On the western edge of Indian Country

Page 5

Summer in British Columbia - what a wonderful time. It feels so good to be home.

I just finished a two-year tour of duty with B.C. Hydro and it feels great to be back in Indian Country. I left the company for personal reasons and not because I didn't feel welcome there and not because I was forced out. I did my job in the face of extreme adversity and paid the price for working for a professional company.

In so many ways working for a major corporation as a First Nations person was a challenge that I took personally. It was an invaluable experience that few Aboriginal people have a chance to experience first-hand and yet it came at a steep price.

I was a communications coordinator with an Aboriginal relations department and a small cog in a very sophisticated corporate machine. Almost everyone around me in the corporation had a university degree of some kind or had worked in the corporation for many years.

It was eye-opening to see how policy is formed within a Crown corporation and how one person can influence how decisions are made. It felt really, really good to be a part of a team where it was just assumed that you knew your stuff and you were consulted and your knowledge made a difference. Contrast that to the Aboriginal community where you have the bucket of crabs mentality.

I moved from the Aboriginal community into the corporate world and was dazed by how corporate culture is so much more regimented and paper-driven than operations in Indian Country.

As the editor of the Aboriginal relations department's quarterly newsletter, I was at the bottom end of the corporate food chain. I had to go through three different levels of approvals to have the content of the newsletter approved for publication. As a result, there was very little creativity in the position.

Corporate messages and corporate-speak were rules of the day. Nothing was done without approvals and sign-offs from managers and other hydro employees with more experience.

The position, which I won after competing against almost 200 other applicants, was very demanding. I was responsible for writing for the internal news service that the corporation sends out on the Intranet (only available to company employees) about the Aboriginal relations department's newsworthy events. In addition I was also working on special projects and was responsible for the writing, some of the editing, and photography for the department's quarterly publication.

By and large, the people I worked with were very competent and professional while being sensitive to the needs of the Aboriginal community. That isn't to say there aren't a lot of problems you face as an Aboriginal person working for a corporation. Managers with a lot of authority keep things from changing within the corporation and that impacts a lot of people outside of the corporation. A recent study done by human resources revealed the average age of the employees was 44 and that most of the management was male and white.

That by itself is not so surprising but it does point out how hard it would be to be an Aboriginal person working in an office dominated by Euro-centric ways of doing things. The stats also pointed out that there were barely more than 100 Aboriginal people working for the corporation out of a workforce of about 5,000. There are also thousands of contract jobs created by the hundreds of millions of dollars that are contracted out on an annual basis. Very few of these positions are contracted to Aboriginal businesses and it is tough because the corporation will not change policies so that Aboriginal companies can have preferential treatment in getting contract work. I am talking about $500 to 600 million annually that is contracted out. Granted, most of the work is stuff that few Aboriginal people have the training for, but a large part of that money is spent by managers who spent most of their time protecting their turf.

In order to influence change within the corporation, I would have had to sty another couple of years and met other young management types and hung out with them in my spare hours and been best buddies. I would have had to play the game.

I decided in the end that working for a corporation wasn't something that appealed to me as a First Nations person interested in change at the community level. Corporations are traps for Aboriginal people. If you want to change things you have to commit yourself to staying with the corporation for long periods of time and know the right people within the corporation. The trade-off is that unless you are living in the community where you work, you must leave your extended family and everything that makes you an Aboriginal person.

I was living in Vancouver and couldn't really practice the things that make me a Shuswap person. My Aboriginal fishing and hunting rights are only viable in my traditional territory. My spirituality can be practiced outside of the Shuswap Nation boundaries but I only felt comfortable doing them at home. There is only one place that I can do those things and that is in the interior of British Columbia and within the traditional territory of the Shuswap Nation.

It was a rewarding experience both professionally and personally because the things that I took from there were the friendships that I made with other employees. The experience that I had working with a professional organization is invaluable and I can use the best parts in working for the Aboriginal community in an advisory capacity. Sometime in the future, that will help my community if I decide to run for a leadership position. It wasn't a bad place to work, just very rigid and very different from what I am used to.

Not like in the Aboriginal community where you go with the flow and yet get things done, much less stressful and in a lot of ways healthier. This is where my heart is and always will be - nothing will change that.