Environmental engineering student Emily Quecke says a summer working with the Beaver First Nation had a profound impact on her education.
It might have been the best summer job ever.
Emily Quecke, who is in the fourth year of her environmental engineering degree, spent her summer working with the Beaver First Nation, lending her engineering experience to the band as it navigates through land use and settlement issues with industry and government.
The Beaver First Nation as a lands and consultation fellow for the Beaver First Nation in northern Alberta.
As a student in the engineering co-op program, Quecke worked completed a co-op placement working for the Beaver First Nation as a summer Fellow with Engage North. Founded and based at the University of Alberta, Engage North is a national initiative bringing remote communities and Canada's universities together.
Over the summer, Quecke used her engineering skills to conduct surveys as part of a land settlement process, helped map and report on land uses and land the band has stopped using as a result of development, and assessed forestry resources as part of ongoing consultations the band is having with a logging company. She even drew upon her knowledge of gravel pit operations that she gained during a previous co-op placement in assessing a proposed gravel operation.
The four-month placement gave her an insider's view of how small and remote communities deal with development and, in the case of First Nations communities, with government.
"I want to be a very conscientious and well-rounded professional," she said. "This experience has helped me so much, by giving me a first-hand perspective of issues that intersect first nations and engineering."
In the forestry sector, Quecke helped facilitate meetings for the logging company's forestry management plan. This included a good deal of research.
"There are different projects starting up in the area so I was busy getting information from the community about for traditional land use for hunting, trapping, foraging-all of that. We were using it to create a land-use secretariat map to indicate areas that are sacred and need to be protected," she said.
The research, at times, included cultural and historic education about the band.
"I was doing some GPS work getting the co-ordinates of an unmarked burial sites to get that area protected by Alberta Culture," she recalled. "We went out with a couple of elders and their grandfather was buried there. One of them told us his grandfather was a cousin of Louis Riel's.
"The history that the elders shared was phenomenal. It was an amazing, emotional and interesting experience."
She also helped with an ongoing land settlement process. The band is engaging engineers of a variety of disciplines to help them choose land that will meet their traditional and economic needs.
"It's a very sensitive issue," she said. "The trust that was given to me in being a part of that was humbling and it was an honour to help. Being part of the process offered me a totally new side of consultation engineering that I haven't seen before. I can potentially become an advocate for First Nations issues from the perspective of giving them the support of my professional knowledge."
As a former instructor with the Faculty of Engineering's DiscoverE outreach program, Quecke also helped run a summer engineering camp for kids and youth when her DiscoverE colleagues showed up for a week.
As part of her duties with Engage North, Quecke is now creating a report that will help support next year's Engage North fellows.