And the winners are...

This year's list of achievers is out, and among the 14 winners of the 2001 National Aboriginal Achievement Awards are four based in British Columbia.

Elder and environmentalist Mary Thomas, entrepreneur Dolly Watts, politician Len Marchand, and Metis leader Fred House will be among those honored on March 16 in Edmonton.

Educator Freda Ahenakew of Saskatchewan, Nunavut Elder and carver Mariano Aupilardjuk, film and television producer Roman Bittman, politician Harold Cardinal, physician Dr. Lindsay Crowshoe, author and playwright Tomson Highway, Inuit film-maker Zacharias Kunuk, politicians Richard Nerysoo and Nicholas Sibbeston of the Northwest Territories, and medical student Lance Relland will also each take home an award.

Mary Thomas, now in her 80s, is an environmentalist and educator. Early in life she harnessed her knowledge of medicines and healing and strove to make a difference. Fearful of the environmental changes she was witnessing, Thomas helped found the Salmon River Watershed restoration project and has worked to create the Ecocultural Centre at Salmon Arm. Thomas has educated young and old about the need for conservation, preservation and environmental awareness and the relevance of the traditional ways in preserving the health of the land and its people.

In the 1970s, she founded the Central Okanagan Interior Friendship Centre so Aboriginal harvesters could find support. She also oversaw the co-ordination and building of a traditional winter house for a local museum. A decade later, the Smithsonian Institution asked her to repeat the project for one of their collections.

Over the last 10 years she has been using her traditional knowledge to document traditional Secwepemc plant knowledge. In 1997, she became the first Aboriginal person in North America to receive the Indigenous Conservationist of the Year award from the Seacology Foundation. In 2000 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Victoria.

Len Marchand arrived in Ottawa in the 1960s. Already among the first from his reserve to complete secondary school and undergraduate and graduate university studies, Marchand was soon the first status Indian to serve as a special assistant to a federal Cabinet minister. By 1966, he became the first Aboriginal to be made special assistant to the minister of Indian Affairs. Fresh from these roles, this member of the Okanagan First Nation in British Columbia was destined to make history, again. Running as a Liberal in 1968, he won. This made him the first status Indian to have ever been elected to Parliament. The second Aboriginal, after Louis Riel.

Marchand served 11 years as an MP and was brought into Pierre Trudeau's cabinet as minister of State for Small Business and minister of State for the Environment. Appointed to the Senate in 1984, Marchand co-chaired the Senate Committee on Aboriginal Veterans and helped make the National Aboriginal Veterans' Scholarship Trust a reality. Retired Senator Leonard Marchand remains actively involved in projects such as the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument Fund.

As the owner-operator of Liliget Feast House and Catering, Dolly Watts "a member of the Gitxsan First Nation" has taken Vancouver by storm.

Customers experience traditional wild game and seafood as only Watts can prepare it.

While in university, Watts established a small bannock stand called Grandma's Bannock. Demand was incredible and a catering business" Just Like Grandma's Bannock' followed. After that, Liliget Feast House and Catering was born in 1995.

She's developed a national and international reputation, serving as a program consultant to prestigious conferences on Canadian cuisine, and speaking overseas on Aboriginal cuisine. Watts also co-founded the Aboriginal Business Club, which provides a forum for sharing successful business strategies and ideas with others in the Aboriginal community.

The recipient of numerous culinary and business honors, Watts hs dveloped a solid nationwide clientele.

Fred House, a Metis leader, helped ensure his people were not ignored or forgotten when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the provincial premiers repatriated the Canadian Constitution in 1982.

House was once described as a "born leader, fighting for those who can't speak for themselves and one who never ever gives up." He served as president of the B.C. Association of Non-Status Indians in the 1970s and formed Coyote Credit Union, which provides small business loans and investments for Aboriginal entrepreneurs.

House founded a construction company and heavy equipment contracting co-operative that employed hundreds. He fought to convince government officials that Metis and non-status Indians desperately needed access to social housing by bringing attention to the deplorable housing crisis in northern B.C. in the 1970s.

House established a province-wide network of court workers to assist Aboriginal people before the courts. This advocate for Metis rights has taken his people's case directly to every prime minister since John Diefenbaker.