The South Island Indigenous Authority Society was officially registered in B.C. on January 24, 2019. While the work of regaining control over child and family services for our Nations has been ongoing, it is interesting to reflect on entering the fifth year of work under the name of SIIA.
As we enter 2023 we intend for our work to become more visible to the communities. A part of that visibility is our community engagement team (Margaret Charlie, Shana Sylvester, Jenna Lancaster, and Chris Jim) who are gearing up to re-enter the communities after a slow time with Longhouse and the holiday season. Another part is this website, which Erica Pepevnak has worked hard to make more current and more topical. We also hold our hands up to Bryan McCrae, who designed and maintains the site from his home on Gabriola Island. To quote Bryan, “Thank you so much for the space to be apart of something so special and so important…“.
SIIA has had a great relationship with the UVic School of Law and their Joint Indigenous Degree Program. We have had a great partnership with Dr. Sarah Morales from the faculty, and are now incorporating our eighth student from the school in our contractor team. Paula Rasmussen started with SIIA part time over the holiday period and will continue with us through her spring term at UVic, becoming full time during the school summer term (May through August). These emerging professionals always add both learning and enthusiasm to our team.
We held the Annual General Meeting for SIIA in December. We took the opportunity to amend our Society Bylaws with our legal firm consulting with Chair Bruce Underwood about how we could make them more aligned with our Indigenous culture. We are pleased to have accommodated culture to a degree within a very bureaucratic process. Much of our Executive remained the same, although the sad passing of Chief Allan Tom from Pauquachin, who was our Vice-Chair, meant that position was vacant. Now, rather than using the terms “Chair” and “Vice Chair”, our new titles in leadership are Speaker and Vice Speaker. So our new executive for the coming year for SIIA is: Bruce Underwood, Speaker; Chief Gordon Planes, Vice Speaker; Kendra Gage, Treasurer; and Ron Rice, Secretary. I raise my hands to their continuing commitment to our children, families, communities, and organization.
Because SIIA is carrying on a long process of community engagement and consultation, begun well before SIIA was created, we want to place our role in the longer context of the communities’ quest to reclaim control over child and family services. One way we will be doing that is through graphic representations of what we have learned historically from each community. We will be finished that work soon, and at that point we will share the information with each community. A draft graphic is shown below:
Our team at SIIA is enthusiastic, committed, and excited to be serving their communities. We know 2023 will be a very significant year. We shall see you in your community.
Hysh’ka Siem / Kleco Kleco
Chuck Eamer, Interim Executive Director, South Island Indigenous Authority