April 15, 2002

Aboriginal economies blossom

By Nadia Daniell
ndaniell@uwo.ca

Spring is a very busy time for Ken and Linda Parker. Around this time of year they know that their business is going to pick-up dramatically and they have been preparing all year for it. The Parkers run Sweet Grass Gardens, the only native owned native plant nursery in North America, located just outside of Brantford in Ontario. As the gardening season fast approaches, Ken and Linda Parker are heading into their sixth year of business.

Sweet Grass Gardens is just one example of a new trend within the native community. The rise in aboriginal businesses is steadily increasing and although the strides in this area have often been overshadowed by negative stories in the media over trouble on reserves, there are many areas of Canadian society where natives are blossoming.

"We started our business thinking that we were only going to supply plants to First Nations communities," says Ken Parker. "What we didn't anticipate was that the majority of our customer based would be non-natives."

Photo by Linda Parker

Ken Parker giving a presentation on native plants.

The spirit of Entrepreneurialism is spreading among natives. In the past, business owners have not been embraced by the aboriginal community nor encouraged by the federal government. However, the cultural attitudes held by natives about commercialism and communalism are changing and as a result natives are becoming just as enterprising outside of the reserves, as well as in their own communities.

These efforts have been met with some support from the government. Various new programs have provided natives with support services as well as financial backing. Like most aspects of the relationship between the government and aboriginals, the one that governs these new business practices is not as extensive as it could be and still requires a better understanding of aboriginals.

According to Industry Canada there are about 5,000 aboriginal owned businesses in Ontario and this number has been growing steadily since 1981. Self-employed aboriginal entrepreneurs like Ken and Linda Parker account for most of these small businesses, which primarily serve local markets.

While many aboriginals are moving into non-traditional sectors of the business world such as information technology, Sweet Grass Gardens is an example of how aboriginals are creating innovative services. The couple operates the nursery at their home on the Six Nations Reserve outside Brantford, Ont., with some help from their son Taylor, 11, and daughter Kaylin, 7. The business yields a small profit, enough to sustain the nursery and make improvements every year.

Taylor and Kaylin are exposed to the ins and outs of their parent's business and get a look at how the business world operates, something many native children will never experience. According to Ian Hilton, a member of the Ontario government's native affairs secretariat, aboriginal people are only into their second generation of advances into economic self-reliance. "Older generations have not previously been involved in business," says Hilton. "When you don't see people around you in businesses, it's tough to get into business yourself."

Demographically, the aboriginal baby boom is about one decade behind the mainstream baby boom. Consequently, education, housing and youth employment are major issues for aboriginal leaders.

The Internet is one example of how aboriginals are playing catch-up with the rest of Canadian society. Across the country native reserves are the most isolated communities in all of Canada, and will remain so without information technology. John Bernard is now in the business of bringing cyberspace to the reserves through his Ottawa-based computer systems company, Donna Cona Inc. His line of work calls for bringing non-native ideas to his native people. He also knows that the major companies that provide Internet and telecommunications services to most of Canada have little interest in the small and remote aboriginal communities. Bernard has proven to be both innovative and enterprising.

Photo courtesy of Donna Cona

John Bernard is the head of the largest native IT firm in Canada.

Bernard's business is more than just about nickels and dimes. His native culture, which stresses community over the individual, means he is bringing a resource to reserves that could possibly turn life around in these remote communities. The more access people have on reserves to the tools and resources that exist outside of the reserves, the better the quality of life on reserves will become.

Bernard became convinced that getting natives connected with the Internet would jump-start their road to recovery from isolation and substance abuse when he began working in some of the country's remotest reserves. What Bernard witnessed was deep poverty and despair as children resorted to sniffing nail polish. Bernard realized that there was an entire world that natives were missing out on and that the Internet was not a choice they were being exposed to.

According to Statistics Canada, Ontario's aboriginal population is youthful and growing rapidly. In 1996, it was 10 years younger on average than the general population. As a result, the pool of working-age aboriginal people will grow substantially over the next two decades. By 2006, the number of people aged 35 to 54 is expected to increase by 41 per cent.

Bernard knows that computer skills are becoming more relevant in today's workforce, and are beneficial to young people's futures. With help from the government, Bernard hopes to create a "National First Nations Network" to link 633 aboriginal communities to each other.

Although many aboriginal groups have had strained relationships with the government in the past, the initiatives set up to help aboriginals engage in the business economy have been working quite well.

According to Tom Morrison, region manager of Ceso Aboriginal Services, the main role of government in aboriginal businesses is to help "put the seed into the business." The seed in this case is equity or start-up capital. For better or worse the province has gotten away from using fiscal instruments to develop entrepreneurialism in the aboriginal community and there are few direct grants these days. For Morrison this may be a good thing. "Just because you're aboriginal doesn't mean that you aren't subjected to the competition from the rest of the world."

Businesses in remote locations are the only ones that receive substantial start-up assistance. As the department store giant the Hudson's Bay has withdrawn from many of these locations it has become vital that the aboriginals in those areas have access to services.

One of the myths surrounding aboriginal businesses is that they receive many loans and grants as well as tax exemptions. According to Morrison there is an underlying feeling of suspicion among non-native business owners in the Brantford area, which is heavily populated with native businesses. The truth is no one outside of the aboriginal community really knows what the natives are getting. What benefits are gained from their native status hardly negate the barriers, says Morrison

For a long time the ideas of competition and profits were ingrained into the aboriginal psyche as negative terms. "Those two words used to be dirty words," says Morrison. As a result aboriginals shied away from competing with anyone in their community, which meant only one of everything in their communities.

This attitude has changed, according to Morrison. He believes that there have been enough people out there making their success look positive to dispel the notion that they were being greedy if they competed and were successful.

Bernard can testify that introducing non-native ideas into a native community can be challenging. To many native Elders, new technologies like the Internet are seen as destroying native culture and leading to assimilation. But if the hardships on the reserve continue to bring little hope to young aboriginals and push them out of their communities Bernard feels that is a worse fate and will ultimately lead to the destruction of their culture. Ken Parker says communications technology has helped develop an array of businesses on their reserve and now they function more like a self-sufficient suburban community.

The name of Ken and Linda Parker's nursery honours Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata), which native people believed was the first plant to cover the Earth. The Ojibway believed it was a purifier and burned the dried form of this fragrant grass before all ceremonies to help them communicate more clearly with the Great Spirit.

In many ways, Sweet Grass Gardens reflects aboriginal business priorities and strategies. Many aboriginals are looking toward re-traditionalization, an outlook that encourages the re-emergence of traditional world views, values and customs. As a result, aboriginal businesses are creating "cultural identity reinforcement," positive and self-constructed identities based on traditional cultural groups.

David Newhouse, a professor of native studies at Trent University in Peterborough, says aboriginal business owners are more likely to have slightly different priorities. Most aboriginal businesses pursue objectives of stability, profitability and person/family employment rather than growth of the firm.

The Parkers grow a number of rare plants for sale, and even those that are not uncommon are in limited supply. "We're not a big wholesaler," notes Ken Parker. "It's hard to mass-produce rare plants. We just grow a couple of this and that for people's yards."

Asked why expanding wasn't in Sweet Grass Gardens' future, Ken Parker replies: "We couldn't keep up with the demand and, besides, we like people to come here and see us and our garden."

Morrison says that the issue of growth is not a major barrier to aboriginal business. His primary concern is that aboriginal people do not give enough thought to the economics that govern their community.

"One guy will see a successful business on the reserve, like a video store and thing 'Oh maybe I should open one to and then I'II make lots of money just like Joe."

Morrison says he has seen this a number of times. Just recently, he convinced someone who wanted to open a third video store on the reserve to try and look at the economics of the situation in a different way.

"The only thing another video store would do is split the profits from video sales three ways, instead of two," says Morrison. Together they decided it would be better to open a VCR repair shop, something that wasn't available to the people living on the reserve.

Some of Morrison's best success stories involve convincing people not to get into business. Morrison is equally as happy when he helps someone to stop and think about what it is going to be like running their own business. He helped one of his clients realize that she wasn't quite prepared to start-up a horse ranch in Bowmanville and convinced her to wait another year.

Ken Parker is an example of aboriginal tunnel vision, the second attitudial problem that Morrison feels works against aboriginals who want to start their own business.

"When I first started, I was very narrow-minded," Ken Parker says. "I wanted to rip everything out of my year - take out the lilacs - and have only native plants. "I have come to understand that we can never go back. Now I tell myself that I'd like see at least one native plant in everyone's garden."

Ken Parker's original attitude is one of the barriers that Morrison says many aboriginals must overcome. "Natives always feel that the aboriginal way is the only ways," says Morrison.

Ceso, the organization that Morrison works for, teams up volunteer mentors that have business experience with aboriginals looking to start or expand a business. Morrison says that when his clients request an aboriginal volunteer he explains to them that he won't send one unless the business matters are occurring on a reserve.

But the willingness of aboriginals isn't the only thing that needs to be overcome. Hilton sees financing as one of the major barriers, even with the number of government programs available to aboriginals. "Access to equity for native people is still quite difficult. There has been very little wealth creation in the native community and it is difficult to save money when so little money is earned," says Hilton.

For the aboriginal population living on reserves it is difficult to use their assets to secure a loan. Property on reserves cannot be used as collateral and since banks need something tangible incase you default on your loan, many natives have no other means of getting a loan. This problem is tied to the Indian Act and to change it would involve a huge undertaking by the various aboriginal groups across Canada and the federal government. Improvements are taking place with the addition of six new capital corporations for aboriginals created by aboriginals and partners in the coporate sector.

Finally, the services that are available to aboriginals are not enough to serve the population. Hilton says that non-native business services are not very attractive to aboriginals. They don't feel comfortable going into offices with no other aboriginals around, says Hilton.

But as awareness grows new projects are being developed to meet the growing needs of aboriginals in the business world.

"Aboriginal owned businesses give us the economic independence that we need to be self-sufficient," says Ken Parker. "I hope to pass on what I have learned to my children so they can learn to appreciate their own culture and help it prosper as well."