A Suncor Pathways Magazine Story: The Accidental Author

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[{"type":"text","content":"A Suncor Pathways Magazine Story: The Accidental AuthorNORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 8, 2023 / Suncor Energy Ron Janvier's story, and that of many more inspiring Indigenous People from northern Alberta to St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador and places in between, can be found in the 2022 edition of Suncor's Pathways magazine. Our Pathways magazine is a representation of our ongoing commitment to the Journey of Reconciliation. Visit Suncor.com to read more stories.A welder by vocation, Ron Janvier was always more comfortable working with metal than words.\"As my career progressed, I began to take on new roles in planning, business analysis and reliability that required me to write more reports, which was a challenge for me,\" says Ron, who worked for Syncrude for 33 years before retiring in 2012. \"But I had several good mentors and one of them, Colleen Kearney, encouraged me with writing. She told me, ‘Use words to your advantage and paint a picture. That's how you will get results.' Those were wise words.\"Ron has continued to follow that advice in retirement, though his focus now is on retelling the stories of his childhood rather than building business cases. The Chipewyan Prairie First Nation Elder published his first children's book, Sakisak and the Squirrel, last year. It was something of an accident as Ron didn't start out wanting to author a book.\"My wife, Shelly, was developing curriculum for Head Start, a program to help children living on First Nations get ready for school, in the Treaty 8 territory. She had found many Cree children's stories, and stories from other regions, but nothing from the Dene in the Wood Buffalo region,\" says Ron. \"So, she asked me to write down some of the tales that I learned growing up. Stories were very important for us as youngsters-it's a big part of how we learned. These stories were shared from generation to generation by knowledge keepers, who always told us to carry the stories down.\"Ron wrote down 10 of his favourite stories from childhood, which involved Sakisak, a mythical character who created animals and would change their colours to protect them.\"An archeologist who has studied the history of the Prairie Chipewyan First Nation really liked the stories and suggested I turn them into the book,\" he says. \"It was the right time for me to take something like th...

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