The Nihtat Gwich'in were able to secure both feasibility studies of the wind project.

I'm going to give you another example of the value added that we bring as a community. I think this is the really important part. As part of the feasibility study, we needed to put up a meteorological tower. A met tower measures the wind speed on the site. Our met tower is still standing. It's the third one there. The Nihtat have done this type of work before; we work in the region. We recognize that global warming is happening and the tundra is heaving all over the place.

The way they were putting in met towers was as follows. They were 200-metre towers attached to cables with an anchor of about eight inches. That was what the spec was. Then they had three companies come up and put them in and they all fell down. These are all in remote locations, needing a helicopter to get into.

We talked to all the local contractors about what we thought about this and how we would solve the problem. Our solution was to have deadman anchors. They were actually two feet by six feet, each one, and there were 32 of them. It's still standing. We're getting the data we need.

If that approach had been taken right from the start.... This wind regime program has been going on for the last eight years. One of the reasons they couldn't actually develop the project is they couldn't get the data. They couldn't actually say, “This is the wind speed that's going to happen and this is the energy production.”

If they had talked to us first and put that in first, the project probably would have been built already. We were actually adding a lot of value. If we weren't at the point where we are now with the wind project, you would have an indigenous group leading the feasibility study and the development of the project. You would have an indigenous group working in the project as a proponent, possibly in the project, and the benefits would be coming back to the indigenous population. It's really unfortunate that this project didn't happen. To me, it could have been the perfect example of a case study that I think we all wanted to see moving forward.

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