It takes courage, persistence and steadfast determination when you are fighting for equality, especially when it seems like there are endless obstacles blocking the path. Indigenous people from across Canada have been fighting for acceptance and their place at the economic table for centuries. The National Indigenous Economic Strategy (NIES), released earlier this month, stands as an important pillar of strength for Indigenous people and organizations across Canada in breaking down barriers and creating a conversation for change.

Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business is a joint member of the core working group of 20 Indigenous organizations from across Canada that jointly held the pen to create this monumental document. The NIES lists 107 economic calls to prosperity for Indigenous Canadians laid out in four pathways: land, infrastructure, people and finance.

The time is now to realize that Canada’s future prosperity will depend on the success of its growing Indigenous population. Currently, Indigenous Peoples are the youngest and fastest-growing demographic in Canada, and they are creating businesses at nine times the rate of the average non-Indigenous Canadian.

There are close to 60,000 Indigenous businesses across Canada, in every sector and size and every province and territory. And Indigenous women are leading this growth, especially when it comes to introducing new products and services and creating innovative business practices. It has been estimated that the Indigenous population contributes over $32 billion annually to Canada’s GDP, with the private sector economy contributing just over $12 billion.

The time is now to realize that Canada’s future prosperity will depend on the success of its growing Indigenous population.

As the NIES document states, “economic reconciliation is a multifaceted process that includes political and social challenges. Economic reconciliation is not possible when many Indigenous people live in poverty, have inadequate housing, and lack access to clean water and other public services.”

The history of inequality for Indigenous Peoples in Canada is well documented. In 1867, through the Indian Act, inherent Indigenous economic rights were taken away. From 1881 until as recently as 2014, the Indian Act contained a permit system to control First Nations’ ability to sell products off the reserves. And until 1951, Indigenous Peoples were not considered Indians under the Indian Act if they obtained post-secondary-school degrees, which then meant that if you were a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor, your Indian status was stripped away.

When civil liberties were taken away from Indigenous people, so were the mentors and role models for youth, as well as the opportunity for intergenerational wealth. The repercussions have paved the way to generations of financial struggle and trauma. Nothing could paint a better picture of Canada’s history of oppression of Indigenous people than the discovery last year of the 215 children’s remains confirmed at the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc institution and the thousands since at other residential “school” locations.

The discovery, which happened during the 30 months that our coalition of organizations was developing this economic strategy, provided a solemn reminder of all that our communities have lost. While we continue to be aware of the past, the NIES document lays out the necessary steps the Canadian Council of Aboriginal Business, Indigenous organizations across Canada and every Canadian must take toward making this country whole.

An essential part of that is improving economic reconciliation for Indigenous Canadians by urging corporate Canada to conduct meaningful consultations with Indigenous communities and treat them as economic stakeholders, not only through obtaining informed consent, but as equal partners.

We see leaders in corporate Canada building and benefiting from opportunities in procurement, in partnership and in investment. Corporations, investors, institutions, governments and all Canadians stand to benefit by supporting, partnering with, procuring from, and investing in Indigenous communities, businesses and peoples.

When Indigenous people do well economically, so does Canada as a whole.

The post When Indigenous people do well economically, so does Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In 2013, the University of Victoria’s Peter B. Gustavson School of Business founded the Indigenous Advancement of Cultural Entrepreneurship (I-ACE) program. The program bills itself as Canada’s only Indigenous co-designed entrepreneurship program delivered in First Nations communities and centred on their priorities. Since then, the school has worked with 67 Indigenous communities in British Columbia, producing 604 graduates and 200 start-ups.

“We only do these programs when we are invited in to do so by communities or nations,” says Brent Mainprize, a Gustavson professor of entrepreneurship and Indigenous economic development, of I-ACE. “We work hand in hand with the community and nation to find [external] resources so we [are] not taxing a nation’s budget.”

Former Haida Nation council president Miles Richardson says the success of I-ACE, which initially received $1 million in funding from the Bank of Montreal, demonstrates that business schools “need to be flexible in their approach and delivery.” As chair of the National Consortium for Indigenous Economic Development, a University of Victoria research initiative with Indigenous governments, Richardson says First Nations communities are seeking a productive economic relationship with Canada.

“To do that, our people need to be trained and educated, and to gain capacity we have to do it in a way that is consistent with our values and who we are as a people,” says Richardson.

In Australia, the University of Melbourne, in partnership with Indigenous leaders, designed a culturally safe on-campus executive education program for Indigenous entrepreneurs in 2012. The university’s Faculty of Business and Economics added a graduate certificate in Indigenous leadership in 2019 that can ladder into degree programs.

“We are creating as many pathways into business school as we can for Indigenous people,” says Mitch Hibbens, a Wiradjuri tribe member and program director of the entrepreneur program.

Sometimes, topics define the relationship.

Recent specialty programs at the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University, which include certificates in tribal leadership, gaming leadership, and tribal finance and accounting, came at the request of the 38-tribe Oklahoma Tribal Finance Consortium.

“A growing number of tribes need assistance with finances and accounting,” says Julie Weathers, director of Spears’s Center for Executive and Professional Development. “The people in those positions rotate in and out, and so there is a lot of learning that needs to take place quickly.”

Vancouver Island University (VIU), with Heiltsuk Tribal College and North Island College, delivers a seven-month Indigenous Ecotourism Training Program for eligible students supported by their local bands. The program’s instructors travel to Indigenous communities to teach. VIU also offers other credentials that can feed into a business diploma or degree.

At Manitoba’s Assiniboine College, located on the traditional territories of Treaty 1 and Treaty 2 First Nations, the business faculty delivers an in-community advanced diploma in Indigenous financial management. “The more we can include the community in [the] development of the course, the more meaningful it will be for the students who eventually take the courses,” says business dean Bobbie Robertson.

That responsiveness is essential, says Mike Henry, dean of business at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, which works with the Indigenous-led Tulo Centre of Indigenous Economics to design courses in demand by local communities.

“Indigenous communities are taking control and saying, ‘This is what we need,’” he says. “Non-Indigenous communities are starting to listen closer and respond to what Indigenous leaders need, not what we think they need, to manage their own affairs.”

Jennifer Lewington is an intrepid reporter and writes regularly on many topics, including business school news.

The post Class is in session for Indigenous entrepreneurs appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It’s time for a new story, one where Indigenous people assume their rightful place at the economic table of this country.

Why Indigenomics? The truths of this country lie in the experience of Indigenous communities in poverty without access to clean water, warm housing, clean power or good jobs. The root of this can be traced to centuries of being excluded economically.

Dara Kelly notes in her paper Indigenous Development, Wealth, Freedom and Capabilities: “Situating Indigenous economic freedom within a framework of humanism affirms not only the rights of Indigenous peoples to define our own economic futures, but in exchange for economic autonomy, contracts a mutual responsibility to care for, and not violate the rights of others to economic freedom.” This is the next-level Canada. This is Indigenomics.

Through the formation of Canada, Indigenous peoples have gone through four economic stages:

1. Disruption: The first is characterized by the systemic disruption of existing Indigenous economic systems, ways of being and removal from the land while severing inherent authority and responsibility to place.

2. Entanglement: This second stage is characterized by the complexity of the entanglement of the Indigenous relationship firmly embedded within conflict stemming from the disruption.

3. Emergence: The third is characterized by the emergence of the Indigenous legal environment. With over 250 cases won to date, these cases have shaped the economic space for the growth of Indigenous business.

4. Empowerment: Today, Canada is in the fourth stage, characterized by the rise of Indigenous economic empowerment. As an effect of the shifting Indigenous Aboriginal rights and title legal environment, economic equality and inclusion now shape the rise of Indigenous economic empowerment today.

A fundamental question that shaped this country was, how do we eliminate the Indian problem? It is a question that has penetrated the consciousness of generations of Canadians allowing the perception of Indigenous peoples as a problem or a burden. This question begs for relevance as the Canadian courts continuously validate Indigenous rights through the acknowledgement of our place in modernity and the requirement for economic inclusion today.

Questions are the architecture for tomorrow; the quality of questions we ask drives the results. The question of today is, how do we collectively facilitate the development of Canada’s $100 billion Indigenous economy? In the words of Canada’s greatest hockey player, Wayne Gretzky: “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” This is how the Indigenomics Institute is working to develop the emerging Indigenous economy.

This new story of Indigenous peoples can be seen through the joint work of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business and TD Economics, which estimated the annual contribution of the Indigenous economy at over $30 billion in 2016. This figure acts as an initial metric of the growing strength of the Indigenous economy.

The benchmark numbers that frame the growth of the Indigenous economy can be drawn from recent reports:

• An Atlantic region report identified the size of the Indigenous economic impact in that region as $1.2 billion annually.

• A recent Manitoba report puts the Indigenous economic impact in the province at over $9 billion annually.

• An Indigenous Works report based on a research study found that up to 85% of Canadian businesses currently do not engage with Indigenous peoples in any way.

• A National Indigenous Economic Development Board report highlights the potential of an annual $27.7 billion boost to the Canadian economy through better mobilization of the Indigenous workforce.

Framing the future of Canada and the Indigenous relationship can be understood within the concept that we as a country have reached the intersection where the risk of doing nothing outweighs the cost of doing nothing.

Setting the stage for a next-level Canada today means actualizing this growing story of Indigenous economic potential. It must be based on a new understanding that the growth of the Indigenous economy cannot be advanced within existing Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada program and funding approaches. Modern Indigenous economic design is required today, with a strong Indigenous equity ownership, governance, environmental planning and procurement at the heart of any approach.

While Canada was founded on the economic legacy of systemic economic segregation of Indigenous peoples, the pathway forward must be inclusive and purposeful. Indigenous resilience is now expressing out from the margins to the centre of this country’s economic lifeblood.

Indigenomics is a platform for economic reconciliation. Indigenous peoples have existed on the margins of the balance sheet, viewed as a liability. Reconciliation must now occur in the balance sheet of this country. To achieve a $100 billion Indigenous economy requires a shift in how we relate to Indigenous peoples – to see Indigenous peoples as economic powerhouses in our own right.

The $100 billion Indigenous economy is a modern stake in the ground, the marker of a new economic reality on which Canada’s larger economic future now depends.

Carol Anne Hilton is the CEO and founder of the Indigenomics Institute

Also by Carol Anne Hilton: ‘Investing in reconciliation: the role for institutional investors.’

The post Indigenomics in action appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Growing up Anishinaabe hunting and fishing with his father, a second-generation logger and chief, Gladu had always planned on becoming a conservation officer. His first job out of forestry school involved working with over 40 First Nations communities across Ontario through the federal First Nations Forestry program, and that, says Gladu, “is when I fell in love with my community.”

“It seemed to me there was real opportunity to build economies, build communities, build jobs, build families. It’s just something that’s always been innate for me.”

Gladu spent the next two decades in the natural resource sector, creating businesses for First Nations, negotiating agreements with the wind, mining and forestry sector, and consulting on everything from sawmill development to biofuels and wind power monitoring sites. One executive MBA from Queen’s University later, Gladu was a natural fit to take over the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (CCAB) as president and CEO six years ago. Building economies, communities and jobs is what this power broker does best – and now he’s mobilizing action on all three fronts at the national level.

CCAB was actually started by Shoppers Drug Mart founder Murray Koffler, along with former prime minister Paul Martin and a number of others over 30 years ago, with the goal of “reintegrating” Indigenous people into the Canadian economy. As Gladu says, “I like to remind Canadians that we were Canada’s first economy – we had an economy even before the newcomers, with trade and commerce.”

Today’s Indigenous economy is estimated to be around $32 billion, with roughly 45,000 Indigenous businesses across virtually every sector. “There’s been extraordinary growth,” says Gladu.

But while Indigenous people make up 5% of Canada’s population, there still hasn’t been much in the way of economic reconciliation. Indigenous businesses only account for 0.3% of Canadian federal procurement contracts, points out Gladu. “That’s $60 to 65 million, which is a pittance.”

His current passion project is CCAB’s new Procurement Champions program, which challenges governments and corporations to do better by connecting with Indigenous businesses from coast, to coast, to coast.

“Our MO these days has been around supply change – the opportunity to supply change [through supply chains].”

Gladu tells Corporate Knights how he and his co-chair and incoming Suncor CEO Mark Little went to the federal government and said, “Listen, Suncor spends 10 times what you do on Indigenous businesses (roughly $700 million last year alone) and look at the economic impact that it’s had.”

They’re encouraging the federal government to commit to a 5% target in five years. That would increase the government spend to about a billion dollars a year on Indigenous businesses. If they get all provincial governments and territories to also target 5% that would contribute over $23 billion to Canada’s Indigenous economies, fuelling hundreds of Certified Aboriginal Businesses from printing, engineering and catering companies to architectural and media firms.

Gladu says one of the biggest challenges he and his colleagues face in government meetings is that a lot of the programs and resources set up to support Indigenous communities have been very reactionary – supplying clean drinking water, decent housing, dealing with sky-high youth suicide rates. “All these really important issues,” notes Gladu. “Then someone like me will come and say, ‘don’t forget about business and supply chain and procurement’ and they say, ‘we don’t have time for that right now, we’ve got these other issues.’”

Switching mindsets and changing the narrative to consider what a “strong economy means for our community” is a struggle sometimes for Gladu. Particularly when, as he points out, too many have a bias – “sometimes unconscious and sometimes conscious” – against Indigenous businesses. “People think that it costs more money to do business with us or we don’t have the capacity when the opposite is in fact real. We did the research.”

Beyond its Aboriginal Procurement Marketplace open to Certified Aboriginal Businesses and Procurement Champions, CCAB also connects Indigenous entrepreneurs to tools, training and financing to scale their businesses, as well as a certification program that confirms corporate performance in Aboriginal relations.

Why is this work so meaningful to Gladu, who also has a 15-year-old daughter?

“Both my grandmothers are residential school survivors. I was very fortunate that both my parents had jobs. The impact that those jobs had on my parents and the impact that had on me pushed me to go beyond high school to college. It’s put me in a place now where I can influence and where I can make a difference for my family, for my community and, quite frankly, for my country as a national Indigenous leader.”

Gladu, who’s also on the board of Ontario Power Generation and was recently appointed chancellor of St. Paul’s University College, Waterloo, adds, “None of this would have been possible without a job or without an education. I want my people to have as many opportunities as they choose and that’s not possible without a strong robust economy.”

The post Meet the man brokering a path to economic reconciliation appeared first on Corporate Knights.