The Bridgebuilders
“The Indigenous population is the fastest-growing segment of Canada; languages are being revived and recorded; Indigenous communities and individuals are proudly rebuilding their nations”
-Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act
It’s all too easy for people to remain within the walls of their profession for decades without ever venturing to examine what lies beyond. But when what lies beyond comes through those walls and demands your attention, you have a choice to make: rebuild the wall or be open to listening and learning. This article marks one settler’s efforts to listen, learn and take the first few steps on the path to truth and reconciliation.
Leanne Hall is one busy woman. As CEO of Creative Fire, Canada’s first 100% Indigenous-owned professional services firm, she runs a company populated by individuals with skillsets in strategy, communications, Indigenous engagement, reconciliation action planning, and creative and brand execution.
Creative Fire is owned by the Des Nedhe Group, the economic development arm of English River First Nation, an urban common reserve located just a few minutes south of Saskatoon. If you visit Creative Fire’s website, you see right away what this firm is all about: it helps bridge gaps of understanding and build connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and organizations.
As Hall explains, “We have Metis, Inuit and First Nations members on our team. Anyone who is on our team are either indigenous themselves, non-indigenous with indigenous children, or are allies. Creating Indigenous-led solutions for a better future is at the root of all we do.”
Settler Savagery: A Brief Introduction
Creative Fire locates itself at the intense intersection of two cultures that have been in conflict for 165 years, when the Gradual Civilization Act, passed in 1857, sought to assimilate Indigenous people into Canadian settler society. At that time, settler legislators hoped that Indigenous individuals would choose ‘voluntary enfranchisement’ – which meant they would willingly give up their Indian status in favour of assimilating.
It was a total failure. Only one person in the entire country complied.
Nineteen years later, in 1876, the fledgling Dominion of Canada created the Indian Act which, in the infamous words of prime minister John A. MacDonald, was designed to “do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion.” As we now know, it turned out to be legalized cultural genocide.
While this is not the place to enumerate all of the Indian Act’s mechanisms of oppression – a subject well worth exploring in the book cited at the top of this article – we are all by now painfully aware of the most brutal tool in the government’s woodshed: the residential schools. For it was their express purpose, as described in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report “to kill the Indian in the child”.
Tragically, the schools ended up killing many of the children instead, as evidenced by the 2021 discovery of 750 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School – a discovery that has been grimly repeated at many other sites across the country. As early as 1914, a report by Duncan Campbell Scott, then Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, made the grim admission that “It is quite within the mark to say that 50% of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education they received therein.”
Though the last of these institutions – which can accurately be described as thinly disguised juvenile detention centres – closed in 1996, the trauma they inflicted continues. Says Leanne Hall, who is the mother of two Indigenous children from Sucker Creek First Nation in northern Alberta, “Their kookum (grandmother) and their 12 aunties and uncles are all residential school survivors. So as a family, we have firsthand knowledge of the ongoing effects of the residential school system. We talk openly all the time about how we can support the journey towards reconciliation.”
The Business of Reconciliation
So it’s no surprise that the biggest part of Creative Fire’s practice is Reconciliation Action Planning. According to Hall, “Reconciliation action plans are a form of corporate reporting that encourages companies to create a strategy around what they are doing to support Indigenous people, Indigenous communities, and Indigenous wealth generation. It’s a 2 to 3-year framework wherein they make commitments and then report on what they have accomplished.”
As an example, Creative Fire’s work with Ontario Power Generation looked at supply chain and procurement. Says Hall, “Through the Reconciliation Action Plan, OPG made a billion-dollar commitment towards indigenous businesses over the next 10 years.”
This is only one example of how firms like Creative Fire and their clients are addressing one of the 94 Calls to Action embodied in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Call to action #92, entitled ‘Business and Reconciliation’, calls upon companies to “ensure that Aboriginal peoples have equitable access to jobs, training, and education opportunities in the corporate sector and that Aboriginal communities gain long-term sustainable benefits from economic development projects.”
As author John Ralston Saul points out in his 2014 book The Comeback, reconciliation requires more than apologies and good intentions: it requires restitution. It involves a shift in power and economic wealth. That shift is the solution to Indigenous poverty.
One of the objectives of treaty negotiations in the 19th century was to push Indigenous people of the arable land and into the bush to make room for immigrant farmers. But as Ralston Saul reminds us, today Canada is far more dependent on mining, oil and gas and forestry than on agriculture. And many of those commodities are to be found on Indigenous land, which puts First Nations in a powerful strategic position.
Hall provides a pointed illustration. English River First Nation’s traditional territory sits on top of the world’s largest uranium deposit, powering one out of every ten homes in the United States. It is through equity partnerships between Indigenous communities and resource companies that call to action #92 will be brought to life.
A Question of Identity
When you ask Shani Gwin where she’s from, she tells you who she’s from.
A woman of Metis heritage, she is the founder of the Edmonton-based, Indigenous-led and owned PR firm Pipikwan Pehtakwan. Her great-grandfather was St. Pierre Ferguson, a Metis man from Grouard, Alberta, and her great-grandmother was Philomene Callihoo, from the Michel First Nation.
Gwin’s response illustrates how the identity of First Nations people is so closely tied to the land. As an Indigenous author, Thomas King says in The Inconvenient Indian, “If you understand nothing else about the history of Indians in North America, you need to understand that the question that matters is the question of land.”
As Gwin points out, “We need to know where we come from and how we're connected, because our worldview is that everyone and everything are related. It's important to honour who came before us and those that are yet to come.”
Gwin started her company in 2017, which she describes as “an Indigenous PR firm focused on elevating Indigenous people in the media and to the general public.” She hired her first intern in 2020. She now has a team of 25 communications experts, designers and writers. “For indigenous clients, we come in as helpers. We seek to listen, understand, and only when we feel we really understand our client’s needs do we come in with our ideas and advice”, explains Gwin. “For our non-indigenous clients, we're trying to help bring them in and have them shift their hearts and minds to what Indigenous people living in Canada need and want to do.”
The story behind the firm’s name is important. It was originally called Gwin Communications, but as her company started to grow, Gwin had an epiphany: if she wanted a decolonized agency she needed to decolonize its name. She sought the advice of elders and they suggested she go to the ceremony to get a new one. So she did. They gave her the name pipikwan pehtakwan, which means ‘eagle bone whistle heard loudly’. They told her, “Your eagle bone whistle will be heard so loudly that you will wake the ancestors across Turtle Island.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate way to describe a PR firm.
As an example of just how loudly the eagle bone whistle can blow, Gwin relates the story of a program called Protect our Elders. The objective was to educate First nations youth about how to protect the most vulnerable members of the community against Covid. Says Gwin, “It was informed by elders of the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation. We also worked with the youth there to make sure that our ideas were engaging enough for them. It was a very successful campaign. It reached over 3 million people.”
From Rome to Iqaluit
Nadia Ciccone is not a name you expect to encounter north of 60. She grew up in Toronto, worked at J. Walter Thompson and moved to Rome where she worked at JWT and agencies like
Saatchi & Saatchi, Livraghi, Ogilvy & Mather and Lowe. When she found herself back in Canada after several years in the pressure cooker of big advertising, she got a gig that took her to Iqaluit. Much to her surprise, she fell in love with it.
She runs Ayaya, a partially Indigenous-owned firm with many arms and legs. One is marketing communications, another is running the North’s biggest newspaper, The Nunatsiaq News, another is a printing and production facility in Ottawa, and then there is, believe it or not, managing local elections. Says Ciccone, “One thing that's quite different in the north versus other places is you’ve got to be flexible with kind of the work that you do. If you just want to do straight advertising you're not going to have enough business to sustain you.”
Iqaluit has a population of just over 6,000 souls. But it is the seat of the Nunavut government, which means that it has attracted all kinds of folks from the south. In fact, Ciccone, who has been working there for 20 years, says the population is almost as multicultural as some southern cities. And despite the tiny size of the place, there are two other marcom firms in town – Outcrop and Attigo.
There are understandably some very unique challenges to living and working in this remote location. Food prices are astronomical. Rent is higher than in downtown Toronto. Ayaya has to provide housing for staff or else they could not afford to live there. For instance, all of the Nunatsiaq reporters have housing provided by the company. Much of the work needs to be produced in 4 languages. In fact, the work Ayaya did on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls final report which was presented to all the highest levels of government, was produced in 15 languages and dialects.
Though Ciccone is not indigenous, she has fully embraced Inuit culture and has built her business on Indigenous values. Says Ciccone, “If we didn't, we wouldn't be here.” The challenge is to train people who are not from the north because it takes a long time to adjust and embrace local customs. But the biggest challenge remains working in so many different languages. “You almost have to design each language differently, yet they all have to look the same.”
And now there’s a new, far more existential challenge: climate change. It’s happening faster here than anywhere else. All the houses are built on stilts, which sit on the permafrost. The permafrost is melting. The capital of Nunavut is starting to sink.
Surmounting the Insurmountable
Angie Saltman, co-founder of Grand Prairie-based Saltmedia Inc., is excited. She has just begun studies at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. When it’s over, she’ll have earned an Executive MBA in Indigenous Business Leadership. “It’s taught through an Indigenous lens”, explains Saltman. “The western worldview of business is purely financial: make as much profit as you can for your shareholders. The indigenous worldview of business is more about sustainability and the generations to come, not just humans, but all living things on the planet, because we're all connected.”
The barriers she has overcome to get there would be insurmountable for most. She had a rough childhood. “I had a really abusive, alcoholic step-dad,” says Saltman. “So I mostly lived with my grandparents, who loved and cared for me. When I was in grade seven I pressed charges against my stepdad. At about the same time, my real dad committed suicide. And then my house burned down. All that sent me on a downward spiral, living on the streets for a few years, dropping out of high school.”
In her late teens she married a Salvadoran. A few years later he was deported to El Salvador, and she went with him. He was good to her, but her experience there during the final years of a 12-year civil war convinced her to return to Canada without him. She finished high school, completed a college diploma in computer technology, worked as a computer technician for seven years, then studied design. Eventually she remarried and she and her husband launched Saltmedia.
She can trace her Metis genealogy back 6 generations on both sides of her family. Being the only group of mixed Indigenous and European heritage has meant that many of the rights enjoyed by other Indigenous communities are not available to Metis, the most important of which is the right to own land. According to Saltman, of the 500,000 Metis in Canada, maybe only 1% have a land base. That means they face higher barriers to economic development and wealth creation than a First Nation does.
She has lots to say about the barriers in the way of running a technology and marketing services firm in Grand Prairie, Alberta. With a population of 60,000 souls, the client base for tech services is a lot more active than the marketing side of the business. Local clients with decent marketing budgets tend to prefer sending the work to Edmonton or Calgary.
The government, a major source of potential revenue, is another barrier. Says Saltman, “The government says 5% of all procurement opportunities from the federal government will go to Indigenous people. I've been trying to get on that procurement list since they announced it in 2020. All you need to do is climb over a bureaucratic wall of China.”
Despite these obstacles, Saltman is optimistic about figuring out how to balance purpose with profit. If her story tells us anything, she has what it takes to achieve it.
The Next Generation
Kaeden Merasty started his own company exactly one year after graduating from the University of Manitoba. He reasoned that the risk was worth taking because at this early stage, he had nothing to lose.
He named the enterprise The Indigenous Marketing Company. While that sounds rather generic, it turned out to be very search-engine friendly. Says Merasty, “There are lots of indigenous organizations that name themselves in their traditional language. But the general public either doesn't know how to spell it or pronounce it so it kind of just gets lost.”
Kaeden’s Indigenous roots run through his father, who hails from Flying Dust First Nation in Saskatchewan Treaty 6 territory. Like everyone else in this article, his stated purpose is to guide Indigenous peoples toward achieving full economic independence that aligns with their culture and beliefs. “I feel like there's a huge opportunity in the market to help Indigenous entrepreneurs and organizations and their communities grow. And my non-Indigenous clients see me as a bridge to connect their organizations with Indigenous ones.” In his first year of business, he has worked with organizations across Canada.
Merasty was raised in Winnipeg and so sees his business as a bridge to his own indigeneity. “I'm coming across more and more Indigenous people that are 40, 50 years old and still learning because of the impacts of the residential school system and the sixties scoop. They weren't raised with their indigenous cultures and values and now they're on their own learning and healing journeys, just as I am.”
A case in point is the work he has done for Teach for First Nations. Says Merasty, “The goal was to help recruit and retain qualified teaching talent for northern communities here in Manitoba. This stood out to me specifically because it's about helping Indigenous students get the education that they so desperately need to help them achieve their own economic independence and help become their own entrepreneurs. Empowering First Nations youth is critical for us.”
He’s in early discussions with another group that wants his help encouraging Indigenous entrepreneurship in the Northern Territories, Yukon and West Territories. He sees it as part of his responsibility to work within the Indigenous concept of acting with the next 7 generations in mind. “I see it as teaching the next generation to teach the generations that follow them.”
The Resurgence is Real
These stories are a testament to the assertions of both Bob Joseph and John Ralston Saul: Canada’s Indigenous people are indeed rebuilding, healing, and making a comeback. The emergence of a service sector, as exemplified by the firms mentioned above, is a critical part of that process.
The late great Indigenous leader and activist Arthur Manuel reminds us that 99.8% of Canada’s land mass is controlled by settlers while Indigenous people control 0.2%. “It is the loss of our land that has been the precise cause of our impoverishment”, explains Manuel. “With this distribution of the land, you don’t need a doctorate in economics to understand who will be poor and who will be rich.”
Each of the individuals and firms in this story is working hard to address that imbalance of wealth and power. Whether it’s Creative Fire’s reconciliation planning, Pipikwan Pehtakwan’s support for elder health, Ayaya’s heavy lifting on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report, Angie Saltman’s pursuit of an MBA in Indigenous business leadership or Kaeden Merasty’s work on Teach for First Nations, these folks are doing yeoman’s work. And they are doing it under the weight of intergenerational trauma. Along with a growing cohort of professional colleagues across Turtle Island, they more than deserve our recognition and support. But most of all, they deserve their land back.
Written by Will Novosedlik.
Will Novosedlik is a designer and a writer. He is known for a critical perspective on the cultural and socio-economic impact of design, brand, business and innovation.