♪ bouncy mandolin ♪ add bass I'm a journalist and I am traveling across my home country, Canada.

On this journey I'll be visiting some iconic Canadian experiences.

My next trip begins in northern Canada in the Northwest Territories.

♪ ♪ I've come to Yellowknife.

It's the capital of the Northwest Territories and people come here from all around the world to see the Aurora Borealis or the northern lights.

It's also a great place to come to have an Indigenous cultural experience.

♪ [Brandy] These beautiful creations here are from the artist Derrald Taylor and you are an Inuvialuit artist and you work with different types of stones to create incredible sculptures like this polar bear and lots of different animals, can you sort of describe what we're seeing here?

First of all, the types of stone I have are all imported stone.

The Black Stone is from British Columbia, the Green Stone is also quarried in British Columbia, a green stone.

This white marble is from, shipped from overseas from Italy.

It's called Italian marble.

And I also have soapstone from South America called Brazilian stone that comes in a variety of different colors and all the inserts of the white are all caribou and moose antler along with the drums on the cultural dancers that I made.

[Brandy] So how does it work when you are given a big piece of stone like this?

How do you create that ?

Out of this ?

What I do is I'll look at the stone.

This one I just got a couple of days ago and what I'll do is I'll stand it up, I'll balance it.

Then from there I'll work at the piece that I have on my mind on what I'm doing on.

And are you sketching it or is it just coming?

I don't sketch.

It's better for me to just carve it.

The shape of the stone and all of the shape of it.

So it's almost like the rock speaks to you.

Yup.

Well I hear, that you're going to help me make my own sculpture.

What are we gonna to make?

With the piece that I showed you - out of this one we're gonna make us a little polar bear.

Okay, so this one is going to be a polar bear that represents...?

Northwest Territories.

Wonderful.

So what kind of stone is this again?

This is soapstone from British Columbia.

This is soapstone from British Columbia.

And it's the same, it might be the same colour as these but you will only see the color after we're done that filing and the sanding.

And how long will it take us to take this stone and make a sculpture out of it?

It should take us about three hours, three hours of work.

♪ Wow!

Oh, I see!

So this will be the polar bear.

Derrald, this looks great!

That's not good yet.

I think it looks great!

Ah, it's just a piece a' rock.

I love it already.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Okay... ♪ Now that we brought it in from outside we'll start the filing.

Take off all that saw marks, round it out.

♪ By using a file, we remove most of the bulk... bulk of the polar bear.

We took out a lot of the cornering.

Now what I'm gonna do is I can bring bring this to my uh work, workbench.

♪ (and power tools) [Brandy] Wow, you've done an amazing job.

I can't believe that was the piece of rock that we had before.

And now this is where we're at so this is beautiful.

What's next?

OK.

The next thing we start on is we grab the finer, round file and we start, we take off the grinding marks on it.

♪ The dry sanding we will do and we'll use a coarse, we'll use a coarse... sandpaper.

♪ The better job you do, the nicer carving it will be.

[Brandy] Wow, look at the colour.

♪ [Derrald] We oil it, then we buff it down and then we'll see how it looks from there.

It looks perfect already.

♪ You really did a good job.

We did a great job.

[Derrald] There, now it's a carving, and we're all done.

Wow.

♪ ♪ The city of Yellowknife is on the north shore of Great Slave Lake.

The proximity of the lake makes for great fishing and there's where my next adventure begins.

♪ I'm on a commercial fishing tour boat; I'm with Shawn Buckley.

He is a commercial fisherman but also takes people out on the Great Slave Lake to teach them all about what it's like to have his lifestyle.

Give me a sense of what kind of fish we can find here.

There's a lot of fish, just most dominantly white, lake whitefish and lake trout and northern pike and walleye and inconnu.

What else... ciscos?

Ciscos, yeah.

There's lots of different types of fish.

There's lots.

And right now it's the autumn time.

Is this a good time to come out?

This is the perfect time to come out.

There's a lot of fish that are coming into spawn right now so there's huge amounts right now in the shallows.

They come from the main lake and they come into the shallows to spawn.

OK.

So when they're coming in how do you actually fish them?

Do you have rods or nets or how does it work?

Well we can, you could do sport fish for them but we use the gill nets.

How come?

Because you catch more fish.

Yeah?

Yeah!

♪ So we're gonna put this long line for that anchor.

OK.

This is our buoy line.

OK, so we're going to give this a big throw then the anchor second and then the net third.

One, two, three, yeah!

[Shawn] OK!

[Brandy] How was that?

[Shawn] Yeah, that was perfect.

And now we're going to throw the anchor in.

Ready?

Yup.

One, two, it's heavy you know.

One, two, three.

Yay!

[Shawn] There you go.

And now the net's gonna go in.

[Brandy] Taking my time!

This is fun.

How long is this net?

It's a hundred yards...

Fish gotta swim!

Fish gotta swim... (together) and we gotta eat!

(together laughing) Yeah!

The anchor line is gonna go in now.

So here's the net tied to the anchor... and another line tied to your buoy line again.

[Brandy] B'bye!

Yes.

[Brandy] Yeah!

Woo, hoo, are we good now?

We've got the two buoys in; we've got the net.

Yeah.

You can see the other end over there the other end's here.

And how far?

This is how many yards again?

A hundred yards.

Hundred yards and then we're gonna wait.

For how long?

We'll wait, maybe... about forty minutes.

Okay in that time are we gonna try some snacks?

Yes!

I got some special snacks for you.

I can't wait.

Let's do it.

And some tea.

Tea?

Yep.

[Shawn] So Brandy, we're at the kitchen table now and we're gonna show you some of the wares we have from the north here.

Beautiful.

So the tea that you have in your hand that Freddy nicely poured us.

Thank you Freddy.

Cheers.

Cheers.

It's called "Chaga".

It's a mushroom that grows on the northern hemispheres and on birch trees.

We dry it before we put it into teapot and bring it to a boil, shut it down and let it steep.

It's very sweet actually.

M'hm, I like it as well.

We have some homemade cranberry from the bush, low bush cranberry.

We are some bannock that Mom made.

We have some fish here.

That's wild-smoked with wild Alder from the bush.

And what kind of fish is that?

It's Inconnu.

Inconnu.

Which we caught on the lake and we prepared here at the camp, fish camp.

We have homemade caviar.

[Brandy] Ooh, caviar.

[Shawn] And we're actually in caviar season right now.

The name for that caviar is called Golden Yellow Roe.

I've been making it since 1986, for many years.

Golden Yellow Roe?

Yup, and we have some there on a snack.

So we have a little bit of bannock with cranberry sauce with the smoked fish and caviar.

OK. Let's try some of this together I'd love to do that.

No, thanks.

(laughs) Yes!

Of course I'm going to have some.

Mm, It's delicious.

It really goes well.

Mm hmm.

That's my caviar dance.

[Shawn] M-hm...Do the caviar!

(chuckling) It's good to be here because you get a sense of the food that you can eat here.

And it's so neat to have this tea.

Well thank you for coming.

Thank you.

Let's pull those nets.

Lets go!

Okay Brandy, now we are gonna be, uh... pulling up to the buoy.

Freddie is gonna start the net lifter.

We're all suited up down with the rubber gear so we don't get splashed and fish on us and it's cold too, as well.

[Brandy] Yes it is.

We're gonna pick some of the fish out of the net as we go.

So the net lifter is going to be going on.

And we're gonna put the net into a box.

I'm gonna pick the fish put that into a box periodically.

OK. Freddy's got the net lifter going.

Let's get out there and lift this net and see what we got here.

Wow.

So this is a Lake Whitefish.

That's the most common fish on the lake, right there.

Wow, it's huge, big!

Ta da!

[Brandy] Wow, that was really fun.

Yes, that's quite entertaining all right!

[Brandy] All right.

So how many fish you got?

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight fish?

Yep.

Eight fish.

(together) Two types.

Two types, okay.

We have the Lake Whitefish which is this one here.

Beautiful.

And they're coming into spawn right now, so they're gettin' ready to spawn like, lay their eggs.

What a gorgeous fish!

They are a beautiful fish.

They're one of the most common and very well-sought after, like they're really good flavor too, for eating.

Mm, okay.

So we have the Lake Whitefish, then we have the Longnose Red Sucker.

Longnose Red Sucker.

Why does it have that name do you think?

Probably because it has a long nose, it's a bottom feeder, his mouth is facing down.

Beautiful.

Well Sean, thanks so much for teaching me about what it's like to be a commercial fisherman.

Well thanks for coming.

Glad to have you.

♪ Next I decided to fly forty-five minutes from Yellowknife to Lutsel K'e.

It's a remote fly-in community on the east arm of Great Slave Lake and is the home of the Lutsel K'e Dene First Nation.

Tourism is a new industry for this community of around three hundred people.

They are hoping it will continue to grow and help their local economy.

James Marlowe is my guide.

♪ (and marine engine) (sound of footsteps) So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna make a fire.

Gonna have a shore lunch.

Before we do that we're going to grab , err gather some dry twigs.

I hope the tree doesn't mind.

Well these are all dried-out twigs.

And we got fire.

We do have fire.

You can make some, get water in a teapot.

Okay.

Where do we get the water from?

Right there.

Really?

Freshest water in the world.

Perfect.

All right.

Just put on top of the grill right in the middle... right in the middle.

Yeah!

Here we go.

OK?

That's it.

Now we wait for tea.

Okay two tea bags; one... two.

[James] Just give it a couple minutes.

Okay, put it right here.

Wow, okay.

So this area can keep it warm too, eh?

[James] Tea time?

[Brandy] Teatime, always teatime.

Two cups.

This should be... hope was not too hot.

It's really hot!

(laughing) Oh my goodness.

One... ...two.

Cheers.

(clink) Mm, that's perfect.

Let's get cookin'!

Cooking on the land.

Cooking on the land, right here.

[Brandy] Let's cook those potatoes!

I'm gettin' hungry!

You put as much as you can in here.

♪ Wow, let's see how this tastes.

Mm, the fish is really crispy.

This is perfect.

I think it was really fun doing this with you on the shore.

[James] No pollution, everything clear, water, land, wildlife.

You're the best!

Thank you very much.

I returned to Yellowknife to finish my journey.

I stayed up late to watch the Aurora Borealis, which is also known as the northern lights.

Yellowknife is a fantastic place to view them because of its lack of light pollution and its location under the aurora oval.

♪ My next adventure takes me over nine hundred miles south to the province of Alberta.

I travelled to Jasper National Park, which is the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies.

♪ One of my favorite things about Jasper National Park is that you get to see animals like this beautiful elk right here in the wild and I'm with Wes Bradford you've been living here.

For four decades.

Yes!

What is it like to see these animals today?

Well I still get excited although I've been looking at them for almost forty-four years right?

But I love seeing wildlife and of course this animal is an American elk, proper name is Wapiti.

Wapiti is a Shawnee First Nations name and Wapiti means: "He with the yellow or tan rump".

And this is a male, that's right here a small male and he's got a group of cows that's just down around the corner and it's mating season for elk right now.

And so people have to be really cautious.

Never approach them too closely because they are all wild, potentially dangerous animals but come here, view them, enjoy them, they're beautiful, they're magnificent.

[Brandy] Why does he seem so calm?

I mean there are people around here, people stop in their cars?

[Wes] He's used to us as long as, long as we keep our distance away from them, because they're just like us.

You know they have a personal space that they don't like invaded, right?

But they're more worried about the black bears, grizzly bears, wolves and cougars than they are of us.

So they do not see us as a threat.

Look at the beautiful coat.

Absolutely fantastic.

Beautiful.

So look Brandy, we've got an elk laying right on the edge of the trail.

A nice male.

[Brandy] Wow, look at those horns.

[Wes] Beautiful.

[Brandy] Wes, what is the elk doing?

You see the elk chewing?

[Wes] Chewing, chewing...

So it's called "chewing the cud" so it's just like a cow.

Right?

So elk have got a four-stage stomach.

So we're carnivores, you and I - we've got a one-stage stomach.

We only eat our food once and into the stomach it goes.

Well with these elk, which are "ungulates".

So they go along and they grab all those big pieces of grass and they put it into their first stomach.

And it's actually an anti predator strategy for them because when you got your head down, chewing grass you don't see or hear very well.

So they get their first stomach full of grass, big pieces of grass.

Then they go lay down in a nice secluded spot.

And then they start regurgitating that grass out of the stomach, chew it into very fines and send it into the second stomach.

And you can see that male right there is just chomping away, right?

[Brandy] And it's a real survival technique.

[Wes] Guaranteed.

[Brandy] Well thank you for showing me this.

Oh you're welcome.

This is beautiful.

This is absolutely...

This is great!

This is Jasper National Park.

Yeah.

♪ In order to reach my next destination, I boarded a train in the town of Jasper.

♪ gentle acoustic guitar (train bell clanging) ♪ The VIA RAIL Skeena train takes us from Jasper in Alberta to Prince George and then Prince Rupert in the province of British Columbia.

And it's a beautiful ride.

Already we've seen these great forests, the Rocky Mountains, sparkling lakes.

It's just wonderful.

You just sit back, relax, because this journey from Jasper to Prince George is eight hours and all you have is time.

♪ tranquil guitar and trumpet In Prince George, I traveled outside the city to see an ancient forest.

We've come to this magnificent place called the Ancient Forest/Chun T'oh Whudujut Provincial Park and I'm with Nowell Senior.

You've been working to create these accessible pathways so that everybody can enjoy this beautiful place.

Tell us about it.

Well we've been working.

When I say "we" I'm talking about the Caledonia Ramblers Hiking Club.

And we built a rural trail here in 2005/2006.

We've put in about 18,000 volunteer hours and very soon after the little trail that we built opened it was clear that it was very popular and a segment of our community were unable to come and see this unique forest.

So we decided to build a 456 universal boardwalk so we could provide access to folks with mobility issues.

What is unique about this forest is that it is the only inland temperate rainforest in the world that is so far from the ocean.

So far North.

This particular cedar, Western Red Cedar is six or seven hundred years old.

There are other cedars in this forest that could be 2,000 years old.

[Brandy] Wow, amazing.

We found this, a young hemlock growing out of this dead cedar.

[Brandy] Amazing.

And we really didn't want to continue building in a straight line because it was, it would have desecrated this tree.

And so we built what we call a dog's leg, to get around that.

[Brandy] Wonderful!

I love it and I love how the forest just keeps renewing itself, finding ways to grow even in a dead tree.

Well nothing dies in the forest.

It just changes shape or changes composition.

So we have nursery trees that have fallen and apparently look dead but there's all kinds of plants and organisms growing out of it.

Wow!

What an incredible view.

And what I love so much about this boardwalk is that anybody can access this environment and be close to nature like this which is so healthy for us.

It's just fabulous.

Nowell took us beyond the boardwalk to see more of the forest and a famous Western Red Cedar known as 'The Big Tree'.

♪ [Brandy] Wow, it is enormous.

This beautiful tree, which is known as The Big Tree, it is sixteen feet wide.

It's huge.

And it's 2,000 years old or even more, because nobody knows the exact age of this tree.

But it is magnificent.

♪ ♪ (traffic noise) Just watch your step here young lady, nice to see you this morning.

Thank you.

The next morning I boarded the Via Rail Skeena train also commonly known as "The Rupert Rocket" on my way to Prince Rupert.

♪ The train journey from Prince George to Prince Rupert is a twelve-hour trip and look at this view - it's gorgeous to see the blue water and the autumn trees in the background with all the colors.

It's so wonderful to be here.

And it's nice to be on a train taking your time and enjoying the views just like this.

♪ Prince Rupert and the surrounding tidal waters are located within the traditional territories of the Tsimshian First Nations.

I wanted to explore indigenous tourism her e so I joined Coastal Cultural Canoeing Society's big canoe family - the WaveRiders.

Here on the shore, Charlotte Angus is going to show me a little bit about what you can do with cedar.

How do you harvest this from the trees?

How we go about harvesting the cedar is, we'll go out in the month of May when the cedar is ready for pulling and you'll know when it's ready for pulling is when the sap starts to run.

And when you're pulling the cedar off a tree you always pull it from this side of the sun and what you do is you do it with the width of your hand and before you pull it, you say a prayer.

And then usually it helps you let it go.

It'll help the tree let it go.

So when you rip it up and then you take it down, you roll it, you coil it.

And then when you get it, you have a lot of the cedar bark that's on the outside of it.

So when you clean it, you clean it by the tree and you leave the outside bark with the tree for the nutrients.

Let's do a rose.

[Brandy] That'd be great.

You're gonna do the two strand.

[Brandy] OK. [Charlotte] So what you do is you take top over bottom, top over bottom, top over bottom, twist, twist, then you continue till you get to the end.

Okay.

I dunno.

Haven't done a great job here, guys.

(chuckling) It's practice.

I'm not sure it's a rose, but it's sort of amazing flower.

(laughing) [Brandy] So how would you describe your culture now?

How are people doing?

[Charlotte] There are so many years that we've lost our identity and right now we are reclaiming our language and culture that is coming back strong.

There are many, many canoes out there now and there are many, many different communities that are bringing back their dialect, teaching the young ones and into the high schools and I find that's really great.

And the culture was lost because people were sent to Indian Residential Schools right, and then they were told basically to give up their language and and just speak English and your, your orange T- shirts today that say, “Every Child Matters ”, that's, that's a call-out to bring recognition to Indigenous rights.

Am I correct?

Yes.

So with that, saying that because when the individual that was taken into residential school she had an orange top and her orange top was taken away from her.

She is a survivor and she brought awareness to her community.

And then it started to become a wave.

Today's the day, September 30th where you'll see across the nation, people wearing orange and it's in support of “Every Child Matters ”, so.

[Brandy] And do you think that people coming and learning about your culture through tourism is good for your community, or how do you feel about it?

I do believe it's a good thing because right now like, when you take a look at the indigenous people and they're trying to understand what had happened to them because there was a lot of hurt and sorrow and there's been disconnect and a lot of the people are looking for peace.

A lot of people are looking to happy.

You're trying to harmonize around with nature and the way they used to live.

And a lot of the indigenous people are open to sharing because that's what the indigenous people are about.

(Singing an Indigenous song) So right now we're going to sing the Women's Warrior song.

Basically it's empowerment of the females.

[Brandy] Wonderful.

That's why the female vocal.

It's only the females that sing it.

[Brandy] Thank you.

And with that we'd like to thank you for coming and joining us and we will give you one of the cedar roses.

Oh thank you so much!

That's wonderful, Charlotte.

Thank you very much.

You are welcome.

(Singing an Indigenous song).

(Singing an Indigenous song).