A new cafe serves up hope at Maskwacis First Nation
Training, skills development, entrepreneurship also on menu
After graduating from high school at 17, Tia Omeasoo spent two years sitting around her parents’ home, afraid to get on with her life.
But an entrepreneur and work skills program at Maskwacis First Nation has put the shy 19-yearold into a different head space. Ten weeks of waiting tables at the new Nipsis Cafe and Collective, on the lower floor of the Samson Cree band office, has taught her more than how to make coffee and roll silverware into napkins. It’s given her the confidence to think about the bigger world, and her place in it.
“When I first came here, I had no experience. I had never had an actual job,” says Omeasoo. “I didn’t know how to waitress, or talk to people or put myself out there.
“Doing a big table used to scare me, but now I can talk openly and freely ...”
The Nipsis Cafe, which opened at the end of 2015, is a bright spark at Maskwacis, a community of 13,000 located an hour south of Edmonton comprising the First Nations of Samson Cree, Ermineskin, Montana and Louis Bull. The newly renovated space, which replaces a tired eatery, sports stylish decor, an art gallery and a gift shop. Comfort food is on order, aboriginal style.
Nipsis means willow in Cree. Tall stands of the white-barked branches divide the cafe’s seating space from a comfortable lounge area. Cream-coloured, canvas, teepee-shaped light fixtures hang above the tables. Black and white historical photos of First Nations people from Maskwacis dot the walls, along with prints and paintings by local artists.
Open from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., the cafe caters to locals, and hopes to keep them spending their money on reserve, rather than turn to Ponoka or Wetaskiwin for dining choices. The menu was created by a professional chef and features dishes such as Wild Game Burger on a Bannock Bun, and the all-day, Strongbow Breakfast.
“I like the atmosphere and I like that it’s here in Samson, and it’s very elegant and something you would see in a metropolitan area,” says customer Suzanne Life, a director at Montana First Nation, as she tucks in to a plate of eggs and toast one recent morning.
The cafe’s general manager, Heather MacTaggart, is pleased by the positive response of customers, although she notes that the menu has already changed in the few short months the cafe has been open.
“At first, our first menu featured more healthy food, but then we had to realize that wasn’t what people wanted to eat,” says MacTaggart, with a wry smile.
MacTaggart, from Toronto and not native, is executive director of a company called Classroom Connections, which runs an educational program called Change it Up. She’s been living and working among aboriginal Albertans for most of the last seven years, bringing Change It Up — her innovative training, skills development and entrepreneurship program — to challenged native communities in northern Alberta, from Maskwacis to Chipewyan Prairie First Nation.
Samson band director Patrick Buffalo is frank when asked what a white woman from Toronto is doing running a program on reserve.
“If we had somebody that could do what she is doing, it would have been done years ago,” says Buffalo, noting the project has the full support of the band’s leadership. “She comes from the outside world with people skills that are a little bit foreign to the nation.”
Buffalo says some residents of Maskwacis are “challenged at a skill level.” “It’s all about skill development.” Without skills, aboriginal people can’t get jobs. In 2015, a report from the National Aboriginal Economic Development Board found that between 2006 and 2011, the percentage of First Nations people on reserve over the age of 15 who had a job fell to 35.4 per cent from 39 per cent. The employment rate in Canada overall at that same time fell to 61.8 per cent, from 62.8 per cent.
Another challenge to job success is education. Among First Nations people aged 20-24 living on reserves in 2011, 58 per cent were high school dropouts. The Change It Up program targets dropouts of all ages, and aims to re-engage learning, albeit outside a traditional classroom setting. The program emphasizes entrepreneurial skills so trainees could start their own small businesses, or get a job, on or off reserve.
For participants, running the cafe is just another vehicle for learning, says Buffalo.
“And it happened that the lease was expiring for the cafeteria, and it was an ideal time to take the lease back at the nation level,” he says.
Twenty participants joined the first, six-month-long intake of Change It Up in September 2015, doing the groundwork to open the cafe in December. Now, new students enter on a continuous basis.
Change It Up participants did all the work to renovate the cafe, gutting the previous space, and then painting and polishing the 95-seat space (which is open to special events in the evenings) to professional standards. One stu- dent, Ricky Buffalo, had never done woodwork before, but crafted an impressive wood-framed couch with a carved wooden eagle’s head as its armrest.
The Samson Cree band and the Wetaskiwin Home Building Centre contributed $18,000 in cash and in kind to the renovation, including an upgraded kitchen. Change It Up paid for the professional staff to kick the cafe off, including hiring a chef to create the menu, plus a cook and front-of-house staff member to keep it going. On a good day, 70 customers come through the door. A slow day sees 20. About 100 will eventually be necessary for the project to be sustainable.
“It’s a social enterprise,” says MacTaggart. “We’re building, looking to build customers and generate financial support. Eventually, we’d like to expand to catering, or a food truck.”
Students are paid a training allowance to participate for five to eight months. Some participants have gone on to part-time work in restaurants in Ponoka or Wetaskiwin.
MacTaggart says that in the last five years, over 30 students from Change It Up have gone on to full or part-time employment within their own businesses, which include home-based sewing and alterations, and a owning a tow truck.
Former Samson Cree band councillor Derek Bruno is a successful entrepreneur with a Master’s degree who serves as a mentor to MacTaggart and the Nipsis Cafe.
He has his fingers crossed the business will take off.
“What Heather provides is hope,” says Bruno. “Hope is the most powerful thing in a depressed community like Samson.”
Born on Maskwacis, Bruno couldn’t find a job on reserve. So at the age of 21, he opened a convenience store to create his own opportunity. Now 38, he owns Cree Convenience in Maskwacis, plus the Chester’s Chicken franchise and other businesses off-reserve, including a steel manufacturer. He credits his success, in part, to his family. His dad was a hard worker.
Bruno says challenges to entrepreneurial spirit on reserve are many. For one thing, a complex bureaucracy at the band level and at the federal government level makes it hard to obtain space to open a business. It’s also tough to access capital. Often native entrepreneurs can only get loans through alternative lenders, specializing in high-risk loans at high interest rates. Daycare for working parents is also scarce — another barrier to employment.
Other issues, like transportation, get in the way of job success, says Leiha Crier, who was raised on Maskwacis and is an instructor in the Change It Up program. Many reserve folk don’t have a driver’s licence, making it hard to get from far-flung country homes to the Nipsis Cafe. Addictions and mental health issues can keep people from showing up for work from time to time.
“But we have a lot of people who are motivated to change that,” says Crier, 40, who owns a cab company and a cleaning company on reserve.
Her goal as an instructor is to get people off government assistance, which supports 54 per cent of First Nation people living on reserve in Canada. Getting a job working for someone else is good, but creating your own business can have a wider impact. Entrepreneurship is key to getting an economy going at Maskwacis, says Crier.
“Until we address that as an issue, we’ll continue to have the poverty and social issues,” she says.
Tia Omeasoo is one of Crier’s students. After her shift in the Nipsis Cafe, she heads upstairs to a classroom in the band office, where Crier coaches students on business basics.
“She teaches us how to market and advertise,” says Omeasoo, who comes from a family of eight children. “She gave us homework to do, making business cards, Facebook pages or Instagram.”
Eventually, Omeasoo hopes to become a bartender, and perhaps to open her own lounge. She’s also interested in becoming a freelance makeup artist and has been teaching herself techniques by watching YouTube videos.
Far from being terrified of the real world outside her home, Omeasoo now looks forward to work.
“I like talking to people now. I like getting to interact with them and making them laugh,” she says.