Salt River First Nation woman honoured as entrepreneurial icon

A woman from Salt River First Nation was honoured with the RBC Entrepreneurial Icon Award at the recent Pow Wow Pitch Indigenous Entrepreneur Awards.

Tanya Tourangeau, or Eagle Feather Woman, is the founder of Tanya T Consulting, a firm based in Edmonton, which helps governments, non-profit organizations and companies to implement reconciliation.

“When they first told me I won the award I was like, it’s fantastic,” Tourangeau told Cabin Radio from New Zealand, where she presented at the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education.

“To be a northern girl, people used to call me a sauvage in my twenties because treaty people weren’t respected,” she said, using the French for ‘savage.’

“Now, to have a national bank hold me up as an icon, is so far from the level of sauvage.

“I’m incredibly proud and I just want to share it with the world.”

Tourangeau said she aims to help non-Indigenous people find their way in reconciliation and understand there is a strong business case for reconciliation that can result in win-wins.

“That’s needed because we’re not charity,” she said.

“We need to be treated with equity in so many ways, in banking and insurance and employment and investments. Finally, we’re overcoming more than the title, that we actually get to walk side by side with non-Indigenous people on our land.”

Tourangeau’s recent work has included developing a reconciliation roadmap for the City of Yellowknife.

“This is a critical time for that,” Tourangeau said, pointing to the northern economy shifting away from diamond mines, and Indigenous peoples are positioned “to have a part of that win-win and also build on their strengths because we have many businesses that we want to pair up with.”

“For me, Yellowknife’s a start for that,” she said. “Then it’s the rest of Canada to follow through and show that’s possible.”

Tourangeau said she is pushing for more businesses to consider reconciliation. She hopes that having a reconciliation plan or Indigenous engagement plan will become a requirement to get a business licence.

“Then it becomes a norm, it’s not optional,” she said.

She added she wants to help businesses see that procurement can be 100-percent reconciliation.

Tourangeau said she became a mother as a teenager and had to come through a lot of challenges and hardships to get where she is today. She wants young Indigenous northerners to know it’s possible to overcome the barriers they face.

“There’s people out there that are willing to support you, there’s programs,” she said.

She also encouraged people to think about returning home and working in the North.

“I work with the City of Yellowknife now, making changes that I want to see,” she said, “and that hopefully would fan out to also affect other youth in their future.”

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