Born Leader: Shawn Atleo

Shawn Atleo is a hereditary chief, politician and an entrepreneur.

It’s ironic that when Shawn Atleo, B.C. regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations, meets with BCBusiness it’s at a Tim Hortons near the corner of Georgia and Burrard streets.

Atleo tells how he spoke with just about every highrise owner in downtown Vancouver some 15 years ago, trying to convince them of the wisdom of installing coffee shops in the lobbies of their office towers. It’ll never happen, they told him. The city would never allow it, and the lobbies don’t even have the necessary plumbing.

Undeterred, Atleo started his own coffee shop on Commercial Drive. Within a year, Starbucks would open an outlet a block away, forcing him to move. Atleo finally achieved his dream of a downtown coffee bar when he set up shop in the lobby of the BCIT campus, a business he owned for five years before selling it to his manager.

But coffee was merely a detour in the life of Atleo, who was destined from birth to be a leader of First Nations people. In addition to being elected to represent B.C. in the Assembly of First Nations, Atleo is a hereditary chief of the Ahousaht (uh HOWZ uht) nation off the west coast of Vancouver Island.

When we meet in Novem­ber, the 40-year-old Atleo has just finished co-chairing the task force responsible for drafting federal legislation that offers the promise of breaking a decades-old logjam in land-claim negotiations.

“We’re sitting here on the eve of the introduction of the first jointly drafted legislation that has ever happened between First Nations and government,” Atleo explains. “This bill, if implemented the way I’m hoping it will be, will fundamentally transform British Columbia over the next 10 years.”

Atleo is visiting Vancouver from his home in Nanaimo, where he lives with his wife Nancy. (They have two kids, ages 18 and 21.) He retains what he refers to as a “shack” in his ancestral community of Ahousaht, on Flores Island, and gets back there as often as he can.

Clean-shaven and clear-eyed, Atleo is remarkably alert and articulate, given that he has spent the past five months working feverishly on legislation due to be introduced to the House of Commons tomorrow. He will spend the coming weeks meeting with regional delegations from B.C. First Nations to help coordinate a response to the proposed bill.

The federal bill comes on the heels of a B.C. Supreme Court decision that Atleo is confident will establish a new basis for reconciliation between First Nations and provincial and federal governments.

In particular, Justice David Vickers wrote in his November 21 decision that provincial and federal governments had previously held an “impoverished” view of First Nations’ title to disputed lands and would have to accept the fact that they don’t hold sovereignty over disputed land.

“We need not fear reconciliation,” Atleo explains. “Reconciliation is about moving forward on something.” And with the new federal bill, along with recent B.C. treaty agreements, Atleo sees a bright future in B.C.

“I predict there will be an incredible unleashing of human and economic potential with the resolution of the land question in B.C.,” he says.