Welcoming the Nexen Chair in Aboriginal Leadership

When Dr. Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux travels with students on Canadian Roots exchanges, she is totally energized by the creativity they bring to the project. Designed to bring small groups of young people – First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and non-Indigenous – to Aboriginal communities across Canada, Canadian Roots encourages the students to record what they learn in any number of creative ways – through new media work, films, online projects, photography, journal entries, or articles.

Wesley-Esquimaux is particularly interested in storytelling as a way to give a voice to the Aboriginal experience, both historically and in preparation for the future, and she believes that the best type of learning is experiential, both for young people and mature learners.

“We have no choice but to get youth involved in everything we do,” Wesley-Esquimaux says about her work with Aboriginal communities. “These young people are our future leaders.” As The Banff Centre’s first Nexen Chair in Aboriginal Leadership, Wesley-Esquimaux will build upon what she’s learned through Canadian Roots, and through her own community and academic work, to create an archive of Aboriginal success stories. Her teaching and her work with youth inform many of Wesley-Esquimaux’s plans for the Nexen Chair research, and how it will move forward. She has spent much of her 22-year career working with Aboriginal youth leadership, traditional self-governance, historic trauma and healing, public education, and historic land claims research.

Her own experience has been circuitous, bringing her to a community-based philosophy that encourages integration for First Nations without assimilation. She describes herself as coming from a “family of residential school survivors.” Her mom, an Odawa/Pottawatomi from Manitoulin Island, and her stepfather, an Anishinabek from Lac Seul, Ontario, moved to Toronto, where she was raised, almost directly from the Shingwauk Residential School. She dropped out of high school at 16, and moved to southern California, where she got involved with governance and water rights negotiations with a community of Cahuilla people in Palm Springs. Her life and travels with them inspired her to go back to school, finishing her high school diploma and attending the College of the Desert.

After a year at the college, she transferred to the University of Toronto, ultimately earning her Ph.D. in social cultural anthropology at age 48. She is currently an assistant professor in Aboriginal studies and the University’s school of social work. She carries out more than 60 public engagements each year, and is recognized as a key media spokesperson on multiple issues important to First Nations in Canada. She now resides on the Chippewa of Georgina Island First Nation, where her birth father, Charles L. Big Canoe was raised.

Named to the Chair early last year following a $1-million investment by Nexen, Wesley-Esquimaux is now leading an intensive research project into wise practices in Canada’s Aboriginal communities. Beginning with a review of existing research, Wesley Esquimaux will work with the Centre’s Aboriginal Leadership and Management department to create practical case studies identifying critical successes in governance, community and economic development, health, education, arts and culture, and joint-venture partnerships. The ultimate goal is to create a uniquely Canadian archive that will act as a resource for Aboriginal communities and leaders.

“This exercise will create a road map for Indigenous communities,” Wesley-Esquimaux says. “A lot of history has brought us to this place. There’s been a disenfranchisement process and a history of suppression and repression. The idea now is to re-script the future within our communities, and in how our communities are perceived by the general public. ”

She adds that Aboriginal communities are in transition. “We’ve moved from land-based economies to cash-based, from models of communal child care to single families. We can either guide these transitions ourselves, or let them happen to us. We have to decide what traditions we want to maintain, and make sure we build them into our communities social, economic and governance plans for the future.”

She and her team will be searching out case studies, or “wise practices” that can become models for other communities. She cites the economic savvy of the Osoyoos band (a story she considers to be only one of many, many success stories in Canada), and the multi-disciplinary collaboration that brought the Siksika Nation’s Blackfoot Crossing site — a memorial, tourist site, and cultural exhibition space in southern Alberta — into being.

She adds that the process has to hold up the truth of Aboriginal communities, and detail problems and challenges as well as successes, or the project won’t be useful. “There are profound issues in our communities,” she says. “We have to acknowledge that. Our research and statistics have to have balance.” But she is dedicated to the idea of helping to give hope and direction to people within their own communities. “People look at some of these success stories and say ‘We will never get there ourselves.’ I want to help change that.”

Part of her plan is to give camera equipment to young people and ask them to create archival stories of the leaders in their own communities — a digital extension of Aboriginal oral traditions. These communication methods translate to the type of experiential learning The Banff Centre’s Aboriginal Leadership and Management department focuses on. It also connects well with the creative focus of the Centre, which Wesley-Esquimaux thinks adds exponentially to the Nexen Chair project.

“There are one and a half million Indigenous people spread out across this huge country,” she says. “Of course we can get lost in the woods, but The Banff Centre has a powerful voice, and it definitely influences people across Canada.” The trick is to help young people find their way into a future that is informed by the past, embraces the present, and builds a future with every tool at our disposal. The Banff Centre and the Nexen Chair are creating a dynamic process of “re-membering and re-imagining” traditional expressions of successful leadership and management.

Nexen’s $1-million donation has been matched by $1.3 million in support for this project from the Rural Alberta Development Fund.