MN 35. Jerry Asp - A Leader for Generations

hello welcome to mining now i'm your host jared downey joining me is gaudi molina hello gowdy hello and good morning good morning uh okay i want to jump right into her who our guest is today um because jerry asked is someone that i first met at cim virtual 21. see i am well be back in person next year we are all rooting for that um but uh jerry was certainly a highlight of the the uh the show that we did there because um he just he has such a he has such a history in mining that you could you could talk to him for hours and still only be scratching the surface so he's been a real leader in the mining in the mining community as a canadian as an indigenous leader um he's very we will not cover all the aspects of his life today but we're going to try to put a tiny little dent in it so before we do that gowdy let's give a shout out to some great sponsors who are helping us bring this episode to you absolutely okay so first up we've got savannah equipment savannah equipment supplies new and 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you busy nowadays well i really enjoy you know giving back now i uh after almost 60 years in the mining industry and traveling the world now i give back now i try to help other indigenous communities whether they're in belize or honduras or nicaragua or ecuador or canada u.s or sweden doesn't matter i try to assist uh show them the mistakes we made and hopefully we can hopefully we can move them forward so they don't make the same mistakes we made what uh what do you think uh i actually let's you know and i i've i've you know i've done interviews with you before i've heard you um speaking a lot before and of course there's a lot of i mean if anybody will have links to some of your bios and that so people could i mean you're you've accomplished amazing things what are some of the mistakes though um that that you have made along the way or that you see as uh that can be improved in indigenous uh relationships and economical developments and those types of things well you know the biggest thing that most people make a mistake is that they think that first nation people are opposed to mining they're not opposed to mining per se or using the materials that we mine they're opposed to the methods and because the legacy this is one time when the sins of the father are definitely vested in the sons so the legacy of mining has caused a lot of headaches for a lot of first nations and and for the mining industry in general and it's still now they're starting to correct them i just seen this week they've signed a big agreement between the dene and yellowknife and the giant yellowknife mine i mean that is the environmental disaster waiting to happens by now but now i see they've signed an agreement to help clean that mess up so that's some of the things that i've seen are changing and and really big mistakes that the mining companies have made how did you deal with it when you know i mean i think your first deal that you put together was back in no it went back further than 80 in the 80s the early 80s um with uh in the golden triangle that's with your nation the tel-ten nation i believe um how did you i mean the technology wasn't where it was so how did you sort of that environmental accountability and i mean did you have to did you have to let something slide back then or how did you sort of approach it we did two things first we wrote it telltanz wrote the resource development policy before we ever negotiated the first agreement in 1987. and the number one we have it's a very simple agreement with eight points but number one says there shall be no irreparable environmental damage that's number one and so i had this eight point system to work with and i could negotiate and so it was pretty easy for me to negotiate i had my parameters and if they wanted to negotiate outside of that box then they had to talk to leadership but there was a golden bear mine and so we negotiated that that was the first one but we didn't compromise our integrity we hired some of the best environmental people that we knew at the time and they told us what they thought was some of the pitfalls and we implemented those into our agreements we had environmental officers we had hr officers we had people like that on site at all times working with the mining industry we were very hands-on very upfront working with environmental and uh hr for to make sure our people were trained and brought along with the project you know there's something that i've wondered uh you know just as a i mean i i'm a leader in a very small small scale um but when you're leading a community you want the jobs and of course that's obviously a big selling point when a major company is coming in is that they're giving jobs to a community whether it's a community here in in kamloops or an indigenous community it doesn't matter that it's one of the selling points so did i i guess two questions did the mines at the time did they think that was going to be enough that if they offer a few jobs that would be enough and then realize no there's a lot more to it or or and then to your side was it was it ever a question to compromise so that the community could get jobs was that ever a balance you had to find or did you know that you had to be very firm right off at the beginning we we took it we we this was what how we started our negotiations we were in a meeting and one of the golden bear representatives said we think you tell guns are being unreasonable and one of the chiefs spotted zerza said look you the resource developers are taking away our way of life we're just asking you to replace with something that's equitable i don't think that's being unreasonable that was a premise we negotiated from we said you're taking away we took away our hunting trapping our our as we call it the bush economy away now we have to enter the wage economy so you have to replace that so that was how that was the premise of our negotiation yeah that now i you know because i've heard your story i've heard i know that that that ability to negotiate um and that sort of is sort of baked into the culture as well isn't it um the telltale nation a year like over a hundred years ago there was there was like large gatherings of these sort of these of commerce right that is that sort of the history do i have that right yeah the tel-tans were traded from time immemorial there was a there's a cave uh my sister's an archaeologist and she was on a dig on prince of wales island off of the coast of uh wrangle alaska and they found a cave and then there was a body and there was 28 obsidian artifacts the body was carbon dated to 11 600 years old and every single one of those obsidian artifacts came from the center of our country called ice mountain and so we tell people we were mining for 12 000 years and we've been trading we were the traders that worked with the coast we traded with the spanish we prayed with the russians we brought the good into goods inland and then we trade with the inland native people so we were the middlemen between the russians and the and the plinkets and the spanish to start with and this is back in the 1700s so we've been around a long time in the in the business world what about actually i want to go back to some something that you touched on um before i get into the next stuff is um you mentioned bringing in a team you brought in hr and engineers and your environmentalists you you came equipped could have you done it without that how important is it in these negotiations and i think especially as young people um and i think it's going to take an easy shot at things like social media and things like that they see so there's a lot of end result that you see you see the final finished product of something and you think it's easy but there was a lot of preparation that went into not because you know for you know your chief saying that we think we're being reasonable that's one thing but then you had all these parts and pieces ready to go and backed up could have you done it without all of that lag work and all that preparation oh no i mean i'm i'm a great fan of will rogers a native american philosopher who said you have to learn from other people's mistakes because you don't live long enough to make them all yourself right so we we knew where we wanted to go that was a that was number one we had a vision and so we needed to reach that vision so we sat down we said how are we going to get there what do we need to do to be where we want to be in 25 years and we realized that we didn't have expertise in the environment we didn't have expertise in this we didn't have expertise in that so we found people who were experts and we paid them and they trained us but they developed our people that was another statement that we made that you have to develop our people along with our resources yeah and so that happened you're oh sorry go ahead jerry no i'm going to say that that's really the basis of how we made things happen is because we knew we knew what we didn't know let me put it that way right right we know we didn't know this so we needed to find somebody who did and then what about for you though the you know you've i mean you've been in a ton of negotiations you you put together organizations and and now you've worked around the world um where did that come from for you who do you think who had a lot of influence i'm sure it's not just one person when i hear those questions it's like pick one person i don't think anybody gets developed off of one individual are there a few key people though that stand out that you really um you really learned a skill or an approach from oh most definitely the the first person of course is my grandfather george zerza who is the last true hereditary chief of the tel-tan people and uh though he never went to day of school in his life he ran a successful hunting area and hunting business raised 18 children and did all of these things and and uh was well respected and talked about everywhere he went so i learned a lot from him and i then in the mining game i learned from my uncle said osp and hermanos and freddie hasselberg who's a prospector that i traveled with and and spent many years with and uh so i learned a lot about negotiations and a lot about how to deal with people as individuals from those but not like you say there's lots of people my older brother george was one of the was the first aboriginal person to ever graduate as a lawyer from ubc so i spent a lot of time with him of course so these are some of the people that helped me with my negotiating skills and of course i took courses in project management and project development and contracting and contract management those were the kind of skills that i learned and went into although i was an underground miner and a diamond driller and whatnot that was my background in mining to start with yeah well that's the other thing that i'm curious about with you with your story is that you've you know you've also grabbed the wrenches you've done both and how important is that you must still bring that into into everything that you're doing is that when you're having these conversations even if that's at a high level you still have an understanding of what hap what happens on the ground that's one of the big things that i tell people all the time i know it's doable you can negotiate any kind of agreement and or you can you can write any kind of agreement and pass it over but the other side there's two things you have to remember one is you have the other side who may not like what you wrote and secondly somewhere down the road you're going to have to implement this right and so when you talk about what you just said there the practicality of it i know it's doable and i know what helps make things tick that was one of the reasons why i assisted from day one that we have an assistant hr person at the golden bear mine right because even though it wasn't a union operation this assistant personnel person who was tel tan acted like a shop steward in the union if any caltan had a problem they'd go talk to this assistant hr person and then they'd relay it back to me into our leadership and so you know those are the kind of things that we worked at yeah i i can't even imagine the difference that it made honestly um is it when you as you've traveled around the world have you is it is it similar challenges that you're seeing in indigenous communities around the world or is it pretty unique but case-by-case basis or sort of what are you have you seen um you know i've seen it from a distance i haven't sort of got first-hand experience so i'm very interested to know your perspective when i started 30 years ago 35 years ago now and in negotiating with the golden bear in 1987 they thought that aboriginal people only knew how to carve totem poles and do fancy bead work so that was number one i had to get around that and number two when we went to negotiate for contracts you heard the term track record so yeah to combat that i went into joint ventures i brought in joint ventures companies that had a track record and who were recognized as lead as bonafide contracting people and could do the job to the specs on time under budget etc etc so that was how we got around that and now when i work down in in ecuador the sad thing is those people socially they can run computers and do all this kind of stuff better than i can so they're not so behind us socially but economically they're probably 25 years behind us and that's what it is but when i show them what the tel-tans have done and i showed them how weak accomplished it and the thing is we're working with almost exactly the same mining company because a lot of them are registered in canada and i know a lot of the companies personally and know some of their personnel so i'm not starting from square one and neither are they so my guess is there they may be 20 25 years behind us today but i guarantee in five years at working at this they will probably be caught up to to probably only five to eight ten years behind us instead of 25 and my guess is that in 10 to 15 years they'll be where we are today this is a bit of a tricky question that i have um is do do the minds know what you know and they're not they're not helping the indigenous populations move forward as rapidly when they could or is it that they need they need someone like yourself and i know but probably there's truth in both questions that is partially on the on the minds and they partially need someone like yourself to come in but how much of it is is um i guess willful ignorance or by not putting in the effort knowing that they could make a difference or how much of it that they need people to be stepping in to help with these community communications and within these communities well let me put it this way i don't have problems dealing with the top echelon in the mining field presidents vice presidents i have absolutely no problem dealing with them problem is the mining companies are so big that individuals mindsets are our problem simply the the people who give me the most problems even today are middle management right and the reason for that is i think is that because the more they train the indigenous local population the more likely they're not going to be having a job and i always thought that might be uh they seriously feel threatened by this new workforce and but in my opinion that there is a very short-sighted um way of thinking i think that if they push the aboriginal people the harder they push them and and move them up the ladder in the chain the better will be for them and the mining company i don't think anybody will be displaced but it's just simply that feeling and i've i've seen it right from golden bear through sk through the red crisp mine in our country and things are getting much better but uh it's still still prevalent especially down in south america yeah i i agree with what you're saying a hundred percent i think that's absolutely true um i i've had a very similar experience that when i've you know i've dealt with presidents and ceos come on the company they're very they are some of their generally and of course they'll be exceptions are are some of the most generous people i've ever been in contact with because they understand the need to collaborate they can you can't get to that level of a company you can't be the ceo of tech if you are not able to work with other people whereas you can be in middle management if you can distribute an agenda very well you don't have to have exact you don't have to have that high level of compatibility with everybody as you do at a like a ceo or a president so i think that's absolutely true and it's easier to feel threatened when you're in that middle ground where you can be let go so i do get it does the um i wanted to jump i asked you something when last time you were on and i wanted to touch on it more and partially because i have a personal connection to the philippines but i wanted to ask it more and i didn't want to spend too much time on it because it wasn't really the context you've done some work in the philippines and there was some interesting something you touched on it was it was essentially that the in that particular region the community in that particular country the community is supposed to have access to some of the revenue that's generated from things like mining am i remembering that right that's correct constitution of the philippines says two percent of the gross revenue from uh resource development in a local area is supposed to go to the local area so it doesn't matter if you're in forestry or mining or whatever or right if you put up a hydro project it's a resource so i assume it means the same thing but it says two percent of that project is supposed to go to local area for infrastructure schools housing roads for that development but from where we had seen when we were there even though the mining companies were adhering to that giving the two percent uh local politicians weren't receiving the monies it was going into the grand coffers right yeah so it wasn't it's not the fact that they don't have uh the laws there it's just the implementation that's not happened yeah i it really struck when you said that and it really and i'm highlighting the philippines i'm sure there's other countries that have a similar setup it it i i guess my initial reaction was anger but but then of course then you need to start sort of working through it because i i distinctly remember driving through the philippines with my wife and there was a a community that was i mean it's not a wealthy community by any stretch where we were i can't even remember the name of it to be honest but um and i said i said i don't even know where you would start i don't even i don't i don't look at this community and see a starting point like you could come bring a school there you know you could do a project but it just it's got to be such a large scale because that two percent i mean somewhere like the philippines uh obviously places down in latin america i mean they're so resource rich all over the world there's these places that like that that are so resource rich they are not they are not seeing the money that they have the rights to where should they start where do you see i mean we do have people around the world that watch this show if there's someone there that's in the philippines i know we have fans in the philippines watching where should they start in these communities to start getting some of what they are owed and start being involved in some of these projects you know i tell leadership everywhere you have to have a vision the teleturns had a vision when i came and started the teletub nation development corporation building houses our vision was because we had 98 unemployment in the winter and 65 in the summer our vision was to eradicate and eliminate unemployment in our nation in 20 years 25 years that was a vision a pretty narrow vision but you know everything falls into it then the second thing you need then is a strategy how are you going to eliminate unemployment in your nation when to be truthful now as a chief so i know there isn't one program in department of indian affairs geared to get you out of the doldrums you're in not one i know because i was a chief i was asked one time after about four months on the job as a chief they said what are you doing there jerry how's this thing going i said all i'm doing here is administering my own poverty because there are no programs designed to get you out of that mess so our vision then was to eliminate unemployment so the next thing you had to have was a strategy so our strategy then was we had to look off reserve to the resource developers to the mining people the logging the hydro those were what we looked to and of course before we negotiated that we had to write the tell 10 resource development policy and we wrote that so now we knew we had a couple tools in hand to work with and then the third thing of course you need to have is a vehicle to carry that strategy to fruition and that's when we started the tel-tan nation development corporation so any leadership that doesn't follow that path is only doing it piecemeal and half-heartedly you need a vision and i tell this to every single community i go to i say you know when you're setting up a vision it's pretty simple i have three simple questions i ask the first question i ask is where do you see your community or your nation or whatever you want to write a vision for in 25 years okay pretty simple and the second thing is what do you think it's going to take for your community to reach that vision and then the third question i ask is what are you personally willing to do to help bring that vision to fruition they're simple questions but if you write those questions on top of a page one on each page and and fill it out it's not quite so simple but if you give that those three questions to every single person in your village that's over 16 years of old age and say answer these three questions then you bring them back and you and you tabulate them and you put them together and and see where you end up very quickly um it takes a lot of work but at the end of the day you know exactly where your community thinks they should be and what we should do to get there we in essence did that we didn't do it exactly by writing those questions out but we answered them right and of course the people said number one we gotta we gotta bring some pride and dignity back to our nation and we're not beggars we're telltales so we're not going to be beggars in our own land so i said that's great so let's do this so we started to make sure our people were developed along with our resources and today we still have zero unemployment we have the lowest uh welfare statistics in canada probably among among the very top for sure the top five in canada today the only people on welfare are elders and handicapped and and single mothers that unfortunately don't have the training to do stuff but we're even working on that right right what about getting the community on board i mean that's this is a conversation and you know i'm i'm not going to i would i was thinking about coming into this interview that i wanted to ask questions that i know people that i know people have and and i i think you're the right person to answer at least some of them what about getting the community on board and i'm not just talking about canadian indigenous communities or anywhere else in the world if you and develop an environment where people there is high unemployment i'll give an example i have a friend um that when uh communism fell in ukraine he said his parents had a very tough time because all of a sudden they had to go to the bank it was just it was a completely different setup than they were used to there's a whole new economy now that's that's getting developed and when they had they had gotten used to a system how do you get your community and maybe coming back to vision and but i'm very curious how do you get a community if they've been stuck in a place and i don't think telutan's was maybe as severe as some places but if they're stuck in a way of doing something maybe even it's because something's been done to them that's put them in this situation but nevertheless now they're in this situation how do you get the community on board when you've got all this work to do all this preparation all this collaboration that needs to happen which is a long strenuous pro thing to undertake for anyone how do you get everybody on board well the trick is not to try to get everybody on board the trick is you get your leadership on board and then they get the heads of families on board and you start getting those people on board and very soon where the leaders go with they're like the it's like the figurehead on a norseman ship where the where the figurehead goes the body goes and so that's the trick the trick is not to try to get everybody right you you just deal with the people that you think have the influence in the community that'll move this forward right there's only six or seven of us in the nation that started this when i started the telltale nation development corporation started talking about this but the thing was that tel-tan people you see it was only in 1964 when welfare came into the nations and and and i point blank pointed out and i say it all the time that was the ruination of the of the aboriginal people because prior to that every single person who wanted to live had to work and was in my opinion the welfare system that not destroyed the work ethics etc etc of the people because in essence what happened was women could have children and welfare would look after them and then the man in essence was irrelevant except to help make the kid and so so when the tel-tan did this we still had lots of people who came from the era before who were all hard-working people men and women and so when i started talking about jobs and talking about working and whatnot those people got up and when they would say to their grandsons you get off the couch there and you go to work those kids listen right that's what that was the biggest thing for me my biggest help was that we had a generation that was still alive prior to 1964 before the welfare welfare economy welfare system took over and we know now in tel-tan country we broke that welfare culture in the tel-tan nation forever because now it's peer pressure if some young guy isn't working and he goes out to with all these other young guys when they come in from work they say to him how come you're not working yeah no it becomes reversed the culture becomes your your your chastise for not working yeah where's your man how come you're living off your mother and dad what's the matter with you yeah they have nothing to do with you well pretty soon these young guys figured out that they better learn something because we have more training programs and more dollars for training than anybody so it's only you you're the you're the impediment yourself not the not the system not the company not the ban not indian affairs that's you if you don't step up to the plate it's all on you and the young people are not ashamed to say that to their peers yeah i want to point something out it is all on them but leadership has given them a platform that it's not it's not pull yourself up by your bootstraps and walk out to nowhere is pull yourself up the boots by your bootstraps because there's an opportunity that's correct the tel-tan we have our own uh heritage trust fund and the only monies coming out of that is for education any kal-tan person today that has a bona fide legitimate uh of course being university uh apprenticeship forever can apply for up to ten thousand dollars from the tel-tan trust fund per year for five years so in essence there's fifty thousand dollars sitting there for any tel tan by going through these and meeting all the requirements so that's just for education but there's the bc industry training authority i said i said help started the aboriginal apprenticeship board for them i've sat on them for 10 years and just retired a couple years ago from it so there's monies available from them and training programs that we put in place and you know things that we made sure to help aboriginal youth and who and whoever wanted to get into the trades ways to get into the trades and even we even put in prior um experience if you worked as a carpenter for 15 20 years and you just because you don't have journeyman papers you can come there and and after we have uh mentors we have we have people who can who can help you work through this stuff um and then you can go and you can write your exam so you don't have to start that year one for apprentice carpentership right because you got 15 years experience maybe you're at a level three you might even get level four you might be only need to take one more year of of apprenticeship and you got your red seal so i have put those kind of things in place so there's absolutely no reason in my opinion for any young aboriginal person or in fact any young person in canada today to not get the necessary training to enter the workforce because the money is there and then and the programs are in place for them yeah and and if they do them the opportunity yeah the the the jobs are there they're they're there's a real shortage they're looking for people that have i mean i we have we have companies coming on all the time that are looking for skilled labor they're all i'd say every second episode off the camera they're telling me that they're looking for people um one thing another question is uh about leadership is holding them accountable now i i ask this out of ignorance i'm i'm really not sure the in a company if you have a large a large company the size of a community let's say you have people that they're held accountable by doing their job that's they're not they're not coming from a family whereas if you're coming from a community like the tel-10 nation you might the six people you know some of them might be related to each other you've maybe grown up with the person or how do you hold people accountable especially when you get a lot of money coming in that money can uh money can corrupt um you get major decisions that need to be made that can get people at each other there's there's a lot that goes into keeping leadership together how did you approach that well telling a very unique system we have we could trace our whole nation back to eight women okay so we started a family line and since we've been um in the last 50 60 years 70 years integrating marrying into all cultures it doesn't matter we we have every nation almost in the world in our nation bloodline in our nation today we ended up with two extra families we we said they'll be instead of eight we have ten families so every family has a right to pick their spokesperson and those ten people are the board of directors for the tel-tan central government they they are the ones who direct traffic for the tel-tan central government the kel-town central government handles all rights and titles and all all areas outside of the reserves the chief and councils speak and by law their voice ends at the reserve boundary line so we had to have a central government that'll take care of it and so the president of the tel-tan central government works very closely with the two chiefs and then he has to answer to the 10 board of directors he's a vice president and a secretary treasurer also those people are elected the three executive are elected at the general assembly and the ten family members are elected by their own families so that's how the tel-towns operate so if i have a problem i don't go to another family and talk to them about it i just pick up the phone and i talk to to the the my spokesperson and they're always related to me because it's family right so this it just so happens to be my niece so i pick up the phone and i say to my niece i hear this is happening tell me about it i want to know and so and in fact she her job is to have a meeting with with we with our family the attendee family once a month she has to upgrade us as to what's happening in the nation and then if we feel that it's we're a very sophisticated family we have an elder's council if there was 18 children my grandmother and grandfather 18 children that lived so we have 18 elders on that elder's count so one from every family line my mother was the oldest of the azerzah family and the oldest person in the family like my sister is older than i am so she is now the elder representing my personal family wow and so we have a very sophisticated system in the tel tan nation of how to deal with issues and so because you're talking to your own family they can't hide under the bed and say well no i got to talk to somebody else about it that's one of the things i've seen leaders all in my life in aboriginal communities say it at meetings especially big meetings is an important decision to me and say well i got to go back and talk to my people well you can't do that in our nation because i am your people if my niece told me i got to go back talk to my people i would give her a smack inside the head hey wake up you're talking to your people right and that same thing goes with the other family so when they get in the room they talk their they might have 10 different points of view but they talk it out and say what's the best for our nation right and then ultimately what's not best for the stanley family what's best for the nation right but it's above board that the whole point is it's transparent people can see yeah yeah that's that's yeah i'm actually glad you just mentioned that because that's that's the one thing is that you have these leadership you said you know you start with leadership but there's still a transparency so that the and this is something i've you're much better communicating it than me you've probably had a few more years to do it is the importance of of transparency not there's a fine line between everybody sitting there talking at once that's unproductive but if people know the direction even if it's it's amazing how mature a 20 year old can be if they are able to get the information i really think it makes a huge difference especially to a younger generation to be trusted with proper information and proper leadership yeah right yeah my niece is less than about half my age yet she's the spokesperson for our family jerry what about you i want to just pivot away from it a little bit in and going back to the youth and i actually i don't want to make this just about you because i i think there's actually i i don't want to retract that because i think a lot of times people talk about you know major decisions in your life and you know sort of but people do major shifts in their lives when they're older you know there's people that have accomplished unbelievable things in their 80s so i don't want to just make it about youth what are some major decisions in your life personally where you that those left and rights where you you could have gone a completely different area in life um that that just would have taken in in a i guess a worse direction for lack of a better example are there some major decisions that you've made along the way at any age that you thought that was a major moment in my life i could have gone left but i chose to go on right and it got us here got me here got our community here are there those things that stand out sure one of the biggest things was in 30 years old when i quit drinking quit smoking i used to drink a bottle of scotch a day you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day too i don't do either of those and i don't miss either one of them 40 years now over 40 years that was a big decision i used to make my living thinking and i couldn't think anymore because the alcohol was causing problems so i quit i was equipped for other reasons for my family and whatnot because i have four children and wife we've been together for 52 years now so congratulations thing is that was probably one of the biggest decisions and then i went into project management and project development took specialized courses those were big decisions from me because i realized i was tired of working out in 40 below weather in construction and mining so i went into to be a manager as opposed to being a worker um those are big decisions big changes were they were never had to learn to use a computer and i had to learn all of this stuff that's i'm still learning that that's me too is it you know when you when you make a major shift like that you start to learn the management skills you know you put away the boos and was that how many years do you think that took before you sort of again i'm i'm making this a little bit personal for me i see some of the personal decisions i've made and i thought it was going to be a quick change it ends up taking a few years before you sort of recalibrate how you think and how you approach for you how long did it take before you thought you were sort of where you needed to be to really push you know for your family for your community for yourself where you thought when you made those pivotal decisions that you sort of had that edge back or you had a new edge to move forward with for the rest of your life well it took me almost 10 years to to gain the skills to to earn the same kind of money i was making when i was a construction man an underground miner 10 years in management but after that i didn't look back because then i started develop programs and learned how to do that and but it took me at least 10 years so it was over i was over 40 before i really got working in in with tribal councils and with aboriginal bands and you know building things things up and and uh doing business as a business service officer assisting uh first nations start businesses etc etc and individuals and but it was at least 10 15 years before i was really fully comfortable doing it and then i started the telltale nation development corporation in 1985 and then of course i was there until 1996. so it's over 20 years developing that then we did everything we wanted to with that company it was the vehicle that carried the tel-10 nation out of the doldrum we were in and it still carries four today um i need to uh i need to highlight something it's uh it's actually to be completely honest um i i don't know much about the award but i i saw in your bio the queen elizabeth ii diamond jubilee metal um and i i mean that's quite an honor to be to be given um can you talk a little bit about that and how that you know how that even came to be well that came from the mining association of canada uh and pdak [Music] because i worked at alpha i i was a co-founder of the canadian aboriginal minerals association and i was the vice president for 23 and a half years and it was our efforts working with the mining companies to to be talking to aboriginal people i also helped uh it was my from from cama canadian aboriginal mineral association i was the lead liaison when we did the aboriginal toolkit for mining we did it we we released it in 2006 and that year we won the canadian national award for the best aboriginal mind training document in canada and in 2007 that document won the international award from unesco for the best aboriginal mind training document in the world and so those are kind of things that they added up and and they saw what i did with the golden bear and and the next negotiation was with sk mine and how far we had moved the tail tans forward and so on since that was one of the reasons that i received the queen elizabeth diamond jubilee award well it's quite an honor so congratulations for that it really yeah um i want to ask you to sort of turn it on to a another uh a bigger scale of mining in canada um i've i come from a community that has both has had minds go forward around it and has shut down mines do you think communities that i i don't mean specifically indigenous communities um although that's obviously included is do you are our communities it's really taking a long time for minds to get going and and i wonder do you when you see it i'm sure you watch the same news i do and sort of follow some of these stories where is the gap what is happening what is happening either do you see is it a federal issue a local issue is it the minds the way they're approaching it should it take 10 15 years to get a mine going or or should they just are they going into places that they shouldn't be going into like what is your perspective on it because it's a major issue in the mining industry and and it's pulling away the investors out of it they're going into things like tech you know and and just things that just don't take as long to get going it's a major issue so what do you sort of see well i can in my opinion are too many ngos that really uh muddy the waters the galore creek mine [Music] which is just off the stickeen river this uh it's on a river called the scud river um and it's very close within five miles of the stickeen river and the sticking river has five species of salmon and steelhead trout run in it it's an international river so it flows into alaska it has um probably 50 55 feet of snow a year there and so there's probably every potential and also has because there's sulfides in there it has acid generating rock what gives acid generation so you have a problem with potential acid generating waters contamination on and on you probably have every single potential environmental problem you could have and working with when we did the galore project working with nova gold when we would go to a meeting we'd say this is what we see and the alaskans were sitting there the bc government was sitting there and all these people sitting there and we'd say we see these as an issue and we need to have answers for it well within a week we got those answers back and so then we'd call another meeting that that project only took 18 months to receive its environmental certification and so when people say to me you know we have to be three four five years doing this in my opinion somebody's not either not asking the right questions or somebody is not given information in a timely manner right so it's on both sides but with the with the nova gold when we asked for uh we asked questions we wanted information we had it right within a week 10 days we had it and we had another meeting it was like the diving diamond mine diving diamond mine had 257 community meetings but they wrote five agreements four with first nations and one with the new yellowwood and and they they made it work right so it really it's a two-way street if you can ask the right questions and then get the answers for them you can make the serious decisions you don't have to drag it on and on and on and on so that's my opinion my opinion what happens is sometimes in my opinion it's the mining companies that cause their own problems and sometimes it's the people asking the questions of the companies out of the problem yeah so it's it's both ways we didn't try to be cute when we were doing the galore project we asked for we had the chilton heritage environmental assessment team the acronym is threat we have 23 people on that committee and everyone has a different discipline i was on committee as an elder but also on for construction anything to do with roads transmission lines and open pits and we had hydrologists we had biologists we had lawyers we had social workers on there because the social impacts were going to happen and so when we asked questions we weren't trying to be cute we wanted answers so we could mitigate some of the potential problems down the road yeah and the company very quickly answered every one of our questions they didn't try to stall they didn't try to be cute um and at the end of the day it only took 18 months to put that get that ea certificate which is un like almost unheard of nowadays oh that's unheard of you couldn't do that yeah um jerry i you know i you know i appreciate giving our time uh you know we're we're creeping towards the hour here and uh you know i i hope it's not the last time that we we discuss these things um i was curious do people you know if people in other communities are hearing do do you deal directly with with communities still or sort of what's your what's your position if people want some advice or some of your opinion and to take a look at are you actively doing that or or do you have someone that you direct them to how does that work well i started a development the global indigenous development trust to the lawyer business partner sono mode sonia molodecki she's a lawyer by training that is in the mining industry and and uh she was trying to because she was doing a lot of work in south america and latin america she was looking for some model to help move things forward and i had her company had a booth at cama in vancouver and as vice president i was there and i'd meet with all of the people who were sponsoring and who had booths and stuff and we got talking and she realized that this the telltale model could be something that would work so we in essence started the global indigenous development trust and that's why i spoke at cim i mentioned the global indigenous development trust so now we're working with communities and individuals and mining companies around the world doing this and giving them my practical advice and of course heard from the legal side and and stuff that she's learned as well yeah well i hope that uh i so people could get in touch with with you or well well actually off air or i'll get some information where people can either get in touch with her or you or you know because there are i know there are people that want to uh they want to have a better understanding of how they should approach within their community um so so i hope they get in touch with you jerry thank you very much for coming on the show i really appreciate it i i enjoyed talking to you at cim but within that format of course there was you know there's certain topics that were fitting for that environment and so i got so i appreciate you giving me a chance to ask all the other questions i didn't get a chance to ask great okay thank you thank you for inviting me thank you sir okay well thank you uh thank you jerry um gowdy um one of these interviews i don't think the the audience needs a lot to add from me i think jerry pretty much covered it i don't think i'll add a lot of value with my comments so i'm glad he came on he has again i mean it we could give it different examples i mean some of the stories i had my notes of of some of the deals that jerry had put together in that it's yeah we could do three four shows on it um so but gowdy where can people we'll put contact information for jerry but also where can people like follow subscribe to crownsman all right well uh subscribe to our youtube channel we've got tons of new episodes on there um don't forget to share and like of course um you can also contact us info crownsman.com if you would like to be part of one of the shows or you would like to suggest someone to be part of the show yeah that's info crownsman.com thank you very much thank you everybody for watching we will see you on the next episode and we've got quite a few of them coming up of mining now

Channel: Crownsmen Partners

Views: 8,329

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: O5-VhjpCyNQ

Length: 57min 23sec (3443 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021