When Senior Program Officers (SPOs) Erika van der Grinten and Christopher Angeconeb set up a booth at conferences and events, their message for First Nations people is simple. Nations can support their members to own a home in their home Nation, leave a legacy for their families, and invest in your community and its goals.
As outlined in the 2024 and 2025 blogs about the power of networking and how meeting the Fund can help Nations reach their goals, the Fund mostly attends housing conferences, symposiums, and roundtables. According to the SPOs, the primary goal is to meet with Nations and find out how they can support their projects and initiatives.
Beneath that professional layer is often a First Nations person with their own dreams and visions of the future. At the place where working with the Fund becomes personal, Erika and Chris help turn that energy into hope and a path forward.
A balanced blend of talents
It’s hard not to describe the dynamic between the Fund’s western SPOs as familial or twin-like. Resisting this tired corporate trope, we can comfortably record that when the Fund saw the opportunity to hire these professionals with complementary personalities and backgrounds, they made it happen.
“I really think that when they interviewed us, they found that person in Erika, and they just kind of threw me in,” guesses Chris.
“I think it was the other way around,” counters Erika. “I think that they knew of you, and then I came up, and they went, oh, we could give her a try, too.”
This aside, there’s respect and congeniality between the two. They seem to like spending time together. Erika comments that Chris is the “Anthony Bourdain” of their travel. “He knows a good eatery.”
Chris’ journey to the Fund
Erika is right that the Fund would have known Chris before hiring him. He was a band bylaws officer for two years and worked with the Lands Advisory Board (LAB) for eight. Starting in 2013, he helped establish the Centre of Excellence for Matrimonial Real Property (COEMRP) at LAB.
A lawyer by trade and by bar, Chris was more interested in Aboriginal law and how it was applied to First Nations across the country. “Throughout my career, I’ve worked with the federal government on very specific issues related to Indigenous people,” he says. He spent his thirties travelling across the country and recalls having a great time meeting communities and learning where they were at. “If you’re gonna do a job, make it something that you have fun doing, right?”
Chris’ fascination with how Aboriginal law affects Indigenous lives stems from personal experience. He is Ojibwe from Lac Seul First Nation, summered on his mom’s reserve in Grassy Narrows, and grew up next to his traditional territory in Red Lake, Ontario. His family relocated from Trout Lake, their multi-generational wintering grounds, when a dam flooded the land. The federal government required him to attend Pelican Lake Indian Residential School in Sioux Lookout, where other children from Treaty Three and also Treaty Nine experienced terrible living conditions.
Angeconeb enjoyed producing and delivering workshops on matrimonial property until 2018, when a friend at TD Bank suggested he apply for an Executive Trust Officer role in Vancouver. He relocated and worked with seven client Nations across BC and the Yukon.
Then, like many staff at the Fund, a conversation with CEO Travis Seymour landed him at the organization. Chris’ national lens, informed by law, intra-community experience, and lived experience, expertly prepared him for the new challenge.
Erika’s path to the Fund
Erika isn’t shy about announcing that she is non-Indigenous and into, well, embracing destiny. “Chris and I starting a week apart; I do believe that things happen in good ways, if you let them. It was so nice to have someone else sort of starting the journey at the same time. The stars aligned.” She laughs. “I like to hold over him that I have one week of seniority.”
When the Fund was looking to expand into more different geographic areas in 2022, van der Grinten was ready to pass on her role as Lands Manager. “shíshálh Nation was the first self-governing Nation, so their governance is very similar to BC land tenures, and it was a really good transfer. [After COVID], my Lands Administrator could do everything I could, and I felt it was time for me to find another position.” When she left, an Elder told her that her reconciliation work is to take everything she learned at the banks and “use it for good now, rather than evil.”
Erika’s path to the Fund does seem meant to be. Taking a sabbatical from her job at a mortgage investment company to spend time with her father during a serious illness made her re-evaluate how she wanted to live. She found the peace she craved when she applied to be a Lands Assistant with the shíshálh Nation on the Sunshine Coast, staying with them for six years. “It was such a blessing to work for the Nation. I learned so, so much. It was a good recovery from working in banking world and just a different view of how you work and what the priorities are.”
Now, she is honoured to work with many Nations in BC, as well as some in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Her insider perspective on banking, gratitude to learn from First Nations, and ground-up understanding of land management makes her a powerful force in advancing First Nations housing initiatives.
First Nations market value housing supports self-determination
Chris makes a great point that when the Fund was founded in 2008, it was a significant time for First Nations advancement. As he saw the lists of communities joining the FNMHF from his desk at LAB, he reflected on how developing land codes and improving administrative systems was improving overall capacity. Communities now had the ability to download or get specific information from First Nations-led organizations about First Nations housing on reserve, as well as other wealth-building resources.
The First Nations Finance Authority (FNFA) received Royal Assent under the First Nations Fiscal Management Act (FNFMA) in 2005. More Nations were embracing government investment options, capital planning advice, and access to long-term loans with preferable interest rates, all under Indigenous ownership and control. This was a step towards parity with how governments borrow, improving Nations’ abilities to develop stronger economies.
Growing up in Treaty Three territory, Chris’ community spoke of how important their treaty rights, like housing, were. To own a home in a reserve community was an astonishing option. “To see some of the same communities being reflected in all of those different organizations, you knew those guys were going to be doing really well,” he said of these First Nations’ membership lists. “I thought the market housing fund was sort of one of those things that would add to making life better for community members.”
“I think the beauty of the program is that there isn’t a cookie-cutter model,” offers Erika about the Fund’s decolonial approach. “It’s whatever the homeowner or Nation sees homeownership as. We can give [a Nation] guidance and some directions and models of what have worked in other places, but it has to work for where you are; your culture, your traditions, the size of your Nation, the proximity to other services…it’s a big jumble that has to go together to create whatever home ownership is, where you are at.”
Chris sees the SPO’s work as “building the foundations for Nations’ members to be able to own their own homes, so having the First Nation work in such a way that it facilitates individuals in the community to own their own homes.”
“The core piece is giving members the opportunity to have the stability and the pride of ownership and whatever that is similar to off reserve, but that’s created […] very individually,” agrees Erika. “If you have a home that you’ve built, you’re going to look after it,” adds Chris.
Generations of homeowners building their Nations
Chris remarks that, while many communities’ populations are young, baby boomers and Gen X people may want to come home. “Those folks are in the phase of life where they’ve been out there, they’ve worked, they’ve seen a lot, they know a lot about other communities.”
He also points out that some folks have the financial means to come back home, and there are financial incentives to do so. “From a practical financial perspective, there’s no tax living on a community, right? You don’t have the same obligation.”
With a home on the reserve, Chris adds, “You can give it to your kids. They can live on the community. You’re able to pass that on internally for your own family, being able to say, “This is yours; this is on your lands in this country we call Canada. They may not always be welcoming out there, but you’re always welcome to come back home.” Building the connection between kids and communities is also vital to the Nation’s vitality.
Spending on reserve services and home upkeep is also one way living in your community supports your Nation and its goals, Chris shares.
Housing for all
Serving communities in BC, Erika and Chris see the availability of land as the lynchpin of home ownership. “The acreages with these Nations are a lot smaller than, say, out in the prairies or the rest of Canada in some ways,” says Chris.
“A lot of the reserve lands are remote or inaccessible, so they don’t really lend themselves to permanent residency,” adds Erika. “Even the prairies and remote areas and other parts of Canada, people would love to live at home, but it just doesn’t lend itself to the employment or whatever services that they may need. So [the Fund is] looking at ways of facilitating how we can support ownership or support our community members in other ways.”
Erika doesn’t know what this would look like, but she’s confident that there can be pieces in their programming for Nations to build with, even off reserve. “Even if it’s not an urban reserve, how can a Nation assist community members, kind of making home wherever you’re at?”
Spreading hope across the Nation
Chris and Erika enjoy travelling to events where they can meet housing managers and other members of the housing ecosystem. Their goal is to spread hope and build relationships. A common question they’ll ask is how they can support Nations’ programs and initiatives. They respect where every Nation is at, noting that “everyone shares successes, wins, and failures.”
An example of a community with many successes is Membertou, the premier First Nation to achieve International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification. Chris admires that they created jobs for members who live in the community and sees the same economic opportunities in Nations developing golf courses and casinos. “All these investments, all this growth, all this planning and visioning for the future, it’s all for the wellbeing of our next generations to come,” says Westbank First Nation (WFN) councillor c̓ris Jordan Coble. More than 12,000 non-nation members live on WFN’s self-governed lands, along with 914 band members.
The SPOs’ biggest challenge when arriving in a new community is finding their gear. “It’s always an unknown. It’s always a challenge,” they laugh.
They value their travels for the human connection, the energy, the openings, and the prayer. They both love to escape the isolation of working remotely and enjoy the land. They name the stunning beauty of the prairies and the sense of being off the beaten path.
Mostly, they love seeing where the vision of First Nations market housing will unfold.