Seated comfortably in a white linen shirt and jeans in her office at Vancouver International Airportâs bustling South Terminal, Teara Fraser points out of the window. âThatâs ours,â she says.
Sheâs indicating the small, eight-passenger, twin-engine Piper Navajo Chieftain taxiing to the terminal gate belongs to Iskwew (pronounced ISS-KWAY-YO) Air, Canadaâs first Indigenous, woman-owned airline. The airline that Fraser, a Métis of Cree ancestry, founded in 2018. The Métis are an Indigenous People with a distinct collective identity, customs, language and way of life, unique from mixed Indigenous s European ancestry. The Métis are one of three Indigenous Peoples in Canada, the others being First Nations and Inuit.
âWe announced our intentions in March 2018 to start the airline, and then we got our operating certificate in October of 2019,â recalls Fraser. The timing couldnât have been worse, just a few months before the pandemic was declared, when the worldâs skies quieted as nearly all air traffic was effectively grounded for a year.
Starting a small airline as an Indigenous woman had already been a challenging experience. The aviation industry is historically male-dominated with little representation from marginalized groups. Sexism and racism are not uncommon. But the pandemic threatened the nascent companyâs very existenceâ¦
