Clint Davis is on a quest to build business opportunities for First Nations communities across Canada, but his journey is fraught with challenges.
Last week Davis, president and CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (CCAB), was in Vancouver for the council’s annual gala dinner and business session.
He met with Business in Vancouver to talk about one of the most serious issues thwarting aboriginal business development: the lack of human and educational capacity in aboriginal leadership circles.
“It’s very, very common,” Davis said. “It’s unfortunately common.”
The issue was brought to BIV’s attention after West Moberly Chief Roland Willson told the newspaper that his community doesn’t have enough people or knowledge to properly assess business opportunities (see “Development deluge” – issue 1088; August 31-September 6).
Davis said, for the most part, aboriginal people are 30 or 40 years behind the rest of Canada’s business community.
Part of the problem stems from decades of inequality.
“It’s not that to engage in business is in fundamental opposition to our culture and background … it’s that a lot of evolution has taken place in the business community over the last 50 or 60 years, and we weren’t part of it,” he said. “I think, fundamentally, that’s a major contributing factor to this lack of capacity, coupled with the fact that you’re dealing with individuals in abject poverty and the atrocities in residential schools.”
That abuse, he said, has created a situation where many aboriginal communities don’t see formalized education in a “positive light.”
In turn, many First Nations people were left behind as the rest of Canada’s business community pursued MBAs.
Take Squamish First Nation Chief Gibby Jacob, for example.
Jacob has been a leader in his community for 29 years but has no formal post-secondary education.
He said his business and leadership education came from the “school of hard-knocks.”
“I’ve really gone the traditional route. I’ve not had any formal post-secondary education but have been fortunate to have mentors.”
Those mentors, who included a former chief and lawyers, taught him how to be a strong leader in a community with no shortage of challenges.
But even he said things are changing, and the Squamish band is encouraging its youth to pursue formal educations.
“That to me is the cornerstone of evolution for us,” Jacob said. “We do put some of our own revenue into education, but our demands far outstrip our available financial resources.”Tsawwassen First Nation Chief Kim Baird said the same thing.
“This year we’ve had a record number of post-secondary applications that we haven’t been able to fund because we’ve been unprepared for it.”
Yet education can create a vacuum in many remote aboriginal communities, Davis said.
“The challenge that we have now is as more and more young people go from the communities to get educated, how many of them are actually going back to the community to benefit the community?”
The problem, he said, is that many remote communities don’t offer the same career opportunities that urban areas do. And a more insidious problem exists in some communities, Davis said, where educated youth return only to be rejected by their own people.
“You have heard of the term ‘crabs in a bucket,’ right? Sometimes some of the biggest enemies of aboriginal people can be ourselves,” he said. “There is this tendency and level of jealousy where you see one person that’s doing well [and] you try and pull them back into the bucket.”
The solution, he said, is two-fold. One, First Nations communities need to embrace education and, two, explain to their youth that it’s important to return to the community and give back.
That should help create long-term capacity that can take advantage of investment and development opportunities.
The CCAB also encourages mentorship programs between the private sector and aboriginal communities.
The Squamish adopted a similar strategy when many of its people retained jobs with the construction crews that updated the Sea-to-Sky Highway.
Jacob said some of them are now construction foremen and have established lasting careers.
The Tsawwassen’s Baird said she partnered members of her leadership team with industry experts to get hands-on experience in negotiation and legal and resource issues.
And if the business community needs further incentive to invest in aboriginals, Davis, Baird and Jacob pointed to an ongoing labour trend that’s been called the “demographic tsunami.”
According to Statistics Canada, between 1996 and 2006 Canada’s aboriginal population grew 45% compared with the non-aboriginal population that grew only 8%.
The agency projects that the national aboriginal population could total 1.4 million by 2017 compared with 1.1 million in 2006.
That means as the baby boomers retire, the nation’s labour force will increasingly rely on aboriginals.
That’s why Jacob said it’s more important than ever to establish lasting relationships between the business community and aboriginals.
“You can see my hand in one of three ways: clenched fist, palm up looking for handouts or a handshake,” Jacob said. “Where would we like to get to? The handshake.”