Garry Merkel of Kimberley has been presented with a King Charles III Coronation Medal.
The Coronation Medal is given to recognize Canadians who've made a difference in their community, provincially or nationally.
When asked how he felt upon hearing he'd received this distinction, Merkel replied: "Well I don’t know, I’m still the same person I was yesterday. What do you do? It’s good, I guess, I’m not really an awards kind of a person."
Merkel also received a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013.
"I’ve worked in a number of fields over the years and I guess I’ve made some difference in a lot of them," he said, of his extensive and diverse career rather modestly.
Merkel, a member of Tahltan First Nation from northwest B.C., is a Registered Professional Forester by trade. He was a lead voice driving the old-growth forest management strategy recently adopted by the B.C. provincial government.
"The Cabinet asked my friend and I to do a review of how we manage our old growth forests in B.C.," Merkel said. "We did that, and made a number of recommendations on how to change our management of forestry systems. They adopted them all, and are implementing them now.
"I am retained as an independent mentor, coach, advisor, facilitator, whatever, to help our province through this, so I guess people enough to trust me to do that job."
Merkel was also instrumental in the creation of Columbia Basin Trust (CBT) in the early 1990s, first working on the committee that negotiated with the Province for the Trust's establishment, and then served as a founding member of the Board. He was then Vice-Chair from 1995 to 2006 and Chair from 2006 to 2012.
He has also worked in depth in changing the way Treaty processes work with the Ktunaxa Nation and has worked with them as an advisor.
He's also had a profound impact on the education system in B.C.
"When we first started working on education my friend led a task force, and it was called a task force on Native Advanced Education, or something like that," he said. "At that time what we found was that one in 20 Aboriginal students, who attended or went to post-secondary school in B.C. actually succeeded, so five per cent."
He explained a friend of his led the charge that would fundamentally change the secondary school system, but they were finding in some areas that the rate of the people who left the school system before getting their Dogwood Diploma was up to 100 per cent.
"You’re dealing with very low potential numbers to start with who would go on, and then only one in 20 of those was actually making it, compared to the provincial average at the time, which was about 78 per cent or so," Merkel said.
"This task force made a bunch of recommendations and then we wrote a strategy out of it. We built a school and showed people how to do it at Nicola Valley Institute of Technology and we changed the education culture in B.C. Right now an Indigenous person who enters post secondary has the same chance — and in some cases, a slightly better chance — than any other student of succeeding.
"I think that was a pretty big deal."
Merkel also developed the Centre of Indigenous Land Stewardship at UBC, where he is the director.
He has received numerous accolades and awards, including the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal, honorary doctorates, including from the University of British Columbia
"In the beginning I always just wanted to do something that would help and make a difference, and over time that has evolved," he said. "My central purpose has become to help people to be able to envision and shape their own futures and give them the tools the are necessary to do that.
"Sometimes that’s in housing. We’ve done some really big stuff in housing, education, or business — I’ve done tons of stuff in business — and whatever. It’s always that same thing. A lot of it is centred around relationships with land and becoming better land stewards."
The land stewardship issue is a complex one, Merkel said, as it involves shifting social paradigms.
"At this moment we’re shifting our whole land stewardship approach in B.C. to one that prioritizes ecosystem health and biodiversity and it’s much more research based and ecologically based," he said. "The problem is we really, really struggle with leadership on this, because the provincial government in particular is a very, very complex beast with a lot of processes."
He said clear leadership and clear champions are needed to change underlining beliefs and implement this huge changes and that while leadership is a problem, it's not due to a lack of good people.
"Often when government changes things, or others where there’s more of a diffuse and not clear vision of leadership, you kind of try to push it on to people and it doesn’t work very well," he said. "You really need to build a common vision and a common ‘this is what we’re doing’ and really focus."
He told a story where he was sitting around a campfire up north with Nellie Cournoyea, the sixth premier of the Northwest Territories, the first female premier of a Canadian Territory and the first Indigenous female premier of a Canadian province or territory.
He asked her how she makes sure all the really hard things get done right.
"Because you know when you dump it into that damned bureaucracy it just gets all messed up every time," he said. "She says, ‘I do ‘em by hand.’ And I went, ‘Ah, smart, that’s a good thing.’ So that’s kind of the way I work too."
Regarding this current award and his many past honours, Merkel said it was never just him who did all these things. There was always a team of people, who he said are all worthy of recognition. He said he will continue trying to make a difference for as long as he can.
"You don’t know if it’s going to last. And that’s kind of the way I see things too," he said. "You don’t know how long it’s going to be before you’re gone or before you turn into a blithering idiot, or whatever. So while you can do it and while you can you just contribute.
"That’s the way it works. And it takes a bunch of people together to make things happen and somebody’s got to be the leader. Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s not, I don’t care, but somebody’s got to be the leader."
