RANDALL WHITE, ONTARIO TONITE, GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2024. Before leaving Remembrance Day 2024 altogether I want to underline one heretofore unique event on the theme this year in Canada’s most populous province.

On Thursday, November 7, 2024 Sol Mamakwa, Member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for the also somewhat unique far northwestern electoral district of Kiiwetinoong, rose in the Assembly to commemorate “Indigenous Veterans Day [November 8]. To all Indigenous veterans, and those currently serving, thank you for your contributions and sacrifice.”

When posting a video clip of his commemoration the next day (the actual Indigenous Veterans Day) Mr. Mamakwa explained : “Yesterday I spoke to honour Indigenous veterans in Kiiwetinoong and in other places … Meegwetch for watching.”

Sol Mamakwa himself is “a member of the Kingfisher Lake First Nation and speaks Oji-Cree as a first language.” He is as well a member of the Ontario New Democratic Party.

His short bio on Wikipedia further explains that he was “one of three MPPs of Indigenous heritage elected in 2018, alongside ONDP colleagues Suze Morrison and Guy Bourgouin.”

Mr. Mamakwa was similarly “the second person of full First Nations descent elected to the assembly after Peter North in 1990.” On May 28, 2024, he “became the first person to give a speech in an Indigenous language in the Ontario Legislature.” And : “As of August 11, 2024, he serves as the Deputy Leader of the Official Opposition and critic for Indigenous and Treaty Relations as well as for Northern Development.”

It may be still more intriguing that Sol Mamakwa sits for a riding in the somewhat mysterious far north of Ontario, where there are no highways or railways and life has in some respects more in common with Northern Ontario 400 years ago than with Southern Ontario today.

The riding (electoral district) of Kiiwetinoong for which Mr. Mamakwa sits was created by the Kathleen Wynne Liberal government in 2017, to give the province at least one present-day political division where “two-thirds of residents are Indigenous.”

In the midst of the many crazy sides of Doug Ford’s right-wing conservative Government of Ontario today — complete with incessantly applauding trained seals in the Legislative Assembly — Sol Mamakwa often enough lends some high-minded distinction to Ontario politics.

And now that includes the modern patriotic commemorations surrounding Remembrance Day in Canada, its diverse First Nations and Indigenous geography, its most populous province of Ontario, and the full breadth of modern Ontario’s vast geography, all the way to the shores of Hudson Bay. (And the Hudson Bay Lowlands that just may be somewhat transformed by climate change in the 21 st century!)