This year’s science and environment workshops at the Nibinamik Youth Retreat were part of the training for the RoFATA Environmental Monitoring Training Program.
“(The youth) really enjoyed it,” said Harry Bunting, a Ring of Fire Aboriginal Training Alliance (RoFATA) environmental monitoring student from Constance Lake. “They learned quite a bit actually, and so did I. I was able to do some sampling of fish, learned how to age a fish and what to do when you are sampling and doing your protocols to help assess the water quality and assess the environment itself.”
The Environmental Monitoring Training Program is being delivered by Four Rivers Matawa Environmental Services Group at the Matawa First Nations building in Thunder Bay.
“As part of the training program, students are assigned to real community based projects or initiatives so that they can learn to do the work by actually doing it,” said Sarah Cockerton, manager of environmental programs at Four Rivers, in an e-mail. “This year, the environmental monitoring students organized, prepared and delivered the science/environmental workshops to the youth in addition to planning and organizing a lot of the logistics to the trip itself.”
The Four Rivers staff and the environmental monitoring students travelled to Nibinamik on July 14 for the youth retreat and returned on July 18. Soon after arriving back in Thunder Bay, the environmental monitoring students were back in class.