Winton Global houses built by following the numbers and shooting the nails

Building much-needed new homes in remote locations is a challenge for many First Nation communities.  So much so that many are now pursuing the idea of using factory-built, precision-fit wood framing components to quickly erect more and better quality homes. 

     

Winton Global Homes, based in Prince George, BC, operates one of the most technologically advanced roof truss and wall-panel manufacturing facilities in Western North America.  Delivering factory-framed housing components to First Nation communities in order to help alleviate the crisis in housing has become a key focus of the company.

     

Marlene Fehr-Power, General Manager of Winton Global Homes in Prince George alludes to shifting preferences she has noticed when it comes to First Nation housing, "Over time, it is becoming more and more popular for forward-thinking First Nation communities to build multi-family dwellings as a part of their community plans."  

     

And the demand for housing is changing, says Marlene.  "First Nations have a growing number of elders in their communities and these folks often require a form of housing known as 'Visitable Housing'."  In simple terms, a Visitable Home is a home with a zero-step front entry and a bathroom on the main floor which incorporates a 3 ft. door.  "Visitable homes enhance inclusion and participation in community life," says Marlene, not to mention the advantages of easier long term care.

     

Winton Global Homes also produces floor systems, pre-built wall panel and engineered trusses for major urban projects as well.  "We have just finished building floors, walls and trusses for the Friendship House in Prince George, B.C., the new Prince George Native Friendship Centre Transition House that stands on the outer fringe of the city's downtown core. 

     

This major new facility provides a warm and safe home for many disabled and displaced people in the northern B.C. city, but the company also delivers home packages far afield as well.  "Our homes are shipped as far as Manitoba, and to the Pacific North West of the US." 

     

Marlene says, "The truth about factory-framed or panelized or packaged homes is that they shine as housing solutions in remote areas."  Many of the 700 Indian Reservations in Canada are remote and housing construction can cause difficulties when the planning isn't perfect.  But now, Winton Global Homes can deliver a new home package directly to site that requires nothing but assembly.  "It's all about controlling your costs.  With easy to assemble pre-built wall panel and engineered trusses all packaged up and delivered with windows, doors, siding and roofing, you can keep a tight reign on 'construction cost over runs' which are so common with other methods of building these days.  For people working within a budget this is the ideal solution."

     

This kind of cost control and efficiency applies to single family dwellings, multi-family projects and two-storey buildings as well.  

"We help communities build the homes they so desperately need, from design through materials selection through to complete assembly instructions and project coordination," she says.  "Our homes are basically assembled by number, and erected to 'lock-up' so finishing can occur on the inside."  

Once the basic outside portion of the home is built the inside work proceeds. The choice and design of a community's factory-framed, panelized homes for remote communities can be done via telephone and with the use of e-mail.  The factory in PG designs, builds and ships floor systems, numbered wall panels and engineered trusses directly to site for assembly.

     

"Follow the numbers and shoot the nails," says Marlene. "The personnel required to build the home only need a qualified carpenter on-site to help guide the process.  And, it goes very smoothly."  Remember, the procedure from lock-up is to install the electrical, plumbing, and heating systems that finish the new home in preparation for move-in day.  "The panel-built home is quickly erected and trades do the rest." 

     

As First Nations Drum reported previously this year, "We love a challenge in the design phase because our goal is to give the customer exactly what they want," says Marlene.  Winton Global Homes has been constructing panel-built housing for the past 30 years, previously doing business as Spruce Capital Homes.  Feel free to view a comprehensive selection of affordable new home designs at their Website by visiting www.wintonglobal.com .

Solar energy in Canada lags behind other industrial nations

First Power Canada is the brainchild of Joe Thwaites and his team from Taylor Munro Energy Systems that  brought to bear the training and skills development in the T-Sou-ke Nation Solar Demonstration Project on the south-west corner of Vancouver Island. The T'Sou-ke Nation installed an $800,000 array of solar energy in the Vancouver Island community to create passive solar electricity and solar thermal heat, light and power. "In summer," says Donna Morton, "the solar panels feed energy back into the BC HYDRO grid," making a valuable contribution to the First Nation community's economy.
    

Morton is founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Integral Economics (CIE), in Victoria, B.C.. First Power Canada is a partnership with Taylor Munro Energy Systems, Morton says, "First Power Canada is a project to creates funding, finance, training, and other community supports to First Nation communities wanting to gain energy autonomy. " The T'Sou-ke project is a prime example of the prowess for capacity building that First Power Canada intends to employ in a number of situations.
    

This kind of energy development is going to go much further in Canadian First Nations because the communities with resource bases and energy demands look to green energy solutions, and industry is making close liaisons to move projects like T'Sou-ke into the making. "Our organization," says Morton, "is geared to work with First Nation communities, Aboriginal organizations, and other groups that face significant barriers to working in the trades." The target audience includes immigrants and those who come from a background of poverty regardless of their origins. We work with people who have special gifts that may fall outside the world of book learning experience. We find the funding to do the training with partnerships in various organizations, adding value to the training and finding people in the margins of society."
    

Morton says, "We train anywhere and piggyback on existing training facilities; we train by doing. It's tactical training with a lot of hands-on building, testing, and learning to fix and maintain equipment in the real world. It's a crash course with apprenticeship qualities, but we employ variables by meeting and customizing the needs of communities. We take people where they are and use whatever skills they possess, in roofing, mechanicals, plumbing, carpentry, or electrical. Any one of these skills is a good entry and our training really works well on people who are jack-of-all-trades."
    

Morton notes that installing solar electrical and heating systems is an integrated trade. "Our training puts all those pieces together. Loggers and wood workers, unemployed mill-workers, these people have huge assets that are not being employed and no programs appear to exist for these people. There are not enough trained people in solar installation to meet the present demand and we hope to incubate the capacity for starting businesses, doing this for all kinds of reserves and bringing business to life in communities. Metis organizations and non-Status First Nation people and immigrant workers who come from a mix of ethnicities, our purpose is to cross the racial barriers."
    

Morton says North American use of solar energy is way behind developments in Europe. "They are 25 years ahead of us and have created a hundred thousand jobs. Solar installation is proceeding in Canada but 10,000 installers are needed, and solar infrastructure need these builder. First Nations can enter the industry in a way that favours the way they respect the earth, and solar harnesses the earth's resources by not taking more than is required. It is a form of natural power." 
    

 First Power Canada designed their education initiatives from a series of pilot projects including the T-Sou-ke project (reported in August 2009 First Nations Drum Dialogue on Development), "From this point we would like to install another 100 more systems this year. From the beginning we foresaw building whole systems that would reduce dependencies on burning diesel and coal to create electricity. We will solve energy problems organically and we will promote training and installation together. We will produce solutions in project financing and business development, building the capacity to own their futures, undoing dependency. It's job creation living up to the traditions of the ancestors. It will assist communities in getting past the perception of dependency and connect them to the world."

Lateral Violence in Indigenous Life in Canada

 

David Segerts is a man who lives for positive change in Canadian society. Sitting one day with Segerts in his tastefully decorated apartment I felt surrounded by an orderly nature given to his lifestyle and was treated to his impeccable manners. I was also given a taste of his lifetime of memories before he talked about the really important issues he works on.

Segerts was born in 1960,  at the time Uranium City, Saskatchewan, was a city of 5,000 souls, and he grew up to see the mining property turn into a ghost town. Uranium City was shutdown in 1982 but by that time he was ready to move on.

"I am a Dene/Cree but I generally say I am Dene because I look almost exactly like my Dene father." He shows a photograph that proves he is the spitting image of his dad. "I dropped out of school when I was in grade 8 and went back for adult upgrading by the age of 25 at Alberta Vocational Centre in Calgary. AVC was a good learning experience although the facility lacked a First Nation student organization so I helped put one together. We held dances, fundraisers, and hosted a room that the school donated, which became a gathering place for all nations and a useful foot in the door for First Nation students."

A short time later Segerts began to study something very important in First Nation life in Canada, the tactics of oppression known as lateral violence that are especially prevalent in systemic racism. It is this lateral violence that explains the extraordinary incarceration rates and recidivism in crime for the First Nation people of Canada. As high as 50 percent of the prisoners in Canada either male or female are First Nation or Aboriginal people. For these kinds of disparities to exist in a segment of society that is less than 5 percent of the total population, the problems have to run very deep indeed.

"Lateral violence goes on in every First Nation organization and starts with arguments like, 'My family is better than theirs,'" he says. "It is important within the system of racism to get us fighting amongst each other. We are actually born into it, however, because the system is designed that way. Public awareness is the only way to address it," says Segerts.

"The methods of lateral violence include, backstabbing, gossip, infighting, shaming, humiliating, damaging comments, belittling, and sometimes violent behaviour." Other terms for what is happening to First Nations in Canada include auto-genocide and horizontal violence, he said. These terms are applied mostly to the members of oppressed groups in society, and he explained, "I didn't really understand lateral violence until I was about 30 years of age. I rarely discussed it until I did the research first. Lateral violence is designed to prevent efforts to heal the effects of oppression."

Lateral violence teaches people to disrespect and deny the rights of an oppressed group, to destroy values and beliefs. Practitioners will engage in infighting, faulting finding, and scapegoating, raising the stakes of competition via jealousy and envy. The attacks are made upon those who already possess low self esteem and further attacks lower a person's self worth.

Ultimately the goal is to make the victim take blame for the continuous putdowns, "This is the nature of oppression," says Segerts. "It is a denial of their self and humanity. They think they have become objects unworthy of respect. They fail from the inability to recognize themselves as human beings. They become convinced that the oppressor owns them, and often the oppressor does own them through financial dependencies upon welfare and personal dependencies upon drugs or alcohol."

He says, “When my son was 11 years old I brought him to Calgary to live with me, and after a few short weeks he told me, ‘Dad, I didn’t realize that Indians didn’t drink. I didn’t realize the Indian men work.’” It was another stunning learning experience about lateral violence for Segerts the father who has never spent time stuck in welfare programs but knows on reserves and in some urban communities it can become a long-running generational trap.

“People who feel dependent suffer a lack of personal power. When they lose power they will see their cultural identity eliminated and be unable to stop it,” he says. Many times the First Nations in Canada have been known to hide their own beliefs or adopt the beliefs of an oppressing society. “They were dislocated from the land and suffered breakdown of family structure during the Residential School years. Indigenous people were removed from families at age four in some cases, only to be afflicted with physical, mental, sexual, and social abuses.”

His own mother had a safety pin jammed through her tongue by nuns at one such school, then was made to sit facing a corner in a classroom for speaking her Cree language. “There were many children killed by torture,” he asserts, “and other families were disrupted by one child being raised in a Catholic school and another being raised in a United Church run school. In fact the Residential School system was a highly specialized form of lateral violence.”

The lateral violence design for First Nations people results in a distrust of First Nation leaders by their own people. “It results in a distrust of those who might emerge to help," he says. "Rising stars are severely restricted or punished. Leaders who make any difference are fired and persecuted. Incompetent leaders are recruited and promoted by the oppressors. Dividing and conquering is the main process used by the oppressors.”

Segerts needs to write a book with a biographical story line if he hasn't already. He was trained as a technical engineer at BCIT and NAIT, then, while living in Vancouver, he entered the film industry, first as an actor, then as a producer and director. When we last spoke he was running a youth-at-risk employment initiative that operates across Canada for First Nations. Remember the name David Segerts because the book would be an important read. If you know David Segerts personally, put the suggestion to him again. 

David Garrick's study of CMTs on the west coast of Canada, Broughton Archipelago

A Firewood CMT

In the days prior to the Industrial Revolution First Nations built canoes to travel the extensive waterways of the Pacific coast. Each dugout canoe was manufactured out of a single cedar tree and these dugout war canoes were designed for ocean voyages of long duration.

Sometimes during these journeys canoeists ran afoul of the weather. The water on the Inside Passage is a reasonably constant 6 or 7 degrees Celsius but the weather varies and rainfall is a potential threat all year long, especially from October to March. Dealing with these wet conditions called for planning, which included the invention of the 'firewood CMT,' a form of culturally modified tree (CMT) found on remote islands and inlets of the Pacific Coast of Canada.

"Knowledge of the history of forest use is crucial for understanding the development of forests, which in turn helps to understand how societies react to forest development," said Rikard Andersson, Faculty of Forest Sciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. "Culturally modified trees (CMTs), recorded in the western U.S. (and Canada), northern Scandinavia, and south-eastern Australia, are features that can be dated precisely, and they bear witness to unique events of human activity."

David Garrick is a Canadian anthropologist with specific expertise in CMTs in west coast rainforests. "These artefacts define the First Nations communities in a practical way. They had camps all over the place, often at the mouth of a river. If they were taking a three-day voyage by canoe and it started raining they would pull out of the water, but how would you start a fire?"

An essential CMT would be found ashore where they could and often did make land and find the firewood CMT, each site containing a dry source of wood. The travelers would find a small cavern dug above the roots inside a massive cedar tree trunk. "They would peel shreds of the dry cedar found inside the hollowed trunk and they would ignite a fire inside the tree."

These firewood CMTs were commonplace, "There's one found at every encampment." Garrick has studied these peculiar modifications from Banks Island all the way to Kitkatla. He and others have found abundant evidence of a kindling source that provided instant fire to travelers. For the past three decades David Garrick concentrated on the study of humans interacting in forests on the Pacific Coast.

He found a perfect place to do CMT research on Hanson Island, about 15 km south west of Alert Bay, B.C.. He set up the Earth Embassy in the heights of the 4 sq. km. island and he worked under the auspices of the Yukusem Heritage Society (composed of four First Nations from the Broughton Archipelago and Johnstone Strait).

"If you keep the ecosystem intact it becomes a living laboratory and a living museum, and a living classroom." For further study, "We have a post-secondary learning opportunities in the area. We have trails into all kinds of nooks and crannies on Hanson Island."

Garrick's laboratory on Hanson Island has been a welcome presence in the First Nations of coastal B.C. because his research provides a good history lesson about cedar usage in the culture and economy of the people. For instance a 'core-popped' cedar tree looks like a traumatic injury to those who pass by, but core-popping was no problem to First Nations, instead, it was a marker of time, "What happened to the cedar tree core was caused by a memorable event like a potlatch."

First Nation forest use went into a state of chaos for a period after contact with Europeans and the anthropology is specific about describing the trauma, "After epidemics reduced the population of Indigenous people, you see the sickness of the people reflected in the cedar peelings. Suddenly there are one-tenth the number of people available to peel cedar tree bark or cultivate and harvest other plants in the cedar groves."

Garrick's work will continue on Hanson Island where he has equipped others to teach everyone from small groups of First Nation students to the First Nation CMT researchers who identify the evidence of occupation and prior use in traditional territories. He maintained beautiful gardens at the Earth Embassy and he had members of the multi-nation Society trained to cut and maintains trails to the instructive cedar groves that will stand in perpetuity on Hanson Island.


Freelance Writing by Mack McColl in 2009

Naikun in Haida Gwaii is about green energy for the provincial grid

Haida Enterprise Corporation (“HaiCo”) made the announcement on Aug 13, 2009, on behalf of the Haida Nation, that an agreement was done with NaiKun Wind Energy Group Inc. (TSX-V: NKW) to acquire up to 40 per cent of the wind energy project being developed through NaiKun Wind subsidiary NaiKun Wind Generating Inc. in the giant Hecate Strait of the North Pacific Coast. 

HaiCo spokespersons said the Haida Nation and NaiKun Wind Energy Group (“NaiKun Wind”) have signed a memorandum of understanding in support of the agreement. 
     

HaiCo and the Haida Nation will be seeking the support of the federal government for the proposal and they have said the initiative is consistent with the objectives of the new Federal Framework on Aboriginal Economic Development. The current estimated cost of the NaiKun Wind project is approximately $2 billion and the Haida are positioned to acquire that 40 per cent of the 396 MW wind energy project, and add a host of energy associated benefits. 

It involves over 100 tower mounted turbines arrayed over hundreds of square kilometres, as proposed for the Hecate Strait. "We are still working on the environmental review and it will be ready, depending on the weather, either in September or October 2009," says Thomas Olsen, MBA, and CEO of HaiCo.
     

"Future income from part ownership of the wind energy project could provide the catalyst to enable the Haida Nation to create a sustainable economy for Haida Gwaii." The Nation is poised to develop the giant islands in their reaches in such economic development areas such as forestry products, fisheries of several species fin and shell, and aquaculture, not too mention that opportunities in tourism and recreation. The new power from ownership in NaiKun adds immensely as well as to community infrastructure.
    

Olsen says the Haida Enterprise Corporation and the Haida Nation will be seeking the support of the federal government for this proposal and that includes a range of offices including INAC, Environment Canada, and DFO. "It will change life and give a wide stream of benefits to people in Haida Gwaii," he says. "The current energy situation is very limiting to the economic development aspirations of the Haida Nation. Diesel generated power is too restrictive of the development process."
     

HaiCO is meanwhile following the processes and meeting with certain politicians like Hon. Chuck Stahl, Minister of Indian Affairs, "We are working with a bureaucracy to see how we fit," Thomas says, "and this is an Aboriginal economic development initiative so we are trying to emphasize the wide array of benefits to the Haida equity position in NaiKun Wind Energy Group. It's a concern to the whole population of these islands," he says, "that they gain ownership and access of a green energy solution," but the cost of the huge array of wind turbines is daunting, "and people don't necessarily understand the debt."
      

Olsen says the federal and provincial governments have to understand that the wind energy project is about more than green energy for the province, "It's about self-reliance for the Haida and self-determination. We have a big fishery and scallop aquaculture underway, and we have tourism opportunities with existing operators. We have a substantial forestry license, 120,000 CM per year. We are concerned about creating new capacity for jobs that will continue to provide downstream benefits within the local economy, and that comes from an equity position in power generation from a large producer like NaiKun." 

HaiCo Environmental Review 2011 / Haida withdraw from Naikun investment opportunity Dec 2011