Things money can't buy
New project looks to balance traditional and wage economies
Kassina Ryder
Northern News Services
Published Monday, February 10, 2014
SAHTU
For more than 73 years, Edward Oudzi has been watching people in the Sahtu region find ways to balance the old world with the new.
Theresa Pierrot, 78, of the Fort Good Hope area pauses last summer to show off the fruits of her labour while drying whitefish and coney at a a fish camp on the banks of the Mackenzie River about 15 km north of Fort Good Hope. A new program is looking at ways to adapt traditional skills to modern economy. - photo courtesy of Simran Lehal |
Oudzi lived on the land hunting and trapping before getting his first jobs doing seasonal labour in communities in the Sahtu region.
For years, Oudzi balanced his life between hours spent at his job in town with the work he did out on the land.
He said he applied many of the skills he learned on the land while working at his jobs, including when he helped build Deline's first Co-Op Store.
"While I was out on the land I built a cabin and I made it pretty good. After I returned to the settlement at Colville Lake, I helped Brent Brown to build log cabins. I learned a lot from Brent Brown, too," he said.
"After I moved to Deline way back in 1968, we built a big log building for the Co-Op Store."
The idea of striking a tangible balance between traditional and industrial wage-based economies is the focus of a new research project through the Sahtu Renewable Resources Board, said Betty Harnum, one of the project's co-ordinators.
Titled, 'The Best of Both Worlds', the project will look at ways traditional economies can support industrial based wage economies and vise versa.
"Certainly skills from each area of activity can be very supportive of the other," Harnum said.
"People who participate in traditional economy often are the ones who do really well in the wage economy as well, because they have that grounding."
The Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency and the territorial Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Investment are funding the two-year project.
With the intensity of shale oil exploration and other projects expected to increase in the Sahtu region, Harnum said the project will help strengthen the concept of a mixed economy, which is made up of traditional harvesters and sewers, as well as wage earners.
"Generally in the North, in the past it was always considered a dual economy where you have two completely different economies and can one survive if the other is too strong?" she said.
"What's been proven is that these two economies, the traditional and the industrial economy, are actually acting as a mixed economy where many, many people are involved in both."
Harnum said skills learned hunting and trapping are adaptable to the workplace, while trained employees can apply skills learned on the job to challenges faced on the land.
"When people are out on the land, they have to take care of all their machinery themselves. Those mechanical skills are very useful when people work in industry and vice versa," Harnum said, for example.
"Skills they learn in industry can be very useful when they're having to manage their own equipment and do all their own maintenance."
Harnum said traditional skills can also be applied to a variety of industrial employment areas, such as wildlife monitoring or providing important information about land and water.
"All of those things that people are learning out on the land can play a role in the development industry projects and the management of those projects," she said.
Skills learned on the job can also be used on the land, such as preparation and how to handle the unexpected.
"People learn project management," she said. "They learn planning."
Spending time learning traditional skills also promotes self-reliance and a variety of other benefits, which all help make better employees, Harnum said.
"They develop a lot of these social, cultural, spiritual values and skills through traditional pursuits," she said.
"That helps industry if they're looking for stable, physically, mentally and spiritually healthy employees."
Harnum said recognizing the benefits of sustaining a traditional economy is another of the project's goals.
"Another thing we want to come out of this workshop is for industry to understand how important traditional economy is to people," she said.
"If they want healthy workers, then they need to help support the traditional economy."
Oudzi, who still takes groups of Mackenzie Mountain School students and teachers on camping trips on the land every year, said teaching people traditional skills gives them confidence in their own abilities.
"There is a lot of things that they should be learning out on the land, how to survive," he said.
"Sometimes we go hunting and it gets dark and we couldn't make it home. We just stay out there and make our own survival camp."
The project will also look at ways people can earn money directly through traditional activities, such as trapping.
Last March, a record-breaking $1.5 million worth of furs were sold through the Government of the Northwest Territories' Genuine Mackenzie Valley Fur program, according to ITI.
"That's a really good example where people are trapping and that is a job," Harnum said.
"It can support their families."
Harnum said she is working on the project with two other co-ordinators, Tee Lim with the Pembina Institute and Joe Hanlon with the Sahtu Renewable Resources Board. Executive director Deborah
Simmons is also helping to guide the research.
"Industrial development in the Sahtu region affects peoples' ways of life and with proper foresight and research and monitoring and planning, it will be hopefully possible to strengthen the way of life as things evolve rather than allowing them to just be pushed aside," Simmons said.
Harnum said part of that evolution means looking at past research, including documents compiled during the Berger Inquiry in the 1970s.
Information gathered at that time shows a shift in how people thought about traditional economies and the future of the North.
"I think at that point people were thinking, well, the traditional economy is eventually going to give way to wage economy," she said.
"With Berger, I think in that whole era, people started to realize how important traditional economy was and traditional activities were to people.
"I think that might have been a changing point where people started to think, people are not willing to give this up and just join an industrialized society."
A workshop is being held in Deline at the Old Mission House from Feb. 11 to 13 to start discussions about traditional economy and what types of traditional activities residents are involved in, as well as to start identifying issues and concerns.
Harnum said for example, some people believe it is wrong to sell meat when it traditionally would have been shared, but others believe cash made from selling meat allows harvesters to spend less time at a job earning money to go hunting.
"That's one of the dialogues we want to have," Harnum said.
Workshops will take place in every Sahtu community over the next year with a goal to develop an action plan for each community to support its own mixed economy.
"We want to help them develop an action plan that specifically fits their community with regard to developing those supports that are required so that people have a choice between one economy or the other, or participating in both," Harnum said.
Co-ordinators hope to attract not only harvesters to the workshops, but elders, women and youth as well.
"We'll look at what sort of training needs there are and aspirations youth have and women," she said. "How do we manage to support people who basically have to keep a foot in both worlds?"
Harnum said the Wildlife of the Sahtu Region
Facebook page is the best place to get up to date information about the project and to leave comments. Anyone interested in attending a workshop can drop in or contact their local renewable resources councils.
