Nominations open for next achievement awards

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The National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation will host next year's awards show in Vancouver. On June 9 in Edmonton, John Kim Bell, founder and chairman of the foundation, officially launched the call for nominations for next year's awards.

"The main special feature . . . will be to celebrate a new millennium. What will the new century bring for our people? Hopefully it will bring a better century. We are going to try and commemorate a special millennium year, just like everybody else," said Bell.

Bell plans to bring the show to Edmonton in the year 2001.

A lot of what determines where the awards show will take place is whether or not the foundation can raise the money to make sure it is successful. The First Nations Summit in British Columbia is very interested in supporting the awards show, said Bell.

He's not content to focus on past achievement, however. There is a bigger picture in Bell's mind about where Aboriginal people need to expand as a culture.

"The bigger picture for Aboriginal people, in a practical sense, is we need to be very conscious to create a middle class, and we need to foster the development of a young professional class, because we need to create an economy for Aboriginal people," said Bell.

He believes that if an economy is created for Aboriginal people, more people will be healed from certain dysfunction, such as alcoholism or drug dependency. Aboriginal people will have better health and a better quality of life and that will lead to a greater impact on Canadian society, he said.

"Who we are as a people can not be only governed by politics, and I believe that the whole of our activity in the last 100 years has been political advancement," said Bell. "We have to now equally emphasize the development of a middle class to create an economic underpinning of who we are as a culture."

During a small reception at the CIBC in downtown Edmonton, Bell, and a small staff of public relations people, handed out information kits detailing the nomination process and contemplated the look of the next show.

The founder of the Aboriginal Achievement Awards said last year's spectacular Northwest rainforest set design will be a hard act to follow, and he hasn't quite figured out what the next set might be. He said he feels the pressure of living up to standards the foundation sets and raises each year.

"We are trying to create something that is a metaphor for the beauty of Aboriginal cultures through the design of the stage. Usually I spend the summer lamenting about what it's going to be and it's not easy, but nobody's ever done an underwater set. I don't know how to do it, but it's never been done," said Bell.

While in Edmonton, Bell received his fourth honorary doctorate in a ceremony at the University of Alberta.