Flying high: Meet the Métis woman behind Canada’s first Indigenous, woman-owned airline

Seated comfortably in a white linen shirt and jeans in her office at Vancouver International Airport’s bustling South Terminal, Teara Fraser points out of the window. “That’s ours,” she says.

She’s indicating the small, eight-passenger, twin-engine Piper Navajo Chieftain taxiing to the terminal gate belongs to Iskwew (pronounced ISS-KWAY-YO) Air, Canada’s 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.

“We announced our intentions in March 2018 to start the airline, and then we got our operating certificate in October of 2019,” recalls Fraser. The timing couldn’t have been worse, just a few months before the pandemic was declared, when the world’s 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 company’s very existence…

“It was a miracle that we survived,” Fraser says, citing long days and nights of very hard work and maxed-out credit lines. She also received words of wisdom from an important Indigenous woman in her life, a respected ‘Auntie’.

“She told me that ‘our girls are watching, our young people are watching,’” Fraser says. “It not only motivated me to persevere but (imparted) a very heavy weight of responsibility.” Fraser felt that she had no choice but to succeed.

Unlike many bitten by the aviation bug in their early years, Fraser’s aeronautical journey began in her 30s, when, as a passenger in a small prop plane for the first time in her life, she flew in an aerial tour over Botswana’s Okavango Delta in 2001.

According to a UN global survey on the status of licensed aviation personnel by gender, the number of women holding positions as pilots, air traffic controllers, and maintenance technicians is 4.9 percent. This represents a slight increase from 4.5 percent in 2016. And in Canada, fewer than half of one percent (.5 percent), are Black, Indigenous or women of color.

“I was awestruck by the country we were flying over,” she tells me. “I just fell in love. It’s incredible to witness the land from the sky like a bird. It looks different. It feels different—expansive and inspiring and free.”

Just a year later, Fraser had her pilot’s license, and by 2010, she’d started an aerial survey company which she was compelled to sell six years later. It was a difficult period during which she thought that her flying days were over. She took solace in a traditional ‘letting go’ ceremony, where she would “remember, honor and let go” milestone moments. Moments like getting her pilot’s license. Her first flight experience.

But she realized she wasn’t quite ready to hang up her wings and walk away from aviation. Fraser had long had a dream to start a small airline to serve small communities in coastal and northern British Columbia: “I had more work to do,” she tells me. “And that work wasn’t just starting an aviation business or starting an airline—that was part of it, but it’s also the work that I have to do about disrupting our industry and creating more space for equity and sustainability.”

Aviation has historically been a male-dominated industry. According to the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) 2021 global survey on the status of licensed aviation personnel by gender, the number of women holding positions as pilots, air traffic controllers, and maintenance technicians is 4.9 percent. This represents a slight increase from 4.5 percent in 2016.

And in Canada, fewer than half of one percent (.5 percent), are Black, Indigenous or women of color.

For Fraser, disrupting the airline industry begins with the name of her airline. Iskwew means woman in the Cree language. “I chose the name as an act of reclamation. Reclamation of womanhood, reclamation of matriarchal leadership, and reclamation of language.”

The act of reclamation is a fitting riposte for decolonization, reminding competitors and the public—one Cree syllabic letter at a time—that Iskwew and its Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff are here, working in a space where they have not been historically present nor welcome.

On the matter of sustainable aviation, Fraser is pragmatic, recognizing the need for airplanes, while acknowledging the importance of offsetting the impact of Iskwew Air’s operations. This is consciously done through carbon offsets, with the beneficiary being the Great Bear Rainforest Carbon Project.

This project enhances carbon sequestration by converting areas previously used for commercial logging into protected forests. As the first carbon offset project in North America to be implemented on traditional territory under Indigenous stewardship and located in British Columbia, Iskwew’s support is a “natural fit.”

Flying isn’t just about sunny destinations and colorful drinks with cute umbrellas. “That’s just a tiny piece of it. Air transportation infrastructure is about moving cargo, it’s moving life-saving medical supplies, it’s firefighting and it’s serving remote communities,” says Fraser.

The pandemic presented its own disruption to the aviation industry as it ground to a halt in spring 2020, but the pause also represented an opportunity to rebuild it in a different way. “The question became how to connect with others who viewed the importance of rebuilding structures and systems in the same way,” says Fraser.

The answer for her was to become a founding partner in the Canadian Advanced Air Mobility Consortium (CAAM) set up to streamline research, development and commercial operations in the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sector. This means looking at the use of zero-emission aircraft powered by electric or hydrogen fuel cells, and ways of providing transportation and emergency services for urban and rural communities, for example, using innovative vertical take-off aircraft (eVTOL) powered by electricity or hybrid power, that take off, as the name suggests, vertically, and can land without the need for extensive runway or taxi space.

Among the potential benefits of these aircraft (yes, drones are included in this group) are greater maneuverability, less need for ground infrastructure (airport runways), reduced fossil fuel consumption, lower costs, less aircraft noise, shorter travel times and improved safety.

Fraser is quick to point out that big airplanes aren’t going away anytime soon. “We need airplanes, we need to be flying.” And that flying isn’t just about sunny destinations and colorful drinks with cute umbrellas. “That’s just a tiny piece of it. Air transportation infrastructure is about moving cargo, it’s moving life-saving medical supplies, it’s firefighting and it’s serving remote communities.”

In picturing the future potential of advanced air mobility, Fraser sees Iskwew Air as a bridge between traditional air transportation and the sustainable transportation of the future. This vision prompted Fraser to start a new aeronautical enterprise, elibird aero, in January 2023.

With its headquarters at Metro Vancouver’s Boundary Bay Airport, elibird is aiming to become the first all-electric, zero-emission flight training unit in Canada, with plans to use advanced air mobility tech, including sustainable aviation fuels, drones, and flight and VR simulators.

The company’s facility at Boundary Bay is also home to the Indigenous LIFT Collective, a non-profit founded by Fraser in 2018. Through the non-profit, Fraser created an initiative aimed to inspire Indigenous youth to pursue aviation. The program, called Give Them Wings, provides flight training, coaching and mentorship, and is Fraser’s way to give back and inspire the next generation of emerging aviators.

In refusing to let go of her own wings, Fraser pursues challenges that honor her long-standing goals of inclusion, equity and respect for Mother Earth. This includes owning and operating her new off-grid ecolodge in northern British Columbia. Located on Babine Lake, the longest natural lake in BC, Liberty Wilderness Lodge is intended as a remote refuge where guests can reconnect with nature and each other.

For Fraser, the sky is no limit as she continues to fuel her ambition and desire to successfully push boundaries for women and Indigenous people in the aviation sector in Canada: “I always say that getting my wings has given me wings for everything else in my life.”

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