Wiikwemkoong engineer had early introduction to university classes

By Sam Laskaris

CHIPPEWAS OF RAMA FIRST NATION – It shouldn’t really be a huge surprise that Kaella-Marie Earle has become an engineer.

Earle, a member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, was extremely young when she first started attending university classes.

Her father, who was an electrician, had a near-death experience after he fell from a building.

“He couldn’t be an electrician any more so he became an electrical engineer,” said Earle, who was one of the presenters at TechNations 2024, a conference organized by the Ontario First Nations Technical Services Corporation (OFNTSC). “When I was four or five, I used to go to engineering school with him at Lakehead (University) because my parents couldn’t afford childcare… I remember watching him building these engineering projects and thinking he was the smartest man in the world. I still look up to him as an exceptional technical specialist for both nuclear and hyrdoelectric energy.”

Earle has gone on to become an engineer herself. She’s worked at Enbridge for the past five years and is currently an energy transition engineer.

Earle is part of a team of engineers working on a strategy for the elimination of emissions.

TechNations 2024 was held Aug. 21-22 at the Casino Rama Resort, located in Chippewas of Rama First Nation.

TechNations is the premier technical advisory services conference for First Nations in Ontario.

This year’s conference included about 200 technical services delegates and more than 30 speakers.

The theme of the conference was From Blueprints to Boot Prints – Building the future for First Nations Housing and Infrastructure.

Earle’s keynote presentation was titled Decolonizing Energy and Mining: Perspectives from an Anishinaabe Engineer for a Just Engineer Transition Strategy.

Early on in her presentation Earle said that when she thinks about blueprinting in the context of trying to help build capacity for First Nations, it reminds her of the book Moons of the Crusted Snow, written by Anishinaabe writer Waubgeshig Rice.

Earle has met Rice in person and he shared his thoughts on the novel with her.

“He talked about why he wrote this book,” Earle said. “And it was really special to me because it eased a lot of the anxiety that I felt around climate change and our exceptional responsibility in dealing with the problems of the land. The point that he made was that so many of our stories about the end of the world have a lot to teach us. That’s what his book was about, an apocalyptic time and how First Nations people survived on a reserve.”

Earle said Indigenous people have been through many ends of the world.

“The stealing of our children was an end of the world,” she said. “Climate change is an end of the world.”

Earle also offered up her thoughts on how to move forward.

“The road to decolonizing energy mining is definitely not perfect,” she said. “What I found in the last couple of years of research and approach is that in order for us to get to a healthier place and really enact self-determination in our Nations with regard to mining and energy, is a lot of harm reduction and a lot of the creative use of the colonial systems in order to make space for healing and rebuilding.”

Earle added another thought on work being done now in the space of energy and mining.

“It’s work that we might not see,” she said. “It’s work that we do for seven generations ahead, which is so foundational for our peoples.”