Ah-neen, Elders, community members, and employees! May was a month of meetings and June will bring ceremonies, which will slow us down and that is good! I realize that I have not been at the office for sometime and I apologize for that, it is hard to be in two places at once.

Progress means stability, sustainability, and diligence especially when we are starting the business or program ourselves. We are teaching our own people to begin from the ground up to teach people how to do business from set up to running the business. That means continuous meetings to ensure we did not miss a step. With this kind of setup, we are building our own capacity by working with the trainee from the ground up. We are teaching as we are learning, we may not have the education but we learn best by using our cultural way of learning and that is by learning through doing.

To date, we have about seven businesses that we are essentially starting from scratch. We have a set of senior managers as well as leadership to help guide and assist the learner, who will eventually become the teacher to teach the next learner. We have the resources, we are the resources, and we learn and use our culture to teach ourselves how to build, manage, and direct our businesses and programs to success, employment, and self sufficiency!

Just as I talked about last issues, we need to keep with the changing paces of the society around us as that society impacts us, we need to compete, keep our way of life, employ our people, and build a quality and cultural way of life.

We are not people who do not change, nor does our ways of doing things change, we adapt to the changing circumstances, and we have a culture, ceremonies, and traditions that have sustained us for generations. We need to start believing in our Creator, ancestors, traditions and ourselves to lead ourselves to the next challenges. As your Leader, and the Council, we have had to learn very quickly how government can change the face of our community just through one piece of legislation. As a Leader, I am responsible for trying to lessen the impact of that change in our community. Sometimes it starts right at home, I continuously need your support, and the Council needs your support to keep our culture alive, increase our capacity, and do for ourselves rather than letting government tell us what to do. More importantly, we need to protect, preserve what our ancestors have painfully put together, our culture and Treaties and those things that are contained in those Treaties. The government has tried to break us as a peoples and our strength but we have preserved and we now need to keep standing tall and believe that we can stand together to create and keep our way of life. You also have responsibility to support, do what you can for yourself, educate yourself and follow our way of life by learning to listen to the teachings of our ceremonies and culture.

In conclusion, I choose to look at change as positive and for the better for not only you but our community. It is our future after all. As always, I thank the community, elders, and employees for their continued support, encouragement, and prayers.

Respectfully, Chief Darren Whitford, O’Chiese First Nation