On this week’s menu: another round of gambling on native reserves in B.C. and elsewhere across Canada.
At stake: entrepreneurial rebirth or status quo dependence. Risky business, indeed. But risk is key to winning the gamble, which requires more than the recent PR jaw sessions with the prime minister.
Risk 1: Ditch the Indian Act or embrace hybrid options like the First Nations Land Management Act (FNLMA).
Another eight bands recently signed on to the FNLMA, which was originally passed in 1999 to allow bands to wrest control over land use on their reserves from Ottawa.
Risk 2: Allow on-reserve band members to secure fee-simple private property rights, which are key to freeing them from continuing to be under Ottawa’s economic house arrest. As last week’s Squamish Voices protest shows, Canada’s current generation of aboriginals is atuned to how important equitable land management is to its future.
The group labelled the two-day Aboriginal Land Resource Management Forum at the Four Seasons Hotel the ”Land and Resources Mismanagement Gathering.” One of the group’s activists said that when it comes to land management in her Squamish band community, “there is no consultation, no communication, no community involvement and no community engagement.”
Risk 3: More community engagement also needs to be applied to band budgets and accounting.
Opaque accounting is a core contributor to the Third World housing conditions and other reserve management challenges illustrated by the Attawapiskat reserve saga. Native bands remain the only publicly funded business in the country allowed to operate without providing open audited financial books to their shareholders.
Risk 4: That issue goes hand in glove with ensuring that elected chiefs and council are accountable to their electorate. As the University of Victoria’s Taiaiake Alfred points out in Calvin Helin’s Dances with Dependency, the current lack of accountability under the Indian Act continues to ensure that band governments are “answerable to Ottawa – where they are answerable at all – rather than to their own people. That’s the inherent corruption.”
Risk 5: Develop a band culture of career training, not only at the blue-collar trades level, but also in band management so that business opportunities can be exploited when offered and pioneered when they’re not.
That initiative is needed to ensure the survival of organizations like the BC Aboriginal Mine Training Association, which trains on-reserve band members for lucrative careers in the human-resources-starved mining sector, but is on the brink of shut down because of funding challenges.
The Burns Lake’s Babine Forest Products mill fire tragedy has likewise set the stage for another potential aboriginal enterprise gamble.
Mill owner Hampton Affiliates will be hard pressed to justify re-investing multimillions into rebuilding its operation in an area where forests have been devastated by the pine beetle infestation and available mill fibre will be gone in less than a decade. It has been the community’s major employer. But it doesn’t call Burns Lake home. The mill’s workers do; many are aboriginal. The risk then is this: investing band energy and equity in rebuilding, managing and marketing an upgraded and refocused mill. It’s a major gamble, but its payoff could be economic independence for a community and a people.
Native chiefs who could have attended the recent Crown-First Nations gathering with Stephen Harper but didn’t were either looking for business or looking for excuses.
Guess which game plan is going to generate meaningful change in the long term. •
