A key note presentation from Jess Housty at the Indigenous Economics Conference, June 10-12, 2021

This video and blog is part of a series sharing the themes from ICA's "Reclaiming the Sacred" Indigenous Economics online conference held June 10-12 2021. This conference was held in partnership with the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics.

In this discussion, Jess Housty opened her address by asking the audience to believe in abundance, gratitude, generosity, and reciprocity.  She shared stories of her community’s efforts to exercise values that are reflective of Haiłzaqv culture, law, and knowledge. As executive director of the Qqs Projects society, Jess gave context and background to her work and the community’s work to build a “generation raised on love.”

The organization, Qqs, has existed since 1989 and began at behest of hereditary leadership. They recognized there was deep intergenerational trauma and pain in community showing up through complex social and cultural dynamics.  The priority was getting youth and families back on land, back on territory, and back to each other; hereditary leadership wanted dedicated capacity focused on addressing that. The organization Qqs was envisioned and came into being. They focus their attention on activities requested by the community: 

• Culture and language

• Literacy 

• Land based education and healing

• Stewardship 

• Storytelling

• Scientific research and monitoring  

The pandemic created unique opportunities for the community to come together and support each other economically to address everyday needs. During the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020, these programs couldn’t run, so they shifted food security into a decentralized network of people growing food at their own homes. Qqs provided planters, soil, seeds, advice, and video tutorials where needed. The network grew from 40 households to140 households. The term the community prefers is “Granny Gardeners”—this is a group of decentralized food growers whose effort honours the deep matriarchal knowledge, based on knowledge of plant systems and the environment, that has carried the people through dark times.

Jess shared other aspects of her community’s experiences, including the initiatives to ensure connection to homeland and culture. When developing services and programs to serve Indigenous communities, her collective experience reflects some best practices:

• Zero barrier must be the goal, no barrier has to be the minimum. Make offerings accessible to people; barriers are for colonizers. 

• No one but the community can determine what success looks like. We define success metrics that prove we are worth investing in. Our people deserve investments, and they are inherently worth it. (e.g., high school graduation rates do not tell the full story of a person’s potential.  We can customize what success looks like for every single person in community.)

• Nobody gets to define success but us, we define it with our participants. It’s a lot of work to push back on standards of external funders. In terms of measuring success, we know it’s working because we are here, in relationship.  This is a hard thing to push but we need to be firm on that. 

• Trust is critical. We want to earn the trust of our community, we want to demonstrate that we will show up. Unbearable intergenerational trauma makes it critical for us to feel safe. That’s something you can’t measure in a one-year grant or short-term program. Trust is built over generations and has applications in every sector. If you are not building trust, you are not building anything that is enduring.

What You Can Do: 

In closing, Jess asked the audience to consider three things:

How does the work that you do imagine economies beyond capitalism and colonialism? 

How do abundance, gratitude, generosity, and reciprocity show up in your personal and professional spaces? 

What values inform your practices? 

Speaker biography:

Cúagilákv (Jess Housty). Jess is a mother, writer, and land-based educator from the Haiłzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation. She is the Executive Director of Qqs (Eyes) Projects Society, a Haiłzaqv charitable non-profit focused on land-based cultural programming for youth and families. She has a background in community organizing and recently completed 2 terms on Haiłzaqv Tribal Council where she championed the Haiłzaqv Lands Portfolio. She lives in her unceded ancestral homelands in Bella Bella, BC.