The Main Issues Facing the Upper Skeena

Social Issues

The 6,500 people in the Upper Skeena are distributed among 14 communities and surrounding rural areas. The communities are geographically separate and access between them is difficult. People are fiercely proud of their communities and tend to want to go their own way, creating their own services and relying on their own strengths. While this independent nature creates a richness that adds to the vitality of the Upper Skeena, it can also block necessary collaborative action.

The creation of healthy, sustainable communities can only occur through the efforts of many people who are committed to the well being of the Upper Skeena over time. We must learn how to talk to one another, build trust, deal with our differences, and work together for our mutual benefit.

Fortunately, residents of the Upper Skeena are learning these skills. Individuals from a wide variety of communities and groups within the Upper Skeena have contributed to the development of this proposal. The Village of Hazelton and the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en Marketing Corporation collaborated to produce the report Action 2000 because both groups recognised the lack of control they have over the local forest land base.

Residents from all the communities contributed to the socio-economic plan described in Beyond 2000 and from this we were able to identify five values which we all seemed to share:

• Youth are our future decision-makers.
• Experiential learning is how we best acquire knowledge and skills.
• We live here because of a connection to family and the land around us.
• Stewardship and working with natural resources is central to our identity.
• We strive for self-reliance self sufficiency, autonomy and independence.

These values can create a starting point for dialogue and action to build a healthy, sustainable community.

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Political Issues

Reconciliation between the Gitxsan Nation and the Crown is the primary political issue in the Upper Skeena. In its 1997 ruling on Delgamuukx vs. British Columbia, the Supreme Court of Canada recommended that the reconciliation of aboriginal peoples' pre-existence with Crown sovereignty be negotiated between the aboriginal parties and the Crown.

While this reconciliation process is underway at the provincial level, there is also a need for reconciliation at the local level. What does reconciliation mean for the residents of the Upper Skeena? How can we learn to live together in a way that respects our cultural differences? How can we learn to trust each other and work together to create our futures? It is only by discussing these types of questions that we can start the reconciliation process in a real and meaningful way. We must learn to create new ways of talking to and listening to each other. We will then have the ability to work and live together, with all of our differences, in a healthy, respectful way.

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Economic Issues

Unemployment and economic regeneration are the key economic issues facing the residents of the Upper Skeena. However, despite the grim economic realities facing the region, people are ready to explore alternate ways of developing a stable economic base and creating a healthy, sustainable community. The type of action necessary is outlined in Beyond 2000: Setting socio-economic priorities in our communities, which advocates five strategies to promote community economic development. These are:

1. Increase the involvement of citizens.
2. Strengthen natural ecosystems.
3. Put more local money back into the local economy.
4. Support community enterprise.
5. Build local capacity.

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Educational Issues

Over the past three years, five separate reports have been produced that describe some level of disconnection between the formal education system and the realities facing many of the learners in the Upper Skeena.

Action 2000 examined the human and economic issues surrounding the forest sector of the Upper Skeena. One of the key observations made in Action 2000 was that local knowledge is largely underdeveloped and under- utilised.

"Numerous financial resources have been allocated to assist people in their education but little attention had been focused on taking advantage of peoples' experience and putting that experience to action that could lead to more independence and self-sufficiency. Much of the educational effort has focused on classroom-based retraining and life skills programs. Despite the commitment of financial resources in this regard, the local population is still largely economically dependent and not self-sufficient."

To Live a Good Life examined the educational experiences and concerns of three groups of young people in the area: dropouts during the last three years, potential dropouts and succeeding students expecting to graduate. This report provided a number of recommendations directed towards creating new ways to give meaning to the partnership between communities and schools and between parents, teachers and students. There were also a number of recommendations that focused on exploring alternate systems of education such as trade schools, folk schools and community mentors.

Establishing Training Programs for Youth focused on the training needs of Gitxsan youth who have dropped out of school and are unemployed and living on income assistance. This report examines the impact of alienation, attempts at assimilation, and residential schools on the young people of today. The report concludes by stating that training programs must be developed that teach young people how to overcome their alienation and achieve success: "Our youth need to be taught how to dream, how to fulfil those dreams, and how to be proud of who they are."

Breaking Barriers: A Model for Literate Citizenship explored the elements and conditions of an educational program that seems to work best for young people who have dropped-out of school. The report found that youth stay involved with these kinds of programs because:

• they get immediate and practical results;
• they become connected to their community;
• they realize the importance of helping others; and
• they feel proud of the work they do.

Gitxsan Millennium: A Proposal to Build an Education Plan for Gitxsan People lays out a framework for a twenty year plan for the Gitxsan people. This paper highlights how education and training programs have been disconnected from the goals and social realities of the Gitxsan nation, the wilp and the territories. The framework for the twenty-year plan has four essential building blocks.

• All aspects of the twenty-year education plan will support, strengthen or directly involve the huwilp and the Gitxsan kinship structure.
• A service-learning model will be applied to the huwilp as a means for integrating and reconciling western academic approaches with Gitxsan laws and institutions.
• The education plan will promote a life-span learning approach to education and development.
• The education plan will include local and out-of-territory education and training delivery of a range of disciplines.

As these reports revealed, the present approach to education and learning is disconnected from the goals and social realities of the Upper Skeena. The current system is not working very well for a large number of people.

In Beyond 2000, people clearly articulated a common learning style that cut across communities and cultural groups within the Upper Skeena:

"Experiential learning is how we best acquire knowledge and skills. We believe it is absolutely necessary to pass on local knowledge to continue our way of life. We recognise that most learning takes place when we do things that are real. We find successes in education programs that involve learning within the life of the community."

We need to expand and adjust our approach to include all learners in the Upper Skeena, not just those who are successful within the mainstream educational system. We need to build upon and use the knowledge and strengths of the residents of the Upper Skeena to create healthy, sustainable communities.

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The Upper Skeena Learning Community Partnerships Project has been made possible by funding from the Office of Learning Technologies Community Learning Networks Initiative