Chief Clarence Louie of the Osoyoos Indian Band near Osoyoos, B.C., close to the U.S. border, offers a variation on a well-known real estate slogan when he identifies the important issues he wants to talk about with people who want to form a relationship with his First Nation.
“I always tell them, ‘I’ve got three words for you: jobs, jobs, jobs,’” says Louie, who was in Thompson Oct. 23 as the keynote speaker for the Thompson Chamber of Commerce’s Northern Business Week. “I think the premier of Alberta said the best social program’s a job. Kids, I don’t care non-native or native, they shouldn’t be growing up in a household where nobody works. Kids should be growing up in a household where at least one parent works.”
Louie, a 10-term chief of the Osoyoos Indian Band and winner of every election but one since first being elected chief at the age of 24 in the mid-80s, says his First Nation’s claim to fame is the success it’s had creating and operating its own businesses.
“I like creating jobs,” he says. “That’s what I like doing. I like focusing on job development, job creation. Like any town or city or any band, you’ve got to have an economy or else you have a ghost town. If you want people to stay and you want the schools, and the hospitals and everything else that goes with that, you need a decent standard of living. Your living comes from your wage from your job. That’s why I focus on jobs.”
The Osoyoos Indian Band didn’t transform into an economic success that employs 700 First Nations and non-First Nations employees in a variety of enterprises, including a winery, overnight.
“Our first economic development, it was as a land lease, it was 1963,” Louie says. “It was a piece of land that the people at the time, I was only three years old, they decided to lease that land out for a golf course to non-natives for a 49-year lease. Our first band-owned business was in 1968 and it was a vineyard. It’s rare a First Nation has economic development on their lands going back to the ‘60s.”
Louie says he prefers hanging around business people rather than politicians, noting that the things First Nations and politicians talk about – like treaty and land claims issues – aren’t going to be solved as soon as he would like.
“Those things are 100-year-old issues and they’ll probably be going on for another 100 years,” says Louie, a recipient of the Order of British Columbia and a two-term chair of the National Aboriginal Economic Development Board. “I want to create jobs and have people and families have a decent income now, not wait for treaty issues to be settled or land claims issues or the ongoing issues between the provinces and First Nations or the federal government and First Nations.”
He also says that ensuring First Nations people have good employment opportunities is important not only to First Nation leaders but to everyone in communities like Thompson with a high percentage of aboriginal people and to everyone in Canada.
“Are a significant proportion of those First Nations people on welfare?” he says, referring to Thompsons’ aboriginal population. “Most cities and towns I go to the native population is usually not doing very well. The youngest and fastest-growing population in Canada, especially on the prairies, are First Nations people. That’s a huge social economic cost if the majority of the future workforce is growing up on welfare. You can see who lives in the poorer sections of town or which group of people are walking the streets and look like they’re unemployed or not doing very well. It’s probably the native people. That should be a concern to citizens in Thompson. It’s probably been that way for a long time.”
Prior to his speech at the October Chamber of Commerce event, Louie said his message included restoring the relationships between First Nations and the government to its original state.
“I don’t know how many native people there will be in the audience but my message is the original treaty relationship was a business relationship not a dependency relationship,” he said. “We’ve got to bet back to the business relationship.”
And while the Osoyoos Indian Band isn’t a perfect First Nation, Louie says there’s no sense in striving for perfection.
“We still have a 10 per cent crowd or so that are caught in that welfare cycle or they have difficulty holding jobs,” said Louie. “There’s no 100 per cent solution. If you can help solve 50 or 60 per cent of the problem, don’t look for the 100 per cent solution. There is no such thing as a 100 per cent solution in anything but that still doesn’t mean that if you can employ half the people, that if you can get 50 per cent of the people employed that’s better than what you’re at now when 20 per cent of the people are employed, for example.”
The important thing for First Nation economic development is to find a niche within the economy that exists in the area, which some First Nations are better positioned to take advantage of than others.
“Location is a big factor but there’s other First Nations that have good location but they don’t make economic development their priority or get involved in the business development,” he says. “Where I come from people say, ‘How’d you get involved in wineries and grapes? Well, that’s the economy of the south Okanagan. There’s a lot of golf courses in the Okanagan, that’s why we own a golf course as well, You participate in the economy that’s in your region. I know some of these bands way up north they have the opportunity of being involved in the mining industry. A lot of bands across the prairies are involved in oil and gas and mining and forestry and making millions of dollars and creating thousands of jobs. It creates a couple of thousand jobs and the spinoff from that creates another thousand that spin off that. There’s always spinoff benefits to any natural resource development. Thompson’s kind of the hub of a lot of the remote areas. I’m sure a lot of the bands’ people come here to shop. If they had decent jobs they’d be spending more money here. Every little service in this town benefits from that income that the people get.”
