Success breeding success by building on existing strengths

George Morrison beside Burrard Inlet

George Morrison, 44, is an urbanite from Vancouver with family roots and Status membership in Namgis First Nation. The Namgis (‘numb geese’) homeland has traditional territory in the surroundings of North Vancouver Island and islands of the Broughton Archipelago.

Morrison is a business person whose career has ranged far and wide in the First Nations economy. The process of being a business person in the world of First Nations is something of an exploration to everyone.
 

“I think the First Peoples Group of Companies is an amazing model for Aboriginal business,” says Morrison, of the brainchild he works with as an entrepreneur. “I did a $15,000 feasibility study that looked at things including the name. I picked ‘First People’ over First Nation because the term First Nation has become too politicized and even contains the ‘hand-out’ mentality,” that prevails with people living under the Indian Act, says Morrison. Meanwhile, the term First People had overwhelming positives in the recognition factors found in the study, a fresh look.

For over a decade Morrison operated Morgroup Management where they specialized in Co-Management as well as Third Party Management with financially distressed First Nation communities. “The Indian Act creates policy and a system to break out of,” says Morrison, candidly. “When I was working in third party management, I was, as far as INAC is concerned, nothing but a glorified accounts payable clerk. We evolved First People GOC by learning how to break out of the core-funding cycle,,” a valuable lesson.
 

“I was ten years ahead of my time when INAC core-funding was sparse,” as always, “and I started a company called Canadian Native Lumber to access First Nation fibre. I ended up working with First Nations using a model that permits the community to maintain independence. The Indian Act stops progress. Elections intervene in communities. The whole environment is unstable on, among other things, the economy.”

Morrison took to setting up development corporations and incorporating business success from role models like the Tahltan Nation Development Corporation (TNDC) and the immense developments surrounding Chief Clarence Louie in Osoyoos. He spent a number of years in consultation working with Tahltan, “TNDC could end up with possibly 50 Partnerships.”

He says, “I am building a blueprint for First Nation economic development that leads to independence,” in mind, spirit, and prosperity. “We will build long-lasting careers that give back and inspire others, scholarships, bursaries, funding for elders, community activities, and sports. We have looked at the organizational abilities of other communities like the Korean, Vietnamese, and East Indians who work together.”

Morrison sees urban opportunity gone to waste with skid row property long the close street-level purview of First Nation people in Canada, properties falling to the possession of savvy developers from the mainstream economy, and no First Nation investment or equity to really speak of. He sees a future when First Nations claw back millions of dollars being squandered under false pretences and put those funds into projects that create real jobs.

“When I go to a First Nation community and see people standing around, it makes me very excited,” says Dean Iverson, co-founder of First peoples Group of Companies, “and I am smiling because I am seeing a huge potential in human resources, social capital builders, men and women who are available to build the economic development capacity of First Nation communities.” There is a growing number of people outside these communities who see it the same way as Iverson, and in this way the world is changing fast.

He decided to make economic development of First Nations the highest priority Iverson has in doing business. He gained knowledge in the forestry industry, and his company, Iverson Forest Management, is engaged in all kinds of forestry operations in the province of B.C. with First Nations forestry licensees.

First Peoples Group of Companies has a number of divisions, economic development orientations toward forestry, environment, construction, natural resources, architecture and engineering, venture development, and a management division to take a wide view of the interests in First Nations communities. “These are places needing strategic support and professional development,” he says. “We work with First Nation members who want to build economy and capacity.”

First Peoples Group of Companies is the outcome of dealing with long-term strategic development issues in communities in forestry, and Iverson recognized a First Nations economy was progressing in a diversity of sectors. More opportunities show up in First Nations every day, “In a really good way,” says he, “these communities are making interesting gains and good things are coming up for them. For me it’s about hearing ideas, sharing their visions, and it is about listening.”

 Putting together a group specializing in First Nation economic development has been quite an effort, “We are excited about what we are doing and where we are going. First Nations are learning they have more capacity than previously understood. It's growing from a desire to live free of the systems that prevail. The Indian Act is what keeps First Nations from real progress. First Nation membership want to work! They just need the opportunity. First Peoples Group of Companies wants to make those opportunities a reality through job creation and training.”

Iverson says, “First Peoples Group of Companies contains a diverse number of development portfolios and each division recognizes First Nations are required to build an economy of their own that fits within the larger Canadian (and world) economy. Our management group recognizes this reality.”

The group is designed to work from a First Nation perspective, take that sense of direction and put business plans to it, “which could be anything. The management group will look at what is available for economic development and train people to seize the opportunity. Our goal is to walk away leaving the development running with it’s rightful owners.”

The message from listening over the years has been that First Nations want to bring home their membership and to do this they need infrastructure and management to make home a place of prosperity and opportunity. First Nations exist amongst a growing wealth of opportunities in natural resources and have an abundance of human resources to employ, and First Peoples Group of Companies is designed to work with the development corporation model or the independent operator in a community.

They take development envelopes that are dormant, empty, and fill them with the cash that comes from professionally managed opportunity. “So many Bands are resource rich and cash poor, so we answer the question of how to change this. We build on strengths, put people in situations where unique skills add new capacity to the community. We build on what they want to do, and take it through feasibility study, schooling, training, financial management, or construction. We are starting with business plans and collaborating until they have an operational office or turn-key enterprise.”

First Peoples Group of Companies has a role in liaison with industries that are making commitments to First Nations in skill development or joint venture economic development. Practically every sector of the economy contains skilled labour deficits. Looming labour crises confront mining, forestry, construction trades, and transportation industries. Professional development is needed for First Nations across the board as they take ownership of large assets like hydro development, commercial fisheries, and forestry licenses.

“First Nations have it, they have everything, and they need to work together to make opportunities happen. They must change the situation from what has been there in the past. They have a desire to go forward but do so without the wherewithal. They need to break out of routine and get past bad experiences. Bands with business failures in their history have to pick it up in the present. It’s time to end the sleight-of- hand that outsiders inflict on unsuspecting First Nations.”

Starting from a position of even a single strength, First Peoples Group of Companies will bring in other components to ensure success. Expanding opportunities will be seized by managers who have established relationships of trust in the business world, and when they know they can turn to a trusted management source. Transparency in dealings with First Peoples Group of Companies will spread to every business relationship in the future. Success will breed success. 

Tla-o-qui-aht’s Canoe Creek Hydro a work of reclamation and restoration

Sayo Masso is liaison officer for the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation in one of their major initiatives, the Ha'uukmin Tribal Park, including the Upper Kennedy watershed, as a place of cultural and economic importance, "We conducted ceremonial gatherings and visited sacred sites," said  Masso.  "Pools in the river provided an abundant fishery to families and there was a village at the mouth of the Kennedy River."

The tribal park contains (in part) the Upper Kennedy River, "Our people moved through lakes in the winter and returned to the ocean in season," said  Masso. "We lived on the coast during summer and as a whaling people we observed the migration patterns of gray whales." Potlatch culture is hereditary and Nuu-Chah-Nulth communities like Tla-o-qui-aht are linked by close families, common meetings at winter feasts, and a lot of kinship with other coastal communities; interestingly, said  Masso, "Some of our closest ties are with the Makah Nation in Washington State."

Bringing the Ha'uukmin Tribal Park to life on behalf of Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation "seemed to take forever," said  Masso, "and years of research was followed by years of implementation including the last couple of years of serious dialogue. We had to study the area closely in terms of hydrology and fish habitat, institute a stream keeper’s course, and begin teaching members to be park guardians and stream keepers. We're really happy this is happening as we speak."

The Tla-o-qui-aht desire to share the magnificent lands and waters of their heritage is not carte blanche; visitors will be made aware of Tla-o-qui-aht stewardship, said  Masso, "Self-determination is on the horizon. We have focussed the initial effort on the Upper Kennedy before we construct new hatcheries," Chinook salmon and sockeye to be reared in separate hatcheries, Chinook hatchery to be built first.

The Tla-o-qui-aht place name for Kennedy River Basin, Haa'uukmin, is "roughly translated as Feast Bowl." The Kennedy Basin is about 60 km from Tofino and the Canoe Creek Hydro project presents the administration with an infrastructure opportunity to create wider visitations to their tribal park. "We are planning to establish a family-oriented picnic area by the Canoe Creek Run-of-River hydro generating station and we have envisioned our land use plan for long-term development in outlying forestry, gravel pits, and out-posts for adventure tours. Guardian and stream keeper courses are giving the administration a professional presence in our tribal park 

He added, "In upcoming phases of the Tribal Park, we will be providingrangering services and safe transit through a network of trails, and access fees will contribute to building and implementing tribal park objectives. We are examining carbon credits to value our trees while they're standing. Tla-o-qui-aht faces systemic issues in Canadian forestry," and will use every means to circumvent the slaughter of forests, "Carbon Credits help us assert a role in using and managing the watershed in a manner that reflects Tla-o-qui-aht Laws of Iisaak, (~Respect), and Hishukish Tsawaak, (Everything is one ~interconnectedness of Life)."

Tla-o-qui-aht implemented two land use zones in their traditional territory; one is entitled Uuyaathluknish Management Zone, which means 'We take care,' and  Masso said, "This is a management area that needs gentle impacts and restoration plans. Use and access must be sustainable and not negatively impacting water quality objectives and fish stock objectives." Qyaasinhap, the second management zone - Leave as you've found it, is generally allocated to the Old Growth Forest corridors in Clayoquot River Valley and Clayoqout plateau.

Uuyaathluknish is already impacted and needs rehabilitation, which is being done in part through the Canoe Creek Hydro project, "We promoted the hydro development in the rehabilitation area, an area already impacted by the highway and logging," an area that requires careful management for the multiple uses that are visioned. "On this side is the low-impact sustainable use area our plans says, Let's deliver fish out of this watershed."

Qyaasinhap is putting wider stewardship back in the local area of the central westcoast and Tofino, said  Masso. 'Leave it as you found it' means the Clayoquot Arm and Plateau Preserve will continue to serve as ground zero for research in climate change and education-oriented relations with colleges and universities. There is a research Centre up Clayoquot Arm and we working with the University of Victoria and with other education institutions to college-certify training in stewardship, and other research partnerships.

"Meanwhile we have two forest licenses in our territory," said  Masso, "and the thinking is that we have to do whatever is needed to move forestry to be more sustainable for our grandchildren and to create a 150-year rotation on harvesting rather than the present 80 rotation. We will examine timber uses and plan the harvest ourselves. We will evaluate the forest companies by how many jobs they create for how many trees they take, not by how many millions it makes."

History contains a couple of important drivers for the established tribal park. "Families quarantined themselves back in the Kennedy watershed during the introduction of plagues," and later, "The Meares Island court case acknowledged the Island in Clayoquot Sound as Tla-oqui-aht TitleLand in 1984, which laid the groundwork for the Hawiih (hereditary chiefs) to work on establishment of the Meares Island Tribal Park declaration.  This declaration formed the framework for the Tribal Park at Kennedy Lake."

As a matter of purely cultural concern the nation requires a quantity of old growth fir and cedar to carry on traditional practices of the potlatch, "We have canoe carvers and totem poles and Long Houses to build."

Angelique Merasty Levac discusses how God Opens Doors

Angelique is author of a book entitled God Opens Doors, Kisemanitow Peyohtena Iskwahtem, in print September 2012. The publisher is Indian Life Ministries, and they have followed her art and business career and admired her Christian walk for many years.

"I was born at Midnight Lake, Manitoba," said Angelique Merasty Levac. "It is bush and nobody lives there,” in the far northern reaches of central Canada. Angie holds close to her memories of a distant place spent with her grandparents in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. She was toddling around the wilderness with her grandparents from the time she was a one year old. That was when she was born, and her mother had a rush of kids come, and so Angie was given to the grandparents to raise. Today, the same place is as wild as it once was, when she was a babe in the woods. “Once in a while a few of my siblings or family members traps there.” It is a Cree people’s playground and belongs to no one else.

I lived beside a nice lake," and she enjoyed the company of loons going 'co-co-op' in the morning hours, she recollects, "My grandparents tried to teach me how to trap when I was six years old." Her grandmother gave her a tiny squirrel trap and showed her where to set the trap under a bundle of roots at the base of a tree.

They were on the lakeside close to the family dwelling, which was a large canvas tent, and Angie would not stray. Her grandmother, she recalls, provided explicit instructions about being very patient when trapping. She had to leave the place alone to permit the process to take its course.

Little Angie couldn’t wait till the grandparents went to sleep and she approached her fledgling trap-line to see if she was enriched. She stuck her six year old hand into the squirrel-sized cubby hole and trapped herself, snap. “Ouch,” she hollered, with a sudden affinity for nature, for the squirrel that wasn't there.

It was a lesson that she can freshly recall, and she smiles about the painful few minutes while she inspects her feminine fingers. This trapping snarl proved to be the end of Angelique Merasty Levac's life as a trapper (and a few families of bushy tailed squirrels have reason to chatter in gratitude).

Those years in the lakes district straddling the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border were made up of the old itinerant way of connecting with the land and which had ever made the vast domain their home. Angie’s grandpa always found it necessary to break camp and find a different place every few weeks, for he was a trapper, hunter, and fisherman.

"My grandpa never lived in one place," Angie explained, and the family packed their large tent and barrel stove and set off looking for the right place in a particular time of year. She said it was a lean existence.

"I used to help my grandmother gather branches she used to make a floor inside the tent. There was nothing to play with when I was a child,” a fact she once pointed out to her grandma. She told her she wanted a doll, so her grandma made Angie a doll. “Do you know what my doll was? We had a flour sack and she tied up the bag into a rag doll, eyes made from the soot of the fire. That was my doll.”

At 9 years of age Angie began to spend more time with her mother and less time with her grandparents when she came to be old enough to be more help to her mother, who was by now raising most of the twelve children she bore on the Lynn Lake railroad line in northern Manitoba.

At this point Angie remembers watching the birch bark biting when she went out with ladies on berry picking sojourns. “The blue berries found in burned out areas, and cranberries found in forested places.”

It was the cranberry picking trips where she saw the women take respite to conduct little competitions. They would peel birch bark and make pieces of art with their teeth but Angie was too young to think much about it. It was a first impression of the way the ladies had social exchanges by causing exquisite artistic impressions by birch bark biting. She remembers a few of them got tossed away.

It was not until much later that she herself would adopt and perhaps help to preserve a fast disappearing cultural practice of the Woodland Cree. It was her destiny to become a Cree cultural icon and reigning expert of a disappearing form of First Nation culture. Over the past three decades Angie garnered a lot of attention for the artistic skill at birch bark biting. She still does, with beautiful straight teeth, with which she takes on the task of an ancient artistic craft (she flosses regularly).

It is a strangely important coincidence that when she met her mentor of the art form the woman was also named Angelique Merasty (Angie’s maiden name). The mentor Angelique Merasty has passed away but not before she almost miraculously passed the legacy onto Angelique Merasty Levac, doing so under the most difficult conditions imaginable.

Angie’s gravitation to the art form is partly owed to bingo. Her mentor Angelique Merasty loved to play and was sitting waiting for a taxi ride to the bingo hall one evening in Beaver Lake, Saskatchewan. Part of the miracle was that the mentor sat in the company of an anthropologist while she waited, and to pass the time sitting beside the fire in winter she reached over and peeled a piece of birch bark off a log that had thawed, and she bit into it, and an exquisite piece of art was born.

The taxi arrived and she cheerfully, wordlessly (for she never spoke English) handed the birch bark biting to the professor who promptly sent it to the Manitoba Museum of Man in Winnipeg, and this prompted a full investigation and revelation of her ability. Soon articles began to appear detailing the art and the artist. And the mentor while being interviewed once expressed a wish to pass the craft along to someone before it was forgotten. Angelique the student saw this quote in a magazine article when she was 24 years of age

It is important to realize the way Angie grew up. She did not speak English until she was between 14 and 15 years of age; she spoke only Cree. She grew up in the days prior to Bill C-31 in Canada when a lot of Indian people were cut off from their Status by marriage, and Angie had no access to school, therefore, because her mother had been stripped of her Status by marriage to a Metis man.

Indeed, our Angie did not read English until she taught herself by reading the Holy Bible, and by the time she was 24 she had proficiency enough to read, and there she stood in a line-up at the post office in Uranium City, amazed to see her name described in a magazine.

She stared at the magazine story about Angelique Merasty, but it was not herself, except it was her name, a woman who was a practitioner of an ancient art form, a Cree culture art form, the artform she had seen her grandmother and mother practicing in the berry patches, and this same Angelique Merasty in the article described how she, "would like to pass this Native art form onto another."

Angie had those recollections of the ladies in the berry patches taking a rest to bite into birch bark and she decided thereabouts that the passing ought to be to herself. She credits the worship of God, "The Lord put that in my heart. Since I did it, it opened doors that I never dreamed of," including a visit to Bill Cosby in Philadelphia, USA, with a guest appearance on his remake of the TV classic 'You Bet Your Life.' She was interviewed by Keith Morrison on CTV, and appeared on BCTV, APTN, the Knowledge Network, and in numerous print articles, including this one in the nationwide Native Journal, and more awards to come in 2009. 

(For more information email dialogueondevelopment@gmail.com

Teaching a treasured and ancient craft in birch bark

The Bark Canoe Store opened in 2000 in Spokane, “originally operating by making birch bark canoes,” explains John Lindeman, owner, “and it expanded to providing birch bark for cabinet and furniture and construction, then expanded to accessories and things that might go along with birch bark canoes like Hudson Bay axes, packs, materials, then came delivery of birch bark canoe building classes.

 "We are known for taking courses to communities," often First Nation communities. "I wanted the building of birch bark canoes to revive by going to the people who originally built them, starting in Minnesota, going as far as Alaska, also to Nebraska, school museums around the country, wherever they wanted, building birch bark canoes in as little as three weeks to a month.”

 These canoe construction classes reach everyone from kids to elders, “and we were doing camps in Canada, also holding classes in Spokane where people got together and each made a single canoe in a group project. In other classes individuals came to build one for themselves.” Birch bark is one medium of construction for the canoes, but usage is demanding on vessels, especially in activities such as film-work or cultural reenactments, “a crowd that wanted a resilient fibreglass replica, so we make a whole variety ot those.”

The company sells birch bark laminates that work over substrates of plywood to make panelling for walls, cabinets, a birch bark finish that is, “very pretty,” says Lindeman, “lots of Canadian customers.” Panels, likewise canoes, have sold in Europe. Most of the birch bark comes from New Hampshire, Maine, Minnesota, before he found a contact in Siberia, “Now I am importing from Siberia, which birch bark is used in building the canoes.”

 A lot of the birch bark is reclaimed from dead trees found near the border of Nelson, B.C., “There is a lot of dying birch, I take the birch bark found there for furniture, not canoes.” Regarding the dying birch, Lindeman says, “the birch tree is a canary in the coal mine,” it's telling us something about the environment. The spindly hardwood like alder, birch, maple, poplar grows up first in clear-cut, “what they will do is defoliate to kill hardwood and do this because no market exists for the hardwood,” essentially done after a clear-cut with the potential to stay in the ecosystem for 5000 years, he says, with an invasion with chemicals.

“I deliver courses year-round and am very portable with this. It is an intensive three weeks, whether making one canoe, or ten.” Where individuals are making their own canoe, up to four can participate in a course, in which it takes over 200 hours. The program works well at structured settings like museums, schools, and other institutions, “My goal is teaching the teachers at places like community centres, showing how to build any style from Great Lakes to Athabascan, Dogrib, we do all different traditional styles.”

There’s been some study done on this on Lindeman’s part, “I took a class in Wisconsin in 1992,” when he had a place in Port Wayne near Lake Superior, “Ojibway country,” he notes. He was taught by David Gidmark, who was trained by Algonquin elders in Quebec. “I’ve done two-seat miniatures up to 26 foot long, most typically 14 to 18 feet.” One fibreglass replica 36 foot canoe he made was used on Hudson River in New York,  “They bought a 20 foot birch bark and 36 foot that featured in the 500 year anniversary of Henry Hudson going up that river.”

Lindeman has done canoes for movies, “There is an on-going demand for this kind of building, every customer has their own unique situation from store to museum, and some canoes may never been seen alight on the water. The original canoes are not surprisingly kind of expendable, like the 26 foot Ojibway canoe that travelled from Keese River, Wisconsin to the Pacific by the Mackenzie River, and at the end the canoe was ceremonially burned. To those who lamented this happening, it is worth knowing even Mackenzies' canoes were destroyed by the end of the voyage.)

The aim is to restore the art of the birch bark canoe. “I want to revitalize the building of these canoes, which were formerly utilitarian, and now exist as an artform, I want to see more building going on.” He explains that the birch is used in multiple ways, building to medicine, “Medicinal companies are exploiting the birch tree, and it is known that birch bark is resistant to mold, and furthermore is used as an inner sole for shoes because it kills athletes foot.”

The fact is that those in the market for buying canoes for schools, say, to start a ricing program, “they would have aluminum and plastic canoes, they don't want to bang around birch bark canoes. That is the idea of the fibreglass ricing canoe, to re-establish a cultural practice in this form of canoe it handles like a ricing canoe, but it's fibreglass it will take a beating. You take care of the wood on the gunwales but the hull, you can leave it outside, you can ram it into the shore.”