Judy Martin says it’s never too late to learn, go back to school or to dream and achieve goals.
Martin, 38, is a community co-ordinator with Creating Safe Environments Project working for the Canadian Red Cross.
“I think it’s always important to keep going, chase those dreams and just go for it,” she says.
She is a member of Attawapiskat First Nation living in Cochrane.
She says she loved growing up in Attawapiskat where she felt safe and always at home. Life seemed so simple back then, she says, recalling how she was surrounded by her family and how she used to be out in the land with her parents hunting or fishing.
When she was about seven years old, her family moved out to live in northern communities like Timmins, Sudbury and Thunder Bay before settling in Cochrane.
Her parents always spoke Cree with her and her two sisters so she didn’t know how to write or speak English until she was about six.
For Martin, it’s important to keep in touch with her culture and traditions. From her mother, she learned how to bead. With her sisters, Martin also harvests traditional medicine and goes out into nature to heal and stay grounded whenever she can.
Martin's father died from cancer when she was 16 and her mother died from COVID-19 last May.
“It’s been me and my sisters that keep those traditions and the language alive. It’s something our parents gave us, it’s the way they lived, the way they spoke,” she says. “All the things they taught us — cooking geese, traditional medicine — we wanted to keep that going for our own kids.”
Martin says she’s been fortunate that every opportunity she had presented itself at the best time.
With her job role at Red Cross, being able to work in Attawapiskat allowed her to reconnect with her home community. Before the pandemic hit, she used to travel up north to do a lot of community engagement work. With the Respect Education team, she would do school-based work with children and youth, facilitating training on bullying prevention, sexual education and healthy relationships.
Her Red Cross experience also includes working as an instructor trainer and a social emergencies responder.
“I love it. For the majority of my work I did, I got to travel all over. I’ve been up to Nunavut five times last year,” she says. If there was a social emergency or a crisis and a community in Nunavut reached out to Red Cross, Martin and another responder would be deployed there to provide social support to schools, students and staff.
She was also a part of the Red Cross team who helped during the Kashechewan flood and Pikangikum fire evacuations.
Before Red Cross, she also worked with the Ininew Friendship Centre and as an Indigenous Language teacher at a public school in Cochrane for four years. For this role, she taught herself how to read and write in syllabics, so she could teach her students that as well. Martin also worked with pre-school-aged children in a summer daycare as part of the Aboriginal Head Start project.
Nowadays, Martin lives in Cochrane with her husband Jansen, daughter Breanna and their extended families. Her family has always been her motivation to keep moving forward and being a good role model to her nieces, her daughter and future granddaughter.
Due to her health issues, Martin and her mother would fly out to hospitals and there were many people who helped them with accommodation, transportation or provided emotional support while they were away from home. That encouraged Martin to pursue a social service worker program at Northern College, which she graduated from in 2018.
“Growing up having these different life challenges, I always had people who were in those helping roles. That’s something that did a lot of good and helped me and my family in the most difficult times, so I wanted to do it for others as well,” Martin says.
In the next few years, she wants to get her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work. Martin says she wanted to have hands-on experience before going back to school.
“I’m able to see the challenges and things that are going on in communities and just in general. I feel like I’m better able to best apply myself in that,” she says. She also wants to continue working with Red Cross and in the human services field to be able to provide support to First Nation communities and beyond.
