The red wooden building in the background is the school. The brown building is a triplex teacherage . A triplex is any building that has been split into three apartments. A teacherage is a any form of house or apartment that is specifically reserved for the residential accommodation of teachers in a remote northern Canadian community.
A snowmobile pulling a sleigh carrying passengers is arriving at the shoreline after crossing the frozen snow covered lake.
The school staff, nursing station staff, band office employees and many other people are gathering for the start of the Christmas parade. All of the participants in the parade rode on vehicles that they had decorated. The parade toured all of the residential streets of the community.
The building in the background is the Deer Lake First Nation Band Office where the band chief, band councillors and band office employees work.
A family home in Deer Lake.
This building has three teacherage apartments. The fourth unit is a shared laundry room. There were many houses in the community without running water or laundry machines so families were bringing their clothes to the laundry rooms in this and the other triplex teacherage to clean them.
The propane tanks on the outside of the building supplied the fuel for the kitchen stoves and laundry room clothes dryer.
This is one of the yellow buildings designed for temporary short term use that were attached to the red wooden David Meekis Memorial School to provide additional classroom space for the increasing student population.
This aluminum metal boat is attached to the back of the snowmobile by a rope. I was very surprised when I watched what was probably a large family of people including children, adults and elders walk out on the ice and climb in this boat. The boat was then pulled across the lake by the snowmobile until it disappear from my sight. The shoreline trees were blocking my view.
This is a view of the winter road as the ice is melting in the spring. For the month or two that the winter road was usable in late February and early March it was possible for a vehicle to drive all the way south to the Trans Canada Highway and big cities such as Winnipeg. It would be a very long trip. A much shorter trip would be to use the winter road to drive on the lake to get around to different parts of the Deer Lake community. It was much easier to drive on the winter road when the lake ice was thick than it was to try to drive on the snow and ice covered dirt roads on land within the Deer Lake community.
This is the view from the top of the hill behind the school. What you are seeing is the bare Precambrian rocks of the Canadian Shield and the evergreen trees of the boreal forest. In the distance starting from the right is a dark red wooden church. Beside the church is the green Northern Store. The white building with the bright red roof is the Northern Store Manager's home. The other buildings you see are storage sheds for the Northern Store and homes of some of the Deer Lake families.
Welcome to the downtown business district of Deer Lake. The green building is the Northern Store. The building to the far right along the shoreline of the lake is the store of an independent shopkeeper. The wooden boards of the outdoor hockey rink are at the bottom of the hill.
The red and yellow buildings in the centre of this photo are the David Meekis Memorial School. The buildings that surround the school along the shoreline of the lake are the teacherages.
The two large white tanks on the left side of the photo are the fuel tanks for the school furnace.
The brown wooden building with the small white tank in the foreground is the water pump house.
Here is a view of the front entrance of the triplex teacherage. There was only one triplex teacherage in Deer Lake. A previous picture showed the far side of this building as seen from the lake.
The yellow building in the foreground is a corner of the school.
Here is a duplex teacherage that contains two apartments. I was told that this building was originally built to contain two classrooms but was later converted to a teacherage when an addition was built on to the school.
Here is an old building that was being used as a storage shed by the school janitors and maintenance workers. The fence is to keep the students away during recess.
Almost directly across the street from the Northern Store is this outfitter's camp for hunters and fishermen. There is a main lodge, a few cabins and some buildings.
Here are a few local homes. A forest fire passed through here a few years before this photograph was taken. The trees on the hillside were killed by the forest fire but many of them are still standing. The tree trunks that have fallen to the ground in many different directions make it very difficult for anyone to try to climb the hill.
The yellow buildings on the side of the hill with the Canadian flag are the Deer Lake Nursing Station. The brown building beyond the nursing station is the nurses' residence. The buildings in the foreground are the family homes of local band members.
All of the trees on the hill were killed by the same forest fire as the previous photograph.
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