First Nation has big plans for former tree nursery
Plans for site near Indian Head include campground, hemp farm, culture centre
INDIAN HEAD, SASK. You can’t really miss seeing them when you drive across the Prairies — straight rows of dense, dark-green trees, positioned as if someone had thrown up a tall, thick wall in the middle of a field.
Perhaps less obvious is their starting place, a former century-old tree nursery that Stephen Harper’s Conservative government shuttered in 2012, citing budget cuts and touting purported interest from the private sector to keep its purpose alive.
But eight years later, that purpose — giving farmers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba hardy trees to protect their homes and their livelihoods from brutal Prairie winds — has withered and died.
Yet the legacy is obvious: In the 111-year history of the Agroforestry Development Centre, it provided 610 million trees to the three Prairie Provinces.
Also known as shelterbelts, those rows of trees — pine, spruce, caragana, maple, ash, poplar — were essential protection for farmers as they settled and cultivated land after the Canadian government starved the Great Plains’ Indigenous peoples off of it.
The 640-acre site (measuring one square mile) is still there, about 70 kilometres east of Regina, south of Indian Head off the Trans-canada Highway.
Now, Saskatchewan’s Carry the Kettle Nakoda Nation owns the land, after buying it in 2016 from Ottawa for $1.5 million through a Treaty Land Entitlement (TLE) process. It’s eyeing business development there while honouring the legacy its five total managers, employees and summer students helped build.
“We’re looking right now at secured employment, a long-term business adventure,” said property manager Howard Adams. “It’s not ‘let’s try this.’ It’s ‘let’s know that this is going to go through.’ ”
He says Carry the Kettle wants to adopt a business-oriented approach.
“What better place to be than off the Number 1 Highway? No one likes to travel in their nice, brand-new Cadillacs when they’re going to make a business deal when they’re travelling country roads. We’ve got the nice, paved road,” he said of the site’s location.
It’s now called Carry the Kettle Administration Office and Property; the First Nation is using the site’s former admin office as its own temporary one, while it rebuilds a permanent office on its original reservation land, north of Indian Head.
Long-term, Carry the Kettle plans to make the site a multi-purpose one, Adams says. Likely business investments include a 200site campground, a hemp-growing venture to possibly extract cannabidiol (CBD) and an interactive cultural-theatre centre to showcase the community’s traditions and the tree nursery’s legacy.
The First Nation hopes the short, two-kilometre detour south of the Trans-canada Highway will be a good tourist draw; Adams suggests it’s a good chance to showcase powwow dancers to passersby.
He says former forestry centre employees, who are Carry the Kettle
members, planted the seeds for those ideas.
Former manager Gord Howe recalls a steady contingent of Carry the Kettle members working at the site up until he retired in 1998. They were as troubled as he was when the feds shut it down in 2012.
“It wasn’t just people from town that were upset. I had people from CTK (Carry the Kettle) here (saying), ‘What can I do? What are you going to do? What are these politicians thinking ?’ ” Howe said.
They “gave the idea of the campground and putting on the shows and the history of this place,” Adams said.
It will be more demanding for the First Nation to accomplish the same goals as what Howe and fellow former manager Bruce Neill did when they oversaw the site.
By Adams’ estimation, Carry the Kettle is employing 50 people for work there; 25 are actually on site, while 25 are at the First Nation’s reserve land. Neill says when he managed the government-funded operation from 1998 to 2011, employment peaked at 115 people, if summer students were included in the count. Howe recalls times during his managerial tenure they delivered 12 million trees per year to farmers.
Lacking the same people- and machine-power, Carry the Kettle has exceeded his expectations in just maintaining the property, Howe says, considering the feds left little useful equipment after they and a one-year lessee were done with it after 2014. He says his and Neill’s staff had regular use of 10 tractors and a giant undercutting machine to safely remove trees and sever their underground root systems.
“Carry the Kettle is left holding the bag and the politicians screwed us around as usual,” Howe said. He recalls how Andrew Scheer, the area’s then- and current-mp, was mum on the site’s closure. As Howe sees it, then-agriculture minister Gerry Ritz proved equally inept.
Adams acknowledges that operating a tree nursery at the same scale as the centre had been run for 111 years isn’t doable. But he says Carry the Kettle will devote a quarter section of the land, 160 acres, to a similar purpose — planting, growing and selling trees to land owners that need them.
“Seeing it be productive and seeing the growth, it’s hard to see it fail, because you have past managers that are there” to help as guides, he said, giving a nod to Howe’s and Neill’s work as the last two tree nursery managers.
“We as white and native, we both have that concept: The older you get you keep on helping the younger ones.”
Neill wished the First Nation “the best of luck.” He hopes Carry the Kettle or perhaps a future business partner will revive some sort of tree-planting operation.
“A tree-planting program that is not just for forestry and forests is an important thing; that could happen in the agricultural landscape of Canada," he said. “But where that leadership is, I really don’t know.” Evan Radford is the Leader-post’s reporter under the Local Journalism Initiative
Seeing it be productive and seeing the growth, it’s hard to see it fail, because you have past (nursery) managers that are there (to help as guides).