straight up.