Response:

You’ve caught me…I’m not a real Lethbian!

My arrival in Lethbridge comes with a bit of an unorthodox story. I grew up in Red Lake, Ontario, which is located six hours north east of Winnipeg and about eight hours north west of Thunder Bay. How my family arrived in Red Lake is also an unorthodox story, but maybe for another day.

My hometown has a current population of around 4,500 people between multiple small towns that make up the municipality of Red Lake. “Red Lake” is actually an umbrella term for the towns of Red Lake, Balmertown (my true hometown), Cochenour, MacKenzie Island (yes, a real island), Madsen, Sterritt Olson, and Ear Falls. The reason for this mish-mosh of small towns is quite simple – gold. At one point in time, each town (with the exception of Sterritt) was a mine site, headframe and all. In my lifetime as a bush gal, Balmertown had one of the most profitable gold mines in the world.

By the time I was 17, my family was tired of living 2.5 hours away from the closest McDonalds & Walmart, 6 hours away from the closest movie theatre and shopping mall, the lifestyle of living in a small northern bush town, but mostly working with the many assholes at Goldcorp Red Lake Gold Mines (Now Evolution Mining). My parents brought me into the world when they were only 21 and never really got the chance to leave, go to school, and experience life outside of northwestern Ontario. After nearly 30 years, they were ready to move away and the timing felt right – mostly because my dad had ticked off enough people, but also because I was heading into university.

In order to facilitate this move, my father took a position with De Beers Diamond Mines, who had a mine in the Northwest Territories. His fly out point was Edmonton, so for a couple of months he would drive six hours to Winnipeg, fly Winnipeg to Edmonton, then Edmonton up to camp, while my sisters, mother and I stayed home waiting for me to graduate high school. My parents loved Alberta and we had visited numerous times when I was a kid, so they knew this was where it was at. Calgary and Edmonton would have been a massive culture shock to us, so they searched for the smallest city in Alberta that had both a university and a college. And as you know, that’s Lethbridge! It still was a culture shock, and a challenge to leave behind everyone we had ever known, but it ended up being entirely worth it.

My go-to story for explaining that I had no idea where I was is this: around the time that the provincial Wild Rose and Conservative party were talking of merging parties to bump out the provincial NDP’s, I said to anyone who would listen, “who votes for someone MORE CONSERVATIVE than the Conservative Party?”

This city is important to me because for the first time in my little life I had found my community. I had never belonged where I had grown up and never came across folks that were interested in the same things that I was. Sure, driving your snowmachine to the hockey rink for beer league is fine for a couple of years, but not for a lifetime. I was always a bit of an outsider in Red Lake – not interested in the small town politics, not really interested in the beer league, and really not interested in being so far away from civilization.

My time in Lethbridge has been a whirlwind of trying to adjust to civilization, trying to adjust to life in Alberta as an outsider, and trying to navigate growing up, all while trying to find a place to fit in. After 12ish? 13ish? years, Lethbridge is now what I consider my home because I would find it a challenge to leave all of my people behind – both because of the individuals but also because that would undo all of my 12ish? 13ish? years of hard work! I attended our university, have worked in some of our great cultural institutions, and my daughter was born in our hospital. Although it’s not the forest and lakes of NWO, I love Lethbridge, quirks and all. Plus, what would I do with that Taber boy?

Emma Aubie