>by Nina Winham
September 4, 2007

It was a lake without stories that first signaled something wrong to Clayton Thomas-Muller and fed the future activist's passion for justice. A lake with no stories and no life, spread thin across his peoples' traditional territory.

“I was raised in Winnipeg, but we spent summers back home, near our reserve,” he says. A member of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation, Thomas-Muller's Pukatawagan Reserve is on the Churchill River near the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. His summers consisted of hunting, fishing, working his family's trapline, and learning traditional culture and ways of living—experiences his mother was intent on providing to her urban-raised children. Read more.