About every two weeks Wendy Drummond makes the long drive from Victoria to the end of a logging road 80 clicks north of Fort. St. James, in the thick of B.C.’s northern wilderness.

The land of snow-peaked mountains and glacial valleys is far from anywhere, but Drummond and her Royal Roads University project are opening new worlds for the Yekooche people. It’s helping lay the groundwork for Yekooche self-governance, and if successful, could be a model for dozens of communities across the province.

In the village, Drummond oversees the community learning centre, a series of computer work stations where Yekooche members develop projects and build skills.

“The Yekooche are closing the gap in preparation for self-governance,” Drummond says. “We are helping prepare them for the post-treaty environment.”

The Yekooche are in the final stage of treaty negotiations with the federal and provincial governments. In 2006, Yekooche and RRU signed an agreement to establish an e-learning centre as the basis for skills training, set up and supported by RRU’s centre for teaching and educational technologies (CTET) and IT department.

Two short years later, the centre is a hub of learning. Yekooche youth and young adults are developing business plans around language preservation, traditional clothing and a hunting guide company. A few dozen are earning their dogwoods online. The provincial government committed almost $100,000 for Drummond to guide advanced projects for another year.

“Yekooche elders have never seen so much involvement of young people,” she says. “They are excited and passionate about what they are doing.”

Drummond, 52, is no stranger to travelling far and wide. Three years ago she’d regularly make the long journey to Tehran, Iran, to support RRU’s MBA program.

“Doing 32 hours of travel to Tehran makes the drive (to Yekooche) a piece of cake,” she says.

She works for the CTET at RRU but is also using the project as her master’s thesis. As part of the funding, she’s detailing the project in a report to the Ministry of Advanced Education.

“The Ministry of Advanced education want a document because they are seeing things (with Yekooche) they haven’t seen in other projects,” she says. “It’s all about taking disengaged youth and re-engaging them with learning. Traditional education just hasn’t worked for them.”

Now local people are trained in the technology and management of running such a facility, which is entirely the point. Her job is to get to the point where she’s no longer needed.

“My goal is to step further and further back and encourage them to step forward. I don’t know what my role will look like next March. The next six months is all about building the resiliency of the community.”

Agencies such as Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and the provincial Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation are watching the Yekooche project with interest. Other First Nations communities too are interested in the RRU model, but Drummond says it’s still to early to know how well it works.

“It’s hard for other communities to know if this will fit,” she says. “I can document it and get it out there, but it could be a model based on a philosophy rather than something out of a box.”

editor@goldstreamgazette.com