‘Reconciliation economy’: Why Indigenous founders need more access to capital

globalnews.ca:

Aaron Joe has been an entrepreneur on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast for 25 years.

He got his start extracting minerals from the earth as a mining contractor, but roughly a decade and a half ago he started to change his perspective on the kind of impact he would like make.

“I wanted to do something a little more that aligned with our values as Indigenous people,” Joe tells Global News. “And I thought, ‘I can help make a change in forestry.’”

Today, Joe is the CEO of Salish Soils, a company operating out of the Sechelt First Nation that takes waste from the B.C. area and repurposes it into soils and compost for farmers and landscapers. He says he sees this as a way of “reclaiming our territory.”

Joe and his business partners have scaled the company up from four people to 36 employees over the past 14 years, all starting from a “shoestring budget.” He says it took a while to find Salish Soils’ first major investor, someone who believed in the company’s vision of “sustainability and economic reconciliation.”

Exclusion from traditional capital sources has been a historic challenge for First Nations, Inuit and Métis entrepreneurs — particularly those living on reserve — who are looking to start and scale up companies, according to Indigenous company founders and business leaders who spoke to Global News.

Indigenous founders say that improving access to capital for startup businesses and for communities looking to shape their own economic fates is critical to achieving meaningful reconciliation.

Many of the barriers facing Indigenous entrepreneurs date back to the Indian Act — historic legislation first enacted in 1876 that established the reserves system in Canada alongside other policies aimed at the assimilation of