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The New CCO podcast from Page tells stories that explore the evolution of the CCO. From culture change to digital transformation to corporate purpose, we focus on the issues that matter to today's communications leaders.
Page is the world’s premier membership organization for chief communications officers, PR agency CEOs and educators who seek to enrich the profession and improve corporate reputation management.
Eliot (00:00):
This week in the United States, people are observing Indigenous People's Day a holiday that until fairly recently was most commonly called Columbus Day. It's rare that a day of observance gets a rebrand, and just as with any rebrand, the change is deeper than the name itself. It calls upon us to think, speak, and act differently. In Canada, where we just had our 2023 page annual conference, they had just observed their National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, commonly known as Orange Shirt Day, a national movement to reckon with the horrors of the Canadian Indian Residential School System. It was against this backdrop that we held a panel discussion titled on Racism, inclusion, and Reconciliation, breaking Barriers through Partnerships. It features Michael Jacobs, the c e o, and Chairman of Cambium Indigenous Professional Services, Dahabo Ahmed-Omer, executive Director of the Black North Initiative, and moderated by page member Cheryl Battles of Pitney Bowes. We bring you one of these voices from the panel, Michael Jacobs, whose company seeks to improve the indigenous economy in Canada through knowledge exchanges, cross-cultural capacity, building efforts and technical excellence. Beyond being a leader on these issues, he's also experienced them himself. We hope you value his advice on how best to communicate with these underrepresented stakeholders and demonstrate a sincere commitment to First Nations people, Aboriginal or Native Americans. I'm Elliot Mizrahi, and this is the new C c o.
Eliot (01:35):
Rivett 360 has been working with Paige to bring you the new c c o for more than six years, and that goes way beyond just editing and production. They're true thought partners, helping us develop our show's unique voice and identity, brainstorm ideas and tell well riveting stories. To me, that's what makes them and our show so special. They're storytellers, first and foremost, and as communicators, I know we can all appreciate the value of a story well told. So if you're thinking about launching a podcast or you have one that needs some fresh ideas, visit rivett three sixty.com to book a free consultation.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
My name's Mike Jacobs. I'm a member of The Curve Lake First Nation. And when you looked and when you thought, and when you, I want you to think about what was communicated when I walked on stage on a subject about racism, inclusion, right? What's, what's he doing up here? I come from a family of chiefs. My grandfather was a chief. My father was a chief. And the way the world is changing is changing, especially for indigenous people. As the Indian Act in Canada sort of, uh, runs its course right as we are assimilated, as those types of things happen, we're starting to talk about a communication issue with our people and how you communicate with our people and being the indigenous people of Canada or First Nation people, which I'll speak to as well. Quickly, I just wanted to sort of let you know that, that that's something I'm conscious of.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Walking up here. I saw the title and I was like, do I allow that? Right? Do I feel that I can speak on racism? And it's amazing how many of my large family, uh, I've watched and how many times it's come across for me because of the way I look that people put their guard down and believe that they're talking to someone different. It's a different perspective that I have. And I've, I've spoken to this and it's taken me my 53 years to realize that I do have something to say on the issue, and I'm proud to say it. And as a, as a co-chair of the board of Directors of Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, I just want to talk a little bit about where that comes from, where some of that confidence has delved and why, why the indigenous sort of, um, issue is prominent in Canada, and we'll get to a little bit in North America as well, but our mission at C C A B to foster sustainable business relations between First Nations, Metis and Inuit businesses and Canadian businesses.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
So that, that's sort of my sphere. I'm a bachelor of commerce degree from McMaster proudly. Um, but at the same time, I, uh, uh, I've learned more that there's a lot more social to it. Uh, we're from 1984, we have over 2000 members. Um, you'll see that it says National Pan indigenous. What does that mean? Right? What does that, what does that mean? And then we do have a number of programs, progressive Aboriginal relations, certified aboriginal businesses, tools for aboriginal business research, aboriginal procurement. So we do a lot of different things at C C A B, and we inter interact in a lot of different spaces, but one of the spaces we interact with the most is the integration between indigenous and non-indigenous businesses in Canada. Okay? So just to give you an idea about the opportunity that you might be missing by not doing this correctly, by not working within the resource sectors of Canada, um, where there's about 63,000 self-employed, first Nations, Inuit and Metis people in Canada, right?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
$31 billion in Canada's G P G D P and our population is young and growing, right? 44% of the indigenous population is under 25 years of age. Think about that when you're talking about your workforce, when you're looking about who's coming up, how do we include those people from very distinct places in remote Northern Canada that may not have Inuit or Inuit internet? How do we do that? How do we include them in your workforce if they don't have internet and they are the biggest growing population that are going to be your best workers, right? That are gonna have opportunities. But why now? Why are you hearing indigenous inclusion? What are the things that are driving it? And right now, internationally, there's the United Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous people on our national side. You'll hear us talk about the T R C in Canada, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls to action.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
And what they're driving towards is this notion of reconciliation. So it's, you know, on racism, inclusion, and reconciliation, you start to say, what is it? And the definition, uh, that's in the T r c, establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples in this country. See, I thought we were talking about indigenous people. I have a slide on that too. So when you look at what's happening in the world right now, uh, the declaration is talking about indigenous people have to be included. You know, we have to be included in the decisions that are made about lands and the lands that we inhabited. And then we also in Canada, are having a lot of indigenous assertion rights and successes in our courts. Uh, courts are deciding on us that we have a lot of rights, especially in the resource sector when it comes to our land and the treaties that were never enforced.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
So we're getting a lot of legal foundation, which is the economic driver, right? If you start losing court cases, you better change the way you're doing business. And then we also have the 94 calls to action. Uh, there's a gentleman by the name of Marie Sinclair in Canada who listened to all of the horrific stories around our residential school system and, uh, held those honor shoulders. And one of the things that came outta that document with our T r C with 94 calls to action, right now, we're gonna talk about call to action 92, uh, call upon the corporate sector in Canada to adopt the U United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a reconciliation framework to apply its principles, norms, and standard to corporate policy and core operational activities. Corporate policy and core operational activities do not just mean you include us.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's inherent in your business operations of how you're working with indigenous peoples. And it involves indigenous peoples in the lands and our resources. Our resources, not just indigenous, right? Our resources on the whole. So again, I talked about this idea of aboriginal people, and a lot of people are here about communication. How do we communicate these ideas and how do we do this? One of the things that Canada does is includes indigenous people. We have to solve an indigenous issue that's about indigenous, uh, things that are going on. The reality is, is in Canada, based on the section 35 of our constitution, we are defined as aboriginal people in the Constitution. So you might hear us referred to as Aboriginal people, because that's the constitutional language, right? And then you have the Inuit, Metis, and the Indian, and it's still in the Indian Act, right?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
We are still called Indians in legal formats. When we go to courts, my name is Michael, everyone always asks me, do you wanna be called Mike? Do you wanna be called Michael? If I say I wanna be called Mike, and I meet you the next time, and you say, Hey, Michael, I'm like, Hey, yeah, Mike, yeah, I remember you had, sorry, I missed that one. Let's do that three or four or 5 million times where we're continually called Indians, where we don't refer to ourselves as Indians. And our government doesn't do this. Our indigenous people love our country. I love our country. They love Canada, they love the land. Our tie is to that. It's the systems that we have an issue with. And if people don't understand the difference between Inuit, Metis and Indian and Inuit Metis, and now we're First Nations, or prefer First Nations in a communications context, you're going to have issues.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
So we talk about this distinctions based approach, and I think when I get to this idea of communications and just sort of summarize, um, look at dare, dare to lead by, um, uh, Breen Brown. People are opting out of vital conversations about diversity inclusion because they fear of looking wrong, saying something wrong or being wrong. Choosing our own comfort over hard conversations is the epitome of privilege and roach trust, and moves us away from meaningful and lasting change. We heard a great example from a and w, right? About, I brought it up and everyone said, you brought it up wrong. You did it wrong. We had the conversation, and that's where the value was. So when we get to communications and you start talking about the opportunity for communications, we wanna make sure that we have those, uh, those ideas and those conversations, and we wanna open those up so that we can be more free in what we're talking about. We can be not fearful of what we're talking about and going forward. So from our perspective, from an indigenous perspective, that's where I see us sort of falling. So, um, thank you and I look forward to the question answer now. And so that's my formal part. Uh, Daniel, I'll, I'll calm down now a little bit with that , and then that's my prepared part, but I'll, I'll loosen up here a bit now. So thank you,
Speaker 3 (09:38):
. That was great. Thank you. And it was really the, the perfect segue, uh, words do matter. And this work we just had the, uh, national Day of Truth and Reconciliation. You see the word reconciliation used a lot. We heard from a and w the need to put, uh, because contextually the need for these conversations might be historical, but the result and the power and the value of these conversations, it's all about our future, our common human future to make the world better. Thank you so much for that response. Um, Mike, your bio, don't you love it when people actually read your bio ? I
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Don't know who wrote it, which communications officer wrote it, but yeah, also great.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
It talks about your ability to translate the needs of stakeholders into a language that is understood and relevant to a variety of audiences. Um, what does that mean and what are some ways that CCOs can do that when they think of the communities that they're trying to connect and partner with?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah. Um, I, it's a great question about how, how do you translate? And I think, let's, let's take the idea. Most of your companies are probably talking about e S G metrics, right? You know, E S G metrics are important. E s G metrics In Canada, you're gonna have a resource-based economy. And one of those E S G metrics is going to be your ability to interact and engage with the indigenous population. It's gonna reduce your risk, it's gonna reduce your project risk, it's gonna do all of these things. And that's what the corporate board room's saying. Well, guess what happens with that is we have now, you get an indigenous engagement team. That indigenous engagement team is to go out and say, okay, we need to get our E S G metrics. How do we build a relationship with you? And we're like, don't wreck the land, right?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
And the conversation's over what we haven't done is translated what we need at one side to what the other needs on the other side, we have issues within our community that could be resolved if we did it together. And you'll see on the indigenous side and C C A B, you'll see, see a lot of this notion of partnerships working together so that the translation happens automatically, right? So that, that translation, there isn't a translation because we develop the word, the words, the words together, right? There's no translation. Why are we translating to each other when we need to be speaking each other's language? And I think the idea of reconciliation, you know that the previous question was, do you think reconciliation's the word? We came up with that word together. So that's the one we use, right? So we're sticking with that. And now you get people saying, well, is reconciliation, right?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
That's because we've moved the needle along when there was no common language. We didn't have any conversations when we had those common languages. Now we get to this part of reconciliation. Now we can question, is reconciliation the right word? Who has to do that? You know, is it a fight? Is it where we go? So this translation and this notion of translation has to be gone. So if you're a communications department is sitting there saying, how do we put it in their words? How do we do that? Well, we go and we ask, what are the words we should share together? How are those words gonna propel us along? I think that's the most important part about in working with indigenous people in Canada, is if you don't ask the Indi, the First Nations people of the East Coast and the First Nations people of West Coast, two entirely different histories,
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Two entirely different ways of being, of lived experience, of treaty relationship with the, with the government of historical wins and losses, right? So you have to break that down and get it into the segments we call them, you know, talk about translation, that's your target market, right? So that's the who is our target market? Who are we talking to? But what we do is we say, our target market is the indigenous peoples of Canada. Big miss in terms of a lesson learned, you have to work within the regional context. You have to understand who are the treaty rights in certain areas. You have to break that target market into segments or else your communication is going to be off. Your communication is gonna miss the mark. And it's not going to include me, my face, my hands, my being. It's gonna include the historical us. Okay? So from a communications perspective, I think that's what we're talking about. Translation is why, why are we talking translation at all? But the language of selling in my bio is I can help you translate that. And when I come in, I say, I don't really translate anything. We go and we do it together, right? So, you know, from a marketing perspective, from a language perspective, that's how I sort of, uh, that's what I'm talking about from that area.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
That's great. This concept of a shared language. I think one of the reasons why we don't often have these conversations is that we don't have shared constructive language around difference. You walk into a garden and you see a rose, a lily, a mom, and a iris, you comment on how beautiful that garden is because of the variety of colors and heights and textures, and even sense. We don't do that when we walk into a room full of humans. So developing this shared, constructive language around difference is really, really important. You know, when people see difference as a barrier, it really distances, um, communities from opportunities. So what kinds of skills or attitudes are needed for organizations and CCOs to kind of help bridge this opportunity gap? And this is for both of you. Before we see if there are any questions in the audience,
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Can I comment
Speaker 3 (15:24):
To that one as well? Yes, please. The,
Speaker 2 (15:26):
So let's take that personal, like amazing personal narrative, and let's put it in our boardrooms. And what do we say, you know, oh, we need indigenous inclusion. Okay, so now we get an indigenous employee, and okay, it's truth and reconciliation day. And what does every of your a hundred employees do? They stare at the indigenous person and say, okay, what do we do? Right? And that doesn't make us feel welcome, by the way, that makes us feel isolated. That's not part of the communication strategy that you want. Now, put us in the boardroom. We, we have to have some indigenous reputation on our boardroom. One board member. We've got an indigenous engagement strategy. Mike, do you like it? I'm like, well, yeah, but what does the indigenous community think of it? How, how is my one voice gonna propel across all of these different things?
Speaker 2 (16:10):
And what we're doing in our organizations is we're sort of isolating one person on an indigenous spectrum, where I will never speak for the indigenous population. I could never speak for all the lived experiences. I could never speak for the uniqueness of individuals and the way each individual is going to perceive. So make sure you're giving one authority, right? Do you give authority? If you have an indigenous engagement team or an indigenous engagement, do they have the authority to actually tell the c e o? You're doing it wrong, right? Because what happens is you take it and say, you know, we're gonna do this engagement. It's gonna cost $150,000 because we wanna do A, B, C, and D. Well, we only budgeted 50. So how can you cut that back? Well, did you, did you consider this right in your risk line item of indigenous engagement? You know, we have to be more included in those discussions about how that happens. So when you're talking about your tools and how you're going to do it, if you're setting up in, uh, diversity committees, make sure that there's some authority there. Make sure heavens, that there's budget there. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
There's
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Nothing that makes you feel more useless of, oh, we'd like to do this. Okay, well hold a bake sale so you can raise the money to do what you wanna do. Because that's how we get isolated. And you may have seen it, right? You may have seen it for those in the Canadian audience on Saturday, how many indigenous people were demanded or asked to go to an event to speak on their experience so you could reflect on truth and reconciliation? How many people of our people had to go and give the message? And by the way, happily. But when you think about, it's a, the day is for reflection on Canadians. So when you talk about how you're going to include, how you're gonna do it at the corporate level, how you're gonna do it in communications, by isolating your stories, yes, we need our case studies.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
We need our people to be promoted, we need our people to be advanced, but are we doing it in isolation or are we doing it in a collective? Are we centering that person out? Or are we actually raising the voice of the indigenous population? It's a really tough task. It's a really tough task to do, but you have to, you can't just report on the metric. There's people behind that metric. And when we're reported as a metric, we're treated like a metric, like the cost of pencils, right? We're treated that way, and it feels that way. So when you're communicating, how are you going to make that, that connection, the human connection at a personal level?
Eliot (18:39):
If you enjoy today's episode of the new c c o, be sure to check out our latest episodes and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, leave us a rating and a review. We want to hear what you think so that we can keep making this podcast more interesting and valuable to you. To find out more about what's happening at Page, please visit us@page.org. Special thanks to Rivet 360, our podcast partner. Without who support, we simply would not be able to bring this podcast to you. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time on the new C C O.