Two First Nation historic sites for summer visits, Rocky Mtn House, and Hat Creek

Eight different First Nations as well as Métis are known to have traded at Rocky Mountain House over the 76-year history of the trading posts. This includes the Nehiyawak, Piikani, Siksika, Kainai, Ktunaxa, Tsuu T’ina , Nakoda, and Atsina.
    

The year 2010 marks the sixth year of partnership between Parks Canada’s Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site and the Métis Nation of Alberta. At Bastions & Bones, August 20 – 22, 2010, Blackfoot culture will feature special guest drummers, dancers and ceremonialists from the Piikani Nation.
    

The event commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Piikani blockade on the North Saskatchewan River.  The blockade prevented David Thompson and his North West Company Brigade from continuing west to trade with First Nations on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. This is part of the International David Thompson Bicentennial initiatives.
    

Historic Hat Creek Ranch is in Bonaparte First Nation territory, and Bonaparte is well-represented on-site.  Sandra Gaspard, Bonaparte member, is Manager of Historic and Cultural Operations, and Curator of the significant First Nation presence at the facilities. “We have five different knowledge streams of Shuswap culture to explain,” says Gaspard.
    

On display are cooking and food preservation, lodging, hide and tannery, a replica kikuli that can house 23 people. The historic site features many outstanding structures like an 1860 Roadhouse to go along with the Shuswap Native Interpretive Site, which itself employs eight people, all with First Nation heritage.
    

On the second weekend of August the First Nations host a traditional Pow-Wow on-site at the Historic Hat Creek Ranch, “It’s no-charge admission and we are often feeding the crowd with breakfast or lunch during the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.,” says Gaspard. 

Meanwhile, until the closing at the end of September, visitors can experience Shuswap ancestry performing drum, flute, and 17 styles of dance. 

Ehattesaht has rebounded in all the ways that matter

Ernie Smith is the forestry manager for Ehattesaht First Nation, in Zeballos, B.C., a Nuu Chau Nulth community in the middle of Vancouver Island. “We received our first forestry license in 1974. We ventured out on our own forestry program a couple years ago,” says Smith. “We bought back our forestry licenses and now we do the hiring of contractors and managers to run our 100 percent-owned forestry.” 
    

Ehattesaht owns Aa’tuu Forestry, “We quadrupled out annual profits since embarking on our own. We have 100 percent control and managers work directly for us.” Aa’tuu Forestry owns no equipment, “We hire contractors and avoid the huge payments and high overhead costs.” Smith notes that Aa’tuu Forestry economic development has 100 percent support of the voting membership of Ehattesaht, approximately 350 members, many of whom “live all over the place, from Vancouver to Victoria to Nanaimo.”
    

Smith says, “We started in on this profit-oriented forestry strategy about six years ago.” As more Annual Allowable Cut was negotiated to add to the 7,700 Cubic Metre FRA, Aa’tuu Forestry was established three years ago as AAC rose to over 200,000. “We generally cut about 110,000 CM in a year’s operation, so we’ve come a long way and maintain full control over everything.”
    

Smith says, “Capacity Management works with us to manage the AAC with their RPF,” Registered Professional Forester, “and when you’re logging every detail counts. We do a lot of heli-logging and selective logging. It is a highly strategic planning to log in our traditional territory and ship out the logs out by barge.” They work with companies like Pallan Timber to get the wood to market.
    

Aa’tuu’s logs are sold at Vancouver Log Market prices, Most of the wood is sold before it hits the ground, be it cedar, Douglas Fir, hemlock, or spruce. “We use Storey Creek Trading to broker our wood.” Smith says Ehattesaht is committed to logging sustainably with complete transparency to members, “Our books are open to members, and we hold regular community meetings to discuss forestry specifics.”
     

Ehattesaht has about 15 loggers in the community and a couple of trained fallers and a couple of silviculture engineers. “We have a training strategy for our membership that began with the formation of Aa’tuu Forestry.” As of this writing the Ehattesaht members are receiving silviculture training in the summer of 2010
     

In another recent initiative Ehattesaht spent $800,000, in 2009, to build a road to the west coast of the island linking Zeballos to Queens Cove. “The reserve there was almost deserted,” says Smith, “and the site was practically abandoned for a while. “We are in the process of re-developing it.” 
     

Ehattesaht folk are Nuu Chah Nulth with a whaling and fishery history. “We were given small reserves the size of postage stamsps becasue the federal government said we lived off the ocean. Well, our people had spiritual places and shrines all over the territory. We hunted throughout our traditional territory. We were 3,000 people at first contact and that was reduced to a mere 58 by the 1960s.”
     

The pathway to progress for Ehattesaht is now re-established in the mainstream of society, and they are making it happen in forestry. Today the elementary school in Zeballos is a majority Ehattesaht students. “We faced a large debt of $3.5 million to buy-back our renewable license, and that is a debt we are close to retiring.” Aa’tuu is run by a board of directors, three from Ehattesaht and one non-Ehattesaht member. 

ACES certification for ocean fisheries continues to evolve

The coastal people on both sides of the Americas made their diet from the oceans. They sustained a relationship with a pristine environment and whether it ever returns to pristine is an open question but people in the Aboriginal Aquaculture Association want to work in that direction. Therefore they created Aboriginal Certification of Environmental Sustainability in Aquaculture (ACES).
    

Chief Richard Harry, Homalco First Nation in Campbell River, B.C., has spent more than a decade developing awareness about fish and seafood from the First Nation point of view through the AAA.  ACES was developed to identify First Nation criteria, and Chief Harry says, "We have some assistance to develop ACES pilot programs on the west coast of Canada, including local First Nations and Mainstream Canada."
    

ACES begins with integration into existing programs and engages various industry and environmental players to create a sustainable fisheries and seafood economy. It includes everything from farm-based components to area-based components, to regional components. Certification under an emerging Aboriginal system would be supported by program monitoring, auditing, and other certification processes, and program compliance incentives are built-in to the ACES framework.
    

ACES was first introduced in 2006, "The concept we've got is what we're putting legs to." The program reaches all levels of coastal fisheries and covers a wide range that needs to fit with models of sustainable development. "Environmentally speaking the First Nations often have different concerns from place to place." Example: the Haida have large fishery in Dungeness Crabs that exists no other place. 
    

 Mainstream Canada (Cermaq) contributed funding to launch a pilot program on monitoring fish farm developments from the Aboriginal perspective, with the intention to make operations compliant with the wider area of interests operating in the coast. ACES will be developing out of these pilot efforts to operate sustainable development in the coastal economy.