A Forestry alumnus who grew up in a small village on Vancouver Island has received the Joint Venture Business of the Year Award on behalf of Ts’elxwéyeqw Tribal Management, a Chilliwack-based management services provider owned by seven First Nations communities.
Matt Wealick, BSF’01 and RPF, accepted the award at the BC Aboriginal Business Awards on December 5, 2013, in Vancouver. As the Chief Operating Officer of Ts’elxwéyeqw Tribal Management, Matt oversees 6 businesses with the support of 9 core and up to 10 part-time staff. The company manages 5 forest licenses: two of its own and 3 belonging to other First Nations.
Matt’s interest in forestry started young, growing up in the small community of Sayward on central Vancouver Island. “My dad, my stepdad, and many of my mom’s siblings worked at MacMillan Bloedel,” he says. “When I was a kid, I thought logging trucks and machinery were pretty cool. So when I was old enough to work inthe summer, I started at a shake block company.”
Matt’s path to UBC wasn’t a direct one, however. “I went to the University of Saskatchewan for a year, studying physiotherapy” he says. “But I realized I didn’t have the connections in the field that would allow me to have a good career. And after I spent a summer doing forest engineering work, I knew I had to go to UBC.”
After graduation, working with Lennard Joe, BSc NRC ’97 and a fellow BC Aboriginal Business Award recipient, gave Matt a more solid grounding in Aboriginal forest management. With 2 years of varied consulting work under his belt, Matt struck out on his own and worked with major forestry companies as a consultant for several years.
In 2005, just after Matt received his RPF, he was asked to apply for the newly created forest manager position with the Ts’elxwéyeqw Tribe in Chilliwack, his tribal home. “I had been sending the chief a letter once a year for many years, suggesting that the tribe get into forestry,” he says. “For a long time, the answer was always ‘no thanks’. But that year the answer was ‘yes’.
Matt embraced the opportunity to build a forest company from the ground up. He became involved in every aspect of forestry, as well as areas that aren’t in the typical RPF scope of practice, like Aboriginal rights and title, traditional and cultural use, and capacity building. An example of this is the Qwō:qwel website, which gives members of Ts’elxwéyeqw Tribe communities a way to voice their opinions about Kinder Morgan’s proposed pipeline expansion.
Matt sits on the Faculty of Forestry First Nations Council of Advisors where, he says, “our main objective is to encourage more Aboriginal students to become interested in forestry. We give input on the needs of industry – there are lots of great opportunities out there — and suggest ways to add Aboriginal content to the curriculum,” he says. “When you graduate from UBC and get a job working for a First Nation, you can be managing a forest license right out of the gate. It’s an amazing experience.”
He adds, “My time at UBC as a student was great, and I appreciate the opportunity to give back”.
Matt is also a Director and the Aboriginal Committee Chair of the Truck Loggers Association, where he develops relationships between small licensees and contract loggers, and First Nations. “I see my role as making connections between First Nations and the forestry industry,” he says.
From Branchlines Spring 2014