When Dora got home from work at 11 p.m., she met Tom, who was just returning from another business trip, in the driveway. She thought this was strange and she began to worry. Nathan, David, and Adrienne were at home with their friends, but Nathan told her that he had separated from Jethro hours earlier and that Jethro hadn’t made it home yet. When she went on break at 9 p.m., she called home to see how the kids were doing. Even at work, Dora was always busy caring for someone. She spent her days translating from Oji-Cree to English, so the caregivers could understand what the patients needed. Dora had been hired by the lodge to help the many elderly patients who didn’t speak English well or had lost the ability to communicate in the settlers’ language to time and dementia. When the boys left she went upstairs to get ready for work. Dora knew he was responsible, and that he and Jethro wouldn’t blow their 10 p.m. Seventeen-year-old Nathan often looked after his younger siblings - Adrienne, who was 12, and David, who was 15. When he went on a business trip, it usually involved an 800 kilometre round trip on a puddle jumper plane.
Tom was an executive at Wasaya Airways, an Indigenous-run airline that services the remote communities in the North. She told Nathan that he was in charge while she and Tom were out.
Both spoke Oji-Cree until they were adolescents and moved to Thunder Bay where they shared a room, played video games, and hung out in comfortable silence on the couch.īefore Dora left for work at the Wequedong Lodge, a housing service for people travelling from remote First Nations into Thunder Bay for medical care, she gave the boys $2.50 each to buy a pop or a snack and told them to be home later for dinner. They had spent countless hours in the bush, climbing trees and using their slingshots to snag partridges for supper. She felt every tick of the clock as she waited for her nephew to walk through the door. The boys were at home, anxious to go to the mall.ĭora’s mind was spinning in circles on that first, awful, long night.
The last time Dora saw Jethro, it was a Saturday afternoon. Speaking them made it harder - it made them true: “Jethro didn’t come home last night.” She picked up the phone to try to get a hold of Stella. As soon as the sun began to rise, Dora couldn’t wait any longer. Human bones found on the shores of Big Trout Lake date back nearly 7,000 years, proving people had occupied this harsh and remote part of the world far earlier than the time of first contact with Europeans.ĭora’s mind was spinning in circles on that first, awful, long night. Their descendants followed the animals and travelled when the seasons changed, settling high up in the northernmost region of Ontario. Dora was from Kasabonika Lake First Nation and Tom from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (Big Trout Lake) First Nation. Dora was a mother figure to all the kids in the neighbourhood, who often congregated at the happy, two-storey home she shared with her husband, Tom Morris, in the Fort William end of.
Dora, a tiny woman with a mighty heart, was not only Jethro’s aunt, sister to his father, Sam she was also Jethro’s guardian, his boarding parent, his second mom. The last time Dora Morris saw Jethro, he was with her son Nathan, who was two years older than her nephew. Racism, death, and hard truths in a northern city
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