Calling
all young Native achievers
Deirdre Tombs, Sweetgrass Writer, Edmonton
If you know of an Aboriginal youth or two who have accomplished
amazing things, then you can nominate them for an Alberta Aboriginal
Youth Achievement Award.
"We want to recognize all Aboriginal youth in the province
for any outstanding achievements that they have," said Kim
Mueller, the youth awards co-ordinator. She wants people to nominate
young Aboriginal people who have contributed to the community
or "done something in a positive way that would just show
good leadership or role modeling to other youth."
This will be the second year for the awards, which began in the
fall of 2003 thanks to Kim Mueller and Métis Nation of
Alberta (MNA) co-worker, Amanda L'Hirondelle. Mueller and L'Hirondelle
run the youth program for the MNA and both are involved in Métis
National Council, which runs the Métis National Youth
Role Model program. The National Council asked Mueller and L'Hirondelle
to be Métis representatives on the revamped National Aboriginal
Role Model Program, now run by the National Aboriginal Health
Organization.
"We did so and had a wonderful time and thought, well we
can do this provincially for the people here in Alberta,"
Mueller said. The end result, 14 Aboriginal youth were recognized
at the awards last April.
Up to 17 young people could be honored this year in the following
categories: culture and heritage, volunteer service, academic
achievement, athletic achievement, career advancement, personal
achievement, walking the red road and community leaders. There
will be two winners from each category, except for a possible
third in the culture and heritage category. The awards committee
hopes to present a First Nation, Métis and Inuk person
each with an award for work in preservating and promoting their
culture.
Last year's awards committee added two categories to the six
originally advertised. Mueller explained that the awards committee
created walking the red road and community leaders when they
found that two nominees stood out from the rest but did not quite
fit into the other categories.
The Community Leaders Award went to Matthew Wildcat from Hobbema.
Wildcat is a straight A student at the University of Alberta
who is heavily involved in Aboriginal Affairs and is "amazing
at everything," said Mueller.
The Walking the Red Road award went to Lenny Labelle, a Métis
from Slave Lake. Lacking parental guidance, Labelle began hanging
with the wrong crowd and started using drugs and alcohol. On
his own initiative, he went to Poundmaker's Lodge for treatment
and turned himself around. Labelle was only 16 years old. Mueller
said it is important to recognize the effort it takes to turn
one's life around from such difficult circumstances.
"We thought it'd be really cool to have an award like that
for those people because a lot of the time we don't recognize
those people or consider them to be role models when I think
they need some recognition as well," said Mueller.
The Walking the Red Road award is also open to those who promote
sobriety and healthy living choices. Recognition of her own hard
work inspired Mueller to work on this project.
"I won the National Métis Youth Role Model Award
in 2001and it was such a wonderful experience to be recognized
for all the things that I've done for my community and I wanted
to recognize other young people for their contributions,"
Mueller told Sweetgrass.
The deadline for nominations is Dec. 24. Call (780) 455-2700
in Edmonton or 1-800-252-7553 in the rest of Alberta for more
information. Winning nominees will be announced in mid-January,
and the awards ceremony will take place in late-February in Edmonton.
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Idea could solve
on-reserve housing shortage
Paul Barnsley, Sweetgrass Writer, Blood Reserve
Dan McGinnis has a dream. If he can make it come true, a lot
of other Native people will benefit.
McGinnis, 40, and his wife, Karren Shouting and three other southern
Alberta Blood reserve residents make up the total current membership
of the Aboriginal Homeowners Association, a not-for-profit group
dedicated to creating an industry that will produce low cost,
high quality homes on First Nation territories.
McGinnis' partner, Pat Eagle Tail Feathers, has his council's
blessing to harvest logs up on the slopes of the Rocky Mountain
foothills located on the Blood reserve, the largest in the country
by land mass. They're using some of those logs as the supporting
beams of the first home the association will build.
There's a story behind that. The first home will be tiny, a 540
square foot, two level hut on the rolling prairie a few minutes'
drive south of the Trans Canada Highway just west of Lethbridge.
They're building that little house a stone's throw away from
the foundation of a much larger 3,400 square foot post and beam
constructed home with four bedrooms, three bathrooms and vaulted
ceilings. Once the smaller structure is completed, they'll qualify
for an infrastructure grant that will help them get their real
home under construction.
"The band made a grant available to its members for infrastructure:
roads, sewer, water, power, gas. It was supposed to be $20,000,"
McGinnis said.
But council's policy is that any grant recipients must already
have a house built.
"I said, 'Fine, I'll build a 20 by 20 and when it's built,
I want my grant,'" he said.
The project will eventually, if all works out, provide a permanent
home for McGinnis, his wife and their three children, ages 11
to 14, that far exceeds the standards of current Indian Affairs
housing.
The association has no assets to speak of, although some local
media coverage has attracted the attention of supporters on and
off the reserve who've helped with small donations of material
and loaned equipment. Having no money is a problem, but it would
be a much bigger problem if they were trying to build a conventional
house in the usual way. Instead, they're using the logs that
survive the forest fires that burn in British Columbia each year-logs
they get for free-and another commodity that's not exactly in
short supply on the Prairies, straw bales. Free wood for the
frame, free straw for the walls and providing most of the labor
yourself cuts the costs down considerably. It's still a struggle
to proceed with little or no cash; they were hoping to have the
smaller house erected before the winter set in and didn't make
it due to mechanical breakdowns.
The project started three years ago when Eagle Tail Feathers,
who owns a log skidder, asked McGinnis, an electronics engineering
technologist who graduated at age 28 from the DeVry Institute
of Technology, for some business advice.
"He's got the access to the raw materials. There's a dire
need for something here. I just put the two together. If we can
take the raw materials and build something that's got some value,
then we should be able to make money," McGinnis said. "The
thing that's needed the most is housing. In order to build a
stick frame house you've got to have a lumber mill and all that
sort of good jazz. And well, we don't have that."
They took on some decorative log projects to get experience working
in construction and were successful there.
"My whole focus since I've been down here has been to try
and get a business going and try to employ some people and contribute
to this community in some way. To that end, that was the whole
reason I went back to school," McGinnis said. He's a member
of the northern Alberta Saddle Lake First Nation and now lives
in his wife's community. "I want to help my community. My
community needs infrastructure; my community needs technology.
I went back to school so I could apply what I learned and help
my community. And isn't that what we're all supposed to do?"
Having to go through the charade of building the mini house to
get the grant for the real project is not the only bureaucratic
hoop they've had to jump through.
"When we went to go see CMHC [Canadian Mortgage and Housing
Corporation], they immediately referred us back to Indian Affairs.
And when we went to see Indian Affairs, they referred us back
to CMHC," he said.
But work continues on the project, with occasional unplanned
interruptions for weather or mechanical problems.
"If we had money, we wouldn't have these problems,"
he said. "It doesn't have to be this way. With the ease
of construction, there's no reason in the world why we couldn't
be building hundreds of homes every year and employing hundreds
of people to do it. You don't need to have a degree to chuck
bales."
He believes he can build his dream house for about $40,000, far
below current housing costs. And he is convinced he can train
others to do the same thing, both inside and outside his community.
"What really struck me was a television program I watched
years ago where there were these 15 Mexican women that got together
and built each other a house," he said. "They were
women with children and no husbands but they banded together
and they collected materials and they started building. In the
end, each family had a house of their own. I thought, 'That's
a great thing. And if they can do it, I can do it.'"
He wonders, since so many government reports lament the horrid
state of First Nation housing, why no one else has looked at
alternative forms of construction.
"I can't understand why either this or any other innovative
way to build homes hasn't been explored. I think maybe people
are just afraid or else there's a vested interest in keeping
it this way. That's what I assume," he said.
How bad is the housing situation on the Blood reserve?
"All we hear is rumors," Dan McGinnis said. "The
rumor two years ago was around 1,800 people. My brother-in-law's
been waiting 20 years now. He applies every year."
McGinnis refuses to wait 20 years to get a house the usual way.
He's living with his in-laws right now and is in a hurry to get
his family into their own home.
"I can't understand why we're running into the roadblocks
we are. I mean, we can build for less. You'll get a better quality
house, I would think, for less of a price and that would save
the reserve money," he said.
He wants the word to get out that he's attempting to start this
revolution in First Nation housing. If he can prove the validity
of his ideas by successfully completing his own house, he expects
to attract interest from many other communities.
"The whole idea behind the association was to create a vehicle
that we could export to other communities verbatim. This is how
we do it and we want to bring it to your reserve and help you
out as well," he said.
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