LUTSEL K'E/SNOWDRIFT
With funding from De Beers Canada, residents of Lutsel K'e are getting to work on community projects, while building skills to stack up their resumes.

"We happen to be in a category of people that are not very experienced in mine work and very low education level," says Florence Catholique, impact benefit and participant agreement co-ordinator for Lutsel K'e Dene First Nation.

"By not getting on site we would never get work, so in order to develop skills that may lead them into mine work, we have them go to training in these different things."

As part of De Beers Canada's work in the region, $52,000 of its impact benefit agreement (IBA) contributions has been designated to projects that not only benefit the community upon completion, but also offer essential training for those involved.

Two crews were put together with the funding; Rocky Catholique was foreman for a team of more than a dozen workers who cleared and plotted trails for community use.

"There was two locations, the first one that we clear-cutted across from the town, that was a lot of work because there was a lot of thick bushes, we had to get around it and find a decent trail," he said. That trail, Rocky said, was about 1.5 km in length.

The second, longer at around 3 or 4 km, was an existing trail that the crew cleared, widened and fixed up to make it more useable - also adding infrastructure to cover swampy areas, Rocky said.

"It was fun, it was good experience," he said.

"Some of them had no experience and then once they had the experience they put it on their resumes right away, which was good."

One of the crew members was Alvin Catholique, who said, with work being slow in the community right now, he applied for the job having had done some work in the past clearing slash.

"We marked it with guys going out and looking for a good place to cut and then us as a team had five chainsaw operators, so we had to watch where we are, where the trees are, always keep an eye out, keep eye contact with other employees," Alvin said. As well as safety, team building and communication were key pieces of the training.

"Working with them as a team was so great - there may be differences but you know that whole team building part of it and being professional in the workplace," said Florence.

"Every day they had to say one good thing to another - one good thing, so that you're mentally programmed to be positive, there will always be something not done right but no sense dwelling on it."

A well as the "trailblazing crew", a second team of workers set out cleaning up and building cribs for the community burial grounds. Ten cribs were completed with the lumber and use of the fire hall for workspace contributed by the nation.

"The cribs are for the beatification of the burial grounds," Florence said.

"We ran the training program to develop skills of making cribs and carpentry, and they paint it and then it's given to whichever family."

The response to the program has been positive.

"The community is very happy because those people that were not working are working and they were happy, so it went into the families being happy," she said.

Dominion Diamonds sponsored a barbecue to thank the crews in October and Florence was grateful for all of the support for the projects.

"I'm really thankful that the mines were very supportive, and the First Nation as well," she said.

"I'm very appreciative of the opportunities that were given to these young people."

In the future, Alvin said he hoped to see more projects like these offered in the community.

"It was good making that trail for everybody in the community and ourselves. When jobs come up like that for work, it's pretty slow around here, so I'm pretty glad," he said.

"I'd like if some other jobs like that came up. I'd apply again, I enjoyed working out there."

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