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About Weagamow (Round) Lake
Weagamow Lake (Round Lake), or North Caribou Lake First Nation, is a remote community located about 320 km by air north of Sioux Lookout, Ontario. The community is a vial link connecting other communities of northern Ontario together, such as Muskrat Dam, Sachigo, Keewaywin, and Kingfisher Lake. The opening of the year-round road allows residents of Round Lake to travel to towns or cities in the south like Sioux Lookout, Dryden, or Thunder Bay. It is accessible by flights at Round Lake airport and Weagamow Air Base. Connecting airports include Sioux Lookout, Thunder Bay, and Cat Lake, among others.
Recreation
In Round Lake, you will find recreational activities behind hosted by different programs year round for people of all age groups. The Awasis program usually does cultural activities such as hunting, fishing, smoking and cutting meat, singeing geese, filleting fish, making hide, sewing, beading, cooking, etc.
Every Christmas/New years, games and dances are hosted at the school gym to celebrate. Radio games are also held during this time, and sometimes they go late into the night. Radio games include dress up games of different themes like any famous person, 80s, etc, and dance contests like jigging and the twist. Some of the games hosted during festivities and celebrations are “horses, knights, and cavaliers”, musical chairs, and mingle mingle.
On July 1st, the community hosts events, games, and contests for a week. Locals and people from out of town alike come together to participate for a week of celebrations. All the businesses of the community host games at the field with cash payouts for winners, and even shoreline fishing derby’s and truck rally’s are
Baseball, broomball, volleyball, and hockey tournaments are usually something to look forward to and other communities come for those too.
This past week was Round Lake’s first Springfest since 2011. Springfest is when people come together for big bingo’s, online and radio games, and lots of fishing derby’s all in the span of a week. Online games are when the hosts post different challenges and contests to the community celebrations page on Facebook, and whoever’s photo/video gets the most likes wins.
Another thing to look forward to is the annual hunters fest where all the hunters of the community are given a few days to hunt and bring back their kills. The meat is then taken to the cooking site where it is cut and cooked. There are a lot of teepee’s at the cooking site that belong to different families but overall, the community comes together to share and eat traditional food. Bannock and refreshments like coffee, tea, and water are offered throughout the site. Condiments like homemade blueberry jam made from wild blueberries can be found at the Hunters Fest too.
My experience
Canoe/kayak races are one of the activities hosted here during the Canada games (first week of July) and I’ve participated in a canoe race before. Other activities that I’ve participated in are aerial drops and cutting meat during the Hunters Fest. Aerial drops are when a plane flies just above a crowd and releases balloons or envelopes containing tickets worth money, and this is usually done during the summer. I’ve also had the opportunity to cut moose meat during the Hunters Fest, which is also where I saw the process of how pemmican is made.
About this website
When starting this website, I was aiming to give a brief introduction into what goes on in Round Lake just to give people a little insight on what it’s like to live in a remote community. Reaching my goal in a way that would provide a basic summary of Round Lake as a community wasn’t simple as a lot of factors, details, and aspects to what makes a thriving community. I’m glad to give an overview of what Round Lake does to celebrate and how community members come together. Something I would do in the future is go into more detail about what the community does during celebrations and how activities vary with the seasons.
Weagamow Lake First Nation 