DAN Marion seems unperturbed by the manic dinging of the seat-belt alarm as he drives his black Mercury Marauder around Rae-Edzo, a Dogrib town an hour west of Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. He likes the racket, he says, “because I keep thinking I’m gonna win the jackpot at the casino slot machines.” In many ways you could say he is already cashing in. With a cigarette permanently dangling from his lower lip, Marion excitedly points out the symbols of new-found wealth in this community of 2,000. Rows of sleek new half-ton vehicles idle in front of homes and stores while teenagers driving the latest-model snowmobile whiz across front yards and onto a nearby lake to practice figure eights.
The most telling signs of the town’s changing fortunes, however, are the homes. Streets of aging government-issue bungalows, disparagingly referred to as Welfare Row, are now overshadowed by an upscale, tree-lined subdivision aptly named Diamond Row. These brand-new homes are the first in Rae-Edzo to have mortgages and they are owned by band members who work at one of the two diamond mines to have started up operations in the Territories over the last six years.
The affluence is an obvious source of pride to Marion, a veteran of thirty years in the north whose expletive-studded vernacular still betrays traces of his French-Canadian roots in Manitoba’s Red River Valley. Known as K’awi K’awo, or “The Boss” in Dogrib, a title he earned while managing the local Hudson’s Bay trading post, Marion went on to become a three-time mayor of Rae and commissioner of the Territories before taking on his current position as manager of the Dogrib Nation Group of Companies, the band’s economic-development arm and vanguard of its newly emerging financial might.
The group manages fourteen subsidiaries, including the only Aboriginal-run hydroelectric dam in Canada and the Territories’ sole private airport. Its first serious plunge into the business world, however, came with the advent of diamonds. Under special impact-benefit agreements reached with the two mines, both of which are located on traditional Dogrib lands, the corporation was given multi-million-dollar service contracts to haul ore, provide on-site sewage and road maintenance, and hire personnel.
While profits are still meagre, more than 250 band members in Rae-Edzo are now employed, either through the corporation or directly by the mines. Marion estimates that welfare rolls have been cut in half, from eighty to forty percent. Many who once squeaked by on $10,000 a year in social assistance are now earning annual salaries of anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000. “It has fundamentally changed what they want out of life,” Marion says.
Aboriginal people in the Northwest Territories make up half its population of around 44,000, but until now, they have remained largely outside its rich mining economy. Only a handful has ever worked in the two gold mines whose shafts burrow deep below the streets of Yellowknife. In the past, Native business was limited to supplying miners with meat, wood, and moccasins.
The current change in their prospects can be traced to a quiet political and social revolution headed by leaders such as Stephen Kakfwi, the Native-born former premier, who succeeded in wresting significant financial benefit from the mines despite wielding limited legislative power in the federally administered territory. Kakfwi’s term ended last December, but he’s still coy when asked how his government was able to exact aboriginal hiring “targets” as well as education and training commitments from the mining companies.
“You have to walk into the room like you own the place. And I own this place,” he adds with a flash of defiance. “I own the north and I don’t give a rat’s ass what [the federal government] says. It belongs to my people.”
For the Dogrib (a tribe of the Dene nation), a timely settlement of their land claims last year proved to be a particularly lucrative bargaining chip. The three thousand-member band will receive $152 million over the next fifteen years and a percentage of territorial resource royalties as a part of a federal agreement combining a land settlement with self-governance. It also collected $1.3 million in private deals struck with Ekati, the first diamond mine, and another $1.4 million from the second, Diavik, says John B. Zoe, the Dogrib’s chief claims negotiator. The band will use the money to shore up its financial might, and is investing $600,000 a year in a scholarship fund that is currently paying for a hundred and fifty students to attend post-secondary institutions. “It’s all been very timely,” Zoe acknowledges. “It’s a new era.”
The first glimmerings of this new era can be traced back to two single-minded prospectors from British Columbia, Chuck Fipke and Stewart Blusson. In the 1980s, Fipke, who had spent years prospecting in remote mining backwaters from Papua New Guinea to Brazil, became convinced the Northwest Territories was prime diamond property.
