Fraser River Salmon Table Society meeting to devise new long-term strategies

The Fraser River Salmon Table Society is working toward consensus, said to Richard McGuigan, PhD, co-chair of the table (along with Marcel Shepert, Pacific Salmon Treaty) meeting in Prince George, BC, Sep 18 07, at the Prince George Native Friendship Centre.

 

Dr. McGuigan said, “Cooperative Decision Management is the way to achieve consensus,” for the fledgling table society.

 

By this emerging method interest-based negotiations are conducted through (three) stages and everybody abides by a final consensus. Cooperative Decision Management allows no veto to any party, and is not co-management, which, “has a negative reputation and gives regulators a lot of power,” said co-chair McGuigan.

 

The salmon table process must respect the ability of First Nations to represent their constituencies,, said Doug Kelly, Sto:lo Tribal Council, “especially regarding the inter-tribal treaty process.” The table is open as long as Aboriginal rights and title are respected.

 

David Moore has worked on table planning, “One goal of the salmon table is to create transparency in marketing, ultimately to resolve problems like selling caviar for as low as 11 cents per pound and finding out it fetches $15 a pound in the US food market.”

 

This transparency is the goal of a Siska First Nation demonstration project, to, “catch, process, and sell their fish harvested from a fish wheel,” with approval of CFIA, BC Food Safety Act, and BC Centre for Disease Control.

 

Salmon is a commodity from the wild realm, and salmon is still largely misunderstood in terms of behaviour and even physiology. Moore explained, “We have learned colour of the flesh is not determined by how far up the river the fish has gone,” a previous assumption, “rather, maturity is the determinant in quality and colour of the flesh.”

 

This is interesting because the old view was the farther up the river salmon were caught the less red and more dark the flesh would be (and dark is inedible). Now upstream fishers can join the mainstream market.

 

“The key is flexibility in marketing,” said Moore to the table society meeting. He said, “Micro-processing can be done profitably without over-capitalization.” A boondoggle may exist in the provincial management of food health via Regional Health Authorities in BC.

 

The BC government says on the internet, “This structure, introduced in December 2001, modernized a complicated, confusing and expensive health care system by merging the previous 52 health authorities into a streamlined governance and management model.”

 

Today, said Moore, “these regional health authorities are charged with supplying permits required for the catching processing and selling of fish.”

 

The commercialization of fresh caught salmon may be advanced through a new process, noted Moore, that now includes a specific container for storing a fish, a card-board, wax-coat that preserves ice and fish together for the few hours required to get a fish a proper larder.

 

The problem is, however, a lack of fish to market. Teresa Ryan works in Vancouver as a fish biologist on the Pacific Salmon Commission and a scientist representing coastal First Nations. They were all asking the same question: where have all the fish gone?

 

A report in the Prince George Free Press said low salmon returns found along the Fraser River this year show nets producing a tenth the expected catch. As a result people are not going fishing.

 

Obviously this is a major concern in Canada’s North West Pacific where often the First Nations are losing of a way of life. Traditional salmon harvests unite communities but this year nobody goes to the river.

 

These people are facing a disappearing cultural diet, a staple food for the poor, and a lack of control over problems associated with the loss.

Kiteboarding the Inside Passage in winter

Northern Gateway Pipeline - Ten percent equity for First Nations in Northern Gateway Pipeline Project

Enbridge interviewed 2008

 - Ten percent equity for First Nations in Northern Gateway Pipeline Project 

The Enbridge Pipeline Northern Gateway Project is back in the news after sitting on the shelf since 2005. The Enbridge people have scheduled a series of public meetings called Open Houses in October and November this year in Alberta and B.C..

Roger Harris is Vice President of Community and Aboriginal Partnerships and he told Native Journal, “We do have a number of processes to address the issues including workshops, 800-numbers,” and a major plan to get out and meet and greet the general public.

Then come the First Nation liaisons, which are presently unscheduled in order to maximize the flexibility required for accommodation, he explained.

”We are preparing our First Nation meetings at their convenience,” Roger said, and the process is underway to some degree. “I've been have meetings since May this year."

He took the VP job in March, “We want them to help us design the project, including their short term and long term involvement.” So far, said Roger, “We have been very well received.”

To his mind the short term benefits are less important than the long term ones.

The pipeline construction is a linear project, five years and it's gone. I want the people to have business opportunities in a $4.5 billion (2006$) project,” which price, he said will undeoubtedly go much higher.

He also addressed the impact on the environment of the Northern Gateway Pipeline, “We will look to First Nations for environmental monitoring and we will offer equity partnerships of up to 10 percent of the project.”

In fact Enbridge will be providing capacity-building to the communities, training welders and tradespeople for jobs to found in half-a-dozen construction camps along the route.

“The trades aspect in pipeline construction is only a three year window of opportunity, from 2001 to 2015,” he said. “Between now and then we are laying the groundwork. We've been investing in learning institutions, for example, Kitimat Valley Institute in has received $30,000 a year for the past couple of years.

“First we need to know where the line will be laid,” and who is affected and how. Roger takes the project to heart because he settled his family in Terrace and his adult children stayed. He spent 20 years in Haida Gwaii, and has an understanding of First Nations politics. He was MLA for Skeena.

He said, “I have priorities for this project like, one, it has to be environmentally sustainable. Two, the economic activity is huge so the focus has to be on the communities where it comes through.”

Enbridge will engage the environmental concerns, and even make the project a stimulus to increasing the environmental awareness already found in the Interior and coast of B.C..

“The ports of the northern coast,” said Roger, “are expanding in Prince Rupert, Kitimat, and there is serious discussion about Stewart, B.C.,” next door to Hyder, Alaska, “turning into an international seaport,” And Roger shared a reminder the Alcan is expanding their aluminum smelter in Kitimat.

“We see the Gateway Project as a catalyst to increase the capacity of environmental stewardship,” on the coast and on the rest of the pipeline route.

So Enbridge is deeply committed to learning how to involve First Nation communities in safeguarding an infrastructure to create a comfort zone in the territories.

The Delgamuukw decision of the Supreme Court of Canada called for 'accommodation' of Aboriginal Rights and Title inherent to the First Nations.

“If it wasn't the law we would want to do it anyway. We are going to be innovative,” to find the accommodation, "and that is what the equity ownership percents are all about."

Enbridge wants to learn what parts of the lands involved are 'special', “We want to avoid going through the Skeena,” which sounds (ahem) unlikely, since the Skeena is the largest pristine watershed remaining on Mother Earth, even when it arrives at Kitimat.

Here is the schedule of  meetings:

Week # 1

October 20th - Whitecourt October 21st - Mayerthorpe October 22nd - Morinville October 23rd -  Bon Accord October 24th - Bruderheim

Week # 2

November 3rd - Tumbler Ridge November 4th - Dawson Creek November 5th - Fox Creek November 6th - Grande Prairie

Week # 3 November 17th - Kitimat November 18th - Prince Rupert November 19th - Terrace November 20th - Houston November 21st - Smithers

Week # 4 November 24th - Burns Lake November 25th - Fort St. James November 26th - Vanderhoof November 27th - Prince George

Roger Harris phone is 1-604-###-#### to inquire about unscheduled meetings.

Host of contrasts on the coast

The coast is a host of contrasts and a primary one is cultural. For example, First Nations are people of the Potlatch who express a lot of national heritage in artistic endeavours that are indelibly cultural. The First Nations identify a presence and their communities with iconic art found in dozens of locations up the coast. When you come to see major features in First Nation art you are likely in the midst of a First Nation community.

Tourism travel on the coast leads visitors into adventurous activities like tours of whale and bear-watching that take people to places like Bute Inlet, Toba Inlet, Desolation Sound. And when you go farther north, tours take visitors into the Broughton Archipelago, Knight’s Inlet or Kingcome Inlet, or around the top of Vancouver Island. As a cultural exploration, Vancouver Island is but one of a seemingly countless number of islands, many of which were inhabited, while others were cultivated, and others were used for communal harvest of vegetation or wildlife.

It is surprising how many people lived in places no longer considered for habitation. In some of these places there are communities holding extinction at bay with one or two Band members living in remote locations like Hopetown or Gilford Island. At Kingcome Inlet, very top of the world when you are there, 125 souls keep a solid First Nation footprint on the ground (even though the houses are on stilts).

Victoria is a picturesque city full of art shops and museums often honed in on the First Nation culture of the Pacific Coast, but Victoria is a city. On the opposite side of the prominent Malahat from Victoria and still southerly on Vancouver Island is the city of Duncan, halfway point between Victoria and Nanaimo. Duncan is a great place to see the cultural contrast in full bloom. They call Duncan the City of Totems and there are totem poles set around the city but the main attraction is the Quw'utsun' Cultural and Conference Centre. It’s a re-created Salishan village nestled beside the Cowichan River and a beautiful representation of past and present Cowichan Tribes community.

The north end of Vancouver contains more rugged beauty enhanced by temperate weather, and the rainforest is more readily available to visit. Hiking, touring, fishing, and outdoor life continues on a year-round basis, top to bottom, on both sides of the big island, but when you arrive at the community of Alert Bay on Cormorant Island you could ask about visiting Yukusem where you will learn about the study of Culturally Modified Trees (CMT). This is the study of human beings working to organize around rainforest resources. What David Garrick, anthropologist, uncovered on Hanson Island is the 'transgenerational' management of vegetation by First Nations at the north end of the Inside Passage, and it is amazing.

This careful study of transgenerational management provides evidence that First Nations used forest resources in coastal rainforests in complex arrangements. Special preserves of rainforest under carefully defined jurisdictions were ‘managed’ to create and provide essential resources. Social groups conducted large scale horticulture within particular groves of cedar trees on Yukusem’s 16 square kilometres, doing so on a truly grand scale. Together they made cedar trees do the most incredible things horticultural.

David Garrick uncovered cedar-shaping in CMTs during his long and fruitful tenure of archaeology on-site at Yukusem. This amazing process involves planning that spans centuries. This cultivation was done in a manner that shaped trees and modified them to produce a surplus of bark while maintaining the integrity of a living cedar tree. First Nations maximized cedar bark production by modifying the tree, doing this in a way that left the cedar tree to heal, thrive, and produce more surplus bark. It was a strategy of development that occurred because cedar bark was a staple product in the social and economic development of coastal life. This cultural product was used in an apparently endless array of purposes. The practice to cultivate giant cedars was millennial to make trees produce a surplus cedar bark into a raw material for production of manufactured goods.

Nothing was left to chance or waste. The term old-growth forest was meaningless within a culture that practised continuous and specialized cultivation in the growth of the forests over several centuries. Even a burnt forest was an opportunity to harvest a different list of highly-prized resources. Meanwhile, everything on Yukusem was planned around the need to produce cedar bark for future generations. A prime example of the transgenerational planning policy occurs on a site called Bear Grove on Yukusem. Garrick’s mapping points out the existence of at least 55 shaped cedars per hectare in the Bear Grove sector of the island. This is an intense concentration of evidence indicative of creating surplus bark. It becomes obvious from concentrations of CMTs of this magnitude that an organized effort was made to cultivate and exploit cedar bark in patterns showing sustainable, long-term, transgenerational planning processes.

The people of Yukusem living 1,350 years ago cultivated a specific tree to furnish Namgis carver Beau Dick with raw material for his canoe project in the modern age. Also in this transgenerational context, ancient people provided a modern chain of evidence to Harry Alfred and Don Svanvik, CMT researchers from Alert Bay who are able to exert First Nation jurisdiction over Yukusem cedar groves in the present. The vital (and heretofore missing) evidence was produced from messages in trees hundreds of years old. The fingerprints of this interaction with forests have been uncovered in many of the forests of B.C., even so, it was a long and arduous 20th century for the folks around Yukusem. Only in 2004 did the First Nations recover jurisdiction over Yukusem.

CMTs studied in this way by Garrick provided scientific resources and evidence to give First Nations proof of former jurisdiction. It is interesting to note, however, there was no apparent conflict in the management of Yukusem resources until about 1930, Garrick explains. His archaeological time-line shows that before the cataclysmic culture shock treatments took form (residential schools, banning of potlatchs, et al), the arrival of industrial foresters was a not-unwelcome event to a degree. The industrial foresters were cooperative by taking only a few trees from Yukusem’s treasured groves, and Garrick reports they apparently left cedar trees untouched, cedar was for the cedar shapers those who used it as a specially-managed and treasured resource. Thus Garrick has proven how two management paradigms co-existed!

It required an exercise of federal government policy to alienate First Nations from their management and jurisdiction over cedar shaping activities. From the time such government policies were introduced until Yukusem Heritage Society was formed in 2004 the cedar groves on Hanson Island faced dire circumstances. Garrick’s archaeological study was the one thing standing in their way, and in a pleasant turn since his study began a series of scientific facts have freed people to exert their sovereignty.

“I am the land and resource officer of the Namgis First Nation,” said Harry Alfred, one afternoon in a communal garden on Yukusem. Alfred described how people have rebounded because of Garrick’s work in these groves. Cultural energy burst from the CMT research and in a way people have regained a sense of cultural balance. New community energy has been born from the old secrets. Alfred and Don Svanvik sit on the Yukusem board of directors on behalf of the Namgis First Nation. Two other Bands share jurisdiction over Hanson Island (Tlowitsis and Muntagila). Alfred and Svanvik have become CMT experts within their communities. “The Namgis Nation,” said Alfred, “comprised about 4,000 km.” With a sweep of his arm he described a rectangular shaped territory with Yukusem sitting almost at the centre.

Furthermore, under the guidance of Namgis artist and lay-historian Beau Dick a group of volunteers has built a few community facilities on the south-west quadrant of Yukusem to teach people the meaning of the old ways. Dick described how one social organization took people into the silvan wilderness and constructed dugout canoes. It is known that canoes were constructed in the cultivated cedar groves in areas adjoining other food or health or community-based cultivated resources. The canoes were dugouts, designed in a technically superior manner to take people back and forth between communities and fishing grounds or ther harvest areas throughout the Broughton Archipelago.

The communities of old are buried today in the forest floor in the surroundings of etchings of harvest found in ancient cedar trees. A volunteer canoe project amounts to a defacto form of reclamation of Yukusem and was the idea of Dick who grew up in a Big House society that remained standing in the splendour of Kingcome Inlet, representing a miraculous survival where traditionalists dodged bullets (literal and figurative) through many previous decades.

Dick learned to carve from his grandfather and father and obtained teaching about hidden meanings in a unique form of artistic expression. Life goes on, yes, and Beau Dick, despite being a realist, believes he is restoring historical significance to the nation by uncovering the old secrets of cedar forest management. On the southwest quadrant of Yukusem he is staging a come-back by building a cultural camp to teach people the old ways -- sharing a forest in a transgenerational and environmentally sustainable way.

B.C. Justice system has specialized First Nation advocates

Patricia Jackson volunteers as treasurer on the board
of directors of the Northern BC Crisis Centre

 Patricia Jackson is a Youth & Family Advocate for the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of British Columbia, and, as noted on the title (or index) page, Patricia was declared the Aboriginal Woman of Distinction by Today’s Woman for the 7th Annual presentation of the northern award. She received the honours during a banquet in Prince George, at the Coast North Inn, this fall. She won this recognition from tireless work at an urgent task.

 

“We are supporting clients who are facing an imbalance, and we advocate correcting injustice.” Patricia Jackson comes to the job with the correct set of personal experiences because, it is true she is young enough to have avoided residential school horrors (by falling outside an age demographic), but Patricia underwent her own disturbing experiences in concert with what Governor General Adrienne Clarkson (Ret.) calls systemic racism against First Nations in Canada.

 

Systemic racism causes people to land in precarious, severely prejudiced, government-legislated losses of human rights from which there is no escape by any means, because it is race-based.

 

Patricia was put into a system of foster care where she grew up in a system of policies under Bill Vanderzalm, renowned and renounced as a form of zealot as then-minister of families, and Patricia lived in one of those ‘foster’ homes filled with frightful encounters, in Valemount, BC.

 

She describes endless days filled with assault and battery, deprivation, and insane rants and dictates about the problems caused by Indian people. These actions were apparently foisted upon dozens of First Nation kids wrenched thousands of kilometres from home. She was, for example, born in Metlakatla, BC, and is a member of the Tsimshian Nation.

 

She said then-minister of government Vanderzalm issued specific orders for social workers to look the other way, which permitted wider and more longterm abuse. The former premier gained a reputation from a lot of bad decisions and poor judgement. This incident, according to Patricia, paints a very dark picture of his period, as a former BC government minister.

 

She survived to raise a family and turn to a profession that provides hope of retribution, in other words, a highly noble cause for the creation in society of behaviour that treats everybody with the same justice, where justice prevails more than here and there.

 

Systemic racism in Canada has been no less absurd, no less arbitrary, no less cruel, no less obvious, and equally as destructive as any system of racism the world has ever seen.

 

Canadians are fortunate to live in an evolving society that has been proving capable of bringing about change. Patricia Jackson is one of those people who is able to lead the way. She has co-workers at the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of British Columbia www.nccabc.ca who cover the territory by following the circuit court, meeting clients and pursuing the cause of justice.

 

Jackson has toiled in a Quebec Street office in downtown Prince George to bring about change in one life or hopefully one family at a time, working to salve wounds suffered either by hook or by crook. She is happy to report the NCCABC offices are moving to new quarters.

 

She has worked at 154 Quebec Street, Prince George, in a historic property. It may well be one of the first commercial properties in Northern British Columbia, indeed, may have been a trading post. It is quaint, cramped, creaky, a false front, and they are moving.

 

A woman of this stature is too busy to pay attention to false fronts and antiquated notions. Jackson is building a place in society for people, and sometimes she delivers unexpected landings for kids. For instance, starting last year she worked with the business manager for the WHL Cougars, Brandi Brodsky, to build a program with businesses to put hundreds of kids in arena seats, fed, clothed, housed, and often over the moon with joy to receive an invitation to the spectacle of world class junior hockey.

 

Disadvantaged, at risk, handicapped, or just lucky for once, some kids might to turn a corner through heartfelt endeavours. She knows for a fact it is worth the effort. She has been mentored by others and Jackson speaks about Gloria George, a Hereditary Chief , who inspired a program to create retribution and healing in the Prince George Provincial Corrections facility. This program is presently underway dealing with residential school trauma.

 

“This program is entering another phase," said Jackson, "and the trauma workshops are being funded by the Anglican Church for this next round.” Jackson noted, “This is the first corrections facility in Canada to offer recovery assistance to residential school survivors,” and the program owes its existence, she said, to Gloria George. The United Church contributed the funding for the first phase.

 

Jackson points out another essential ingredient in the association’s success, the NCCABC is entirely First Nation operated and staffed. “My Regional Manager is Arthur Paul, and he works out of the 50 Powell Street, Vancouver BC office. He lets me do my job to the best of my ability.

 

"He has been responsible for making me a better employee,” where she has been at NCCABC for 2 years, "and on Dec 8, 2007, will be entering my third year of employment.   The NCCABC,” including Darlene Shackelly, Executive Director, “has empowered us," she said "by believing and supporting us.”

Beau Dick canoe carving project

Hawk Hawkins and Beau Dick, circa 2008, Yukusem Culture Bivouac on Hanson Island, B.C..

Beau Dick is a machine when it comes to working with wood. He is a Kwakwala carver of renowned ability whose life includes meeting the British Royal Family, and includes possession of the highest ranking bloodline.

Beau Dick was raised in Kingcome Inlet, B.C. (an obscure postal code), and grew up within a Big House society still standing in the splendour of its generations.

Kingcome Inlet represented a miraculous survival where traditionalists had dodged a lot of bullets, both literal and figurative, through many previous decades.

Beau Dick learned to carve from his grandfather and father and the teaching contained the deeper meaning of this unique form of artistic expression. He learned these important lessons at the archetype level, from which level was born a life-force.

With this knowledge and energy Beau Dick has launched himself into the community to show people the deeper meaning of their old ways.

The timing is right for Beau Dick. He found it easier to create a significant cultural revival since the return of Hanson Island to First Nation custody. It is an opportunity to break out of systematic oppression.

Proof of Aboriginal stewardship of this island has been uncovered in rich Hanson Island Old Growth cedar groves, because the Cultural Modified Trees are filled with archaeological evidence of Aboriginal Rights and Title.

Hanson Island has been returned to the custody of the First Nations. CMTs have restored once-hidden knowledge about shore-based societies constructed around rainforest cedar groves.

David Garrick, anthropologist, coined the term “transgenerational” management of forest resources to explain a social arrangement in forests. Rainforests were ‘managed’ under carefully defined  jurisdiction.

Social groups practiced grand scale horticulture on stands of cedar on Yukusem’s (Hanson Island) 16 square kilometres. They made cedar trees do the most amazing things. Excess bark was produced for harvest,  which might take a couple hundred years to get to.

Harry Alfred (et al) has taken scientific evidence to carve a role in management. He is one of the board of directors of Yukusem Heritage Society, which has custody of most of Hanson Island.

He is also, “land and resource officer of the Namgis First Nation,” he explained, one afternoon in a Garrick-constructed garden in Yukusem heights.

“The Namgis traditional territory,” said Alfred, comprised, “about 4,000 sq km.” Extending an arm to four corners he described a rectangular shaped territory with Yukusem almost centre.

Harry Alfred said the community rebounded due to David Garrick’s work in cedar groves on Yukusem (over 20 years of hands-on research). The First Nations managers have devoted nation-building energy to CMT research.

A hundred people been trained by Garrick and these are people who have regained cultural balance from the experience.

Life goes on, yes, and Beau Dick, a realist, knows this. He is adding something to a historically significant nation using the old secrets of majestic Indian Nation jurisdiction.

On the southwest quadrant of Yukusem he is staging a canoe carving project and building a cultural camp to teach people the old ways about sharing a forest in a transgenerational and environmentally sustainable way.

Visit the Carving Studio of Alert Bay

Carving a Crooked Beak in Alert Bay, B.C.

Feeding the trout

Huge breakthrough coming for Prince George First Nation students

Marlene Erickson is vice-chair of the Aboriginal Education Task Force and chairperson for the Aboriginal Education Board in School District 57, which runs schools in Prince George, B.C., and surroundings, "We reported on the task force findings Feb 26 08."

The report was delivered to the school board and the Aboriginal Education School Board. Erickson has been working for over a decade to bring about the fundamental changes required to make education an acceptable opportunity to these youth from First Nations.

She began to work to bring about change in the previous decade when Erickson volunteered for Native Student Services Committee in the school district, which was a precursor to the Aboriginal Education Board. The Aboriginal Education Board was formed in the area in the mid-1990s and Erickson joined as a board member, then two years ago she was appointed to the chair.

The recommendations made by the Aboriginal Education Task Force, which Erickson vice-chaired, "will take several years and we certainly hope to get started right away." For Erickson the priority is simple, "The biggest issue is to increase the Academic Achievement levels to open the doors for First Nations kids to enter post-secondary institutions and get higher learning.”

The process of designing a program and building relevant curricula will take advantage of research done by other jurisdictions where Aboriginal education engages students with cultural acknowledgements and practices within a protected learning environment.

"We are discussing a 'choice' school and eventually it will deliver an Aboriginal-specific curriculum," said Erickson. "We think we can make rapid progress because the initiatives have SD57 trustee support and results of the task force indicate strong community-level and grassroots support for program changes and design."

Erickson said a city like Prince George needs to work as a community to help struggling kids, "We want a choice school so other kids from non-Native families can access the program. We want the program to emphasize cooperative learning techniques, which seem to benefit the First Nation student more than the learning model that demands high grades and forces ambition into a fiercely competitive mode."

All students in this particular choice for Aboriginal-oriented education will benefit from added levels of support, and, no, “this is not a return to Residential Schools," which Erickson said has been one of the criticisms.

As Aboriginals, "We are already at 25 percent of the school enrolment and it is increasing every year. We have some schools in the city of Prince George already at 75 percent Aboriginal students in the population," and, she said, this will make the development of a 'choice' school a reasonable alternative.

Why hasn't it happened before now? "There are a whole bunch of reasons why the proposal is new," because, she said, "it is essentially new again." They tried proposing a choice school five years ago but the city wasn't ready to listen to the suggestion.

If Prince George's polity thought it had bigger problems and perhaps bigger fish to fry, well, "We are trying to impress on the community that the education system in the city is failing the student population and it amounts to a crisis. We will face mounting social costs, strains to the justice system, and continued dependencies on social welfare programs."

In order for the recommendations to come to pass, including the one about an Aboriginal choice school, community consultations are impending and they could become noisy. The SD57 board has approved the idea, nevertheless, the community needs to be consulted, and consultations can become noisy, especially when the topic is what to do about Indians in the city.

The SD57 area of jurisdiction covers more than the city of Prince George and includes east to Valemount, north to Mackenzie and McLeod Lake, and west to Vanderhoof. Some of the district's schools contain a vast majority of Native kids in their population.

"Our plans for Prince George will possibly benefit places like McLeod Lake and they will be watching closely because they sit on the Aboriginal Education Board.”

Erickson knows the grassroots includes the teachers, "I think the teachers and support workers in the existing school system are seeing the problems up close. Many are performing duties above and beyond the call, and they are really looking forward to a lot of these recommendations."

She hopes adoption of the recommendations will ameliorate against the burnout being experienced by teachers under the present circumstances.

Marlene Erickson comes by her concern honestly, "I am at the college (of New Caledonia) as the First Nation Coordinator of Aboriginal Support Services, and one of my jobs is to recruit students to the college from the community. I found myself on the Native Student Services Committee trying to recruit from too shallow a pool of students."

It was impossible to meet quotas. "First Nation kids do not see grade 12 graduation as a goal." Asked why, she said, "Poverty issues are first, and they are urban as well as rural," and First Nations are transplanting reservation-like poverty and social flux into poor city neighbourhoods.

"Look at all the urban areas of Canada and you will find Aboriginals living in the poorest conditions. Another problem is the sense of identity and pride of culture. We need to find the ways to deal with it, break kids out of the cycle. When you ask the kids, for instance, if their parents went to residential school most of them do not know the answer."

Erickson said the Aboriginal Education Board will have an important role to play in the implementation of the AETF recommendations.

Lois Boone is the chair of the AETF and elected as a trustee of SD57 and she said, "A new school is a different scenario for us. An Aboriginal ‘choice’ school would be based on First Nations philosophies of learning and would be open to everyone in the community," said Boone.

"Our thinking is that we would get a mix of students in the school," and, furthermore, "it would be possible to turn one of the existing schools into the 'choice' school that we envisage."

The task force contained a cross-section of community members totaling 13, and including Boone and Marlene Erickson, then two principals, two teachers, two Aboriginal education workers, an assistant school superintendent, two First Nation parents, and an Elder.

"We had a tight time frame and wanted to have a report done in February so we could meet budget discretion for the next school year," because, ideally, they would like to open an Aboriginal 'choice' school in Sep 08.

In fact the SD57 board is already hiring a 'district' principal for the Aboriginal Education program, whatever form it takes.

"We have to change the way we do education,” said Boone. “We need more cultural stuff in the classrooms, more cultural education and background for teachers and assistants, more interaction with Elders, music, regalia, and other cultural identifiers. What is there now is not working. The higher rates of failure are too much."

Boone said the SD57 board will meet with the Minister of Education Shirley Bond to go over the report. It is a matter of good fortune perhaps that, "Ms. Bond was elected in 2001 to represent the riding of Prince George-Mount Robson and re-elected in 2005."

The government website said, "Before her election to the Legislative Assembly, she served three terms on the Prince George School Board, the last as chair. She also worked with the continuing education department of the Prince George School District."

Trustee Boone said, "There are going to be some costs associated with setting it up," and because of the constraints of population this proposal includes only Kindergarten to grade 7, for at present there are not enough Aboriginal high school students to fill seats in wider high school program.

"We are open to suggestions, however, and if we could somehow fit a choice program into an existing high school," this may become an option.