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Windspeaker.com Contributor
Update: January 16, 2020
Creative Saskatchewan says it requires repayment of $62,000 from two grants for projects Heather Abbey failed to fulfill under her company Indig Inc. The company received more than $160,000 total in grant between 2015 and 2019.
An audit said Abbey met three grant expectations worth nearly $100,000 but failed on a trade mission to Japan for Indigenous artists from Saskatchewan and a retail space for a Saskatoon shopping mall.
Updated with a Press Statement from Creative Saskatchewan, a funder of Indig Inc.
UPDATE:
Creative Saskatchewan can now confirm that concerns recently brought to its attention, in addition to recent public comments made by Heather Abbey, have triggered a review of three previously closed grants she has received. Ms. Abbey and/or her companies have received five Creative Saskatchewan grants since the agency’s inception in 2013. Three of those grant files are complete. Two remain open pending final reports. The two grants currently open will be reviewed as per our standard policies and procedures stated below. This statement will be updated when these reviews are completed.
Creative Saskatchewan can confirm a financial commitment to Indig Inc. in support of a market and export development project. The commitment is a $61,310 grant via our Market and Export Development Grant. 60% of that amount has been delivered to the recipient. 40% remains withheld pending project completion, final reporting and Creative Saskatchewan review. The project was to send a delegation of Indigenous artisans to Japan in an effort to promote Indigenous artisans in an international setting and to open a new market. The Market and Export Development Grant covers half of the eligible expenses incurred by a project.
As noted above, Indig Inc., like all of our grant recipients, did not receive the full amount of the commitment up front. Creative Saskatchewan withholds a portion of every grant it disburses until the applicant completes the project and submits a final report for our review. Creative Saskatchewan generally expects final reports to be submitted within several weeks of the conclusion of a project.
For all grants, withheld amounts are only released after Creative Saskatchewan compares the recipient’s final report, which includes an accounting of all expenses and activities, to the project’s proposed plan and budget. Actual project activity must align with the proposed plan, all expenses must align with the proposed budget, and all expenses must be eligible under the guidelines of each grant.
Actual expenses and/or activities that are not aligned with the project proposal or the grant program are disallowed. In such cases, funding may be deducted from the withheld amount, or funds from the first payment may need to be repaid.
It’s important to clarify that only Saskatchewan residents are eligible to receive Creative Saskatchewan funds. For this reason, funding provided to Indig Inc. was based on the number of Saskatchewan-based entrepreneurs participating in the trip. No funding was provided to Indig Inc. in support of entrepreneurs based outside the province.
Our Annual Report lists a commitment of $84,840 for Indig Inc. to undertake this project. To clarify, this was the maximum amount conditionally approved by the Market and Export Development Grant jury pending the applicant's submission of more detailed documentation. After receiving this documentation, Creative Saskatchewan revised the amount of our commitment: $61,310. At the time of publication of the Annual Report, this revised commitment had not yet been determined, therefore we were required to report the maximum possible commitment.
All Market and Export Development Grant recipients are evaluated by a jury of experienced creative industry stakeholders according to specific criteria. One of these criteria is that the applicant, or members of their team, possesses the expertise, capacity, and ability to complete the project. This is just one of nine specific criteria the jury considers as they adjudicate an application. The complete list of criteria is available here.
As a Crown agency, Creative Saskatchewan is firmly committed to the responsible stewardship of public funds, and fiscal transparency. After receiving and reviewing the Indig Inc. final report, Creative Saskatchewan will post the actual final amount of its investment in this project to its website.
Original Story:
Almost a month after a delegation of 14 artisan vendors returned home from a trip to Tokyo, the organizer of that international event is getting lambasted on social media for the poor results.
Heather Abbey of Indig Inc., also heard criticisms from the vendors at the midway point of the event, which took place July 21 to July 28 (which included two days of travel).
Now she’s hearing it again and she classifies what she’s reading on Facebook, getting through personal messages and threats on her email as a “laterally violent frenzy”. She shut down all her social media accounts and her Indig Inc. website is offline.
She’s not the only one with concerns about the online blowback. She’s had friends email her and phone her asking her if she is physically and emotionally all right, she tells Windspeaker.com.
Abbey finds it particularly hurtful that people she doesn’t know are accusing her of being “a white devil that is taking advantage of our artisans.” Abbey is a Cree woman from Little Pine First Nation.
“The whole point of the Indig Inc. delegation was to create this wonderful opportunity where we could showcase Indigenous artisans, powwow dancers, basically Indigenous culture as a whole in Tokyo,” said Abbey.
She spent six months planning the event in which her aim was for vendors, along with the dancers and models who made the trip, to think globally and see themselves on the international stage.
But that’s not the experience a number of artisans recounted on Facebook. One participant said she felt “used, betrayed and disrespected”. Another said her experience with the other artisans was “amazing” but “was not” with the organizer. Others called the trade mission “a bust.”
The first day was an 11-hour showcase at Ario Hashimoto mall in Sagamihara, which included two tables for each vendor, a stage for the powwow dancers and seats for viewing, a Japanese interpreter, an emcee for the event, and a mall photographer.
The turnout for the powwow was strong and there was a “steady stream of shoppers,” said Abbey, who spent months working with the mall to ensure everything was set up as she wanted, she added.
“It was exactly what I envisioned when we started putting it together.”
However, the results weren’t what the vendors expected, she says, and it was two days after this event that the vendors held a circle talk with Abbey.
For 25 minutes, she says, she listened to vendors tell her how she had done everything wrong. She says she didn’t defend herself, kept apologizing, and admits that after a while, comments “blurred together.”
Abbey says she takes “full responsibility” for not preparing the vendors properly for the mall.
“I should have provided vendor training for that market,” she said. However, she points out, “There were quite a few periods of time where vendors would go off for an hour or two or go shopping. The mall provided us a photographer, who was taking pictures throughout the day and there wasn’t a point where all the vendor tables were full of vendors.”
Abbey says she carefully selected the vendors from about 100 applications based on their crafts and expertise and their vending experiences. Initially, the trip was to include about 30 vendors, but the number was cut in half and a second trip planned for October. That October trip is uncertain at this point.
Abbey says she decided to scale down the initial trip for “a variety of reasons,” including ensuring everything she had planned was doable.
Some of the particulars of the itinerary were changed at the last minute, including the hotel accommodations and the shuttle transportation from the airport was cancelled.
These changes left vendors unhappy. They also claimed that opportunities promised by Abbey were either not delivered on or poorly executed, including cultural sensitivity (which wasn’t done prior to going), a video documentary, and numerous vending opportunities.
It was an expensive trip for vendors. Flights cost anywhere from $1,200 to $1,600 and the original hotel accommodation was $106 per night at double occupancy. One vender said she “invested more than $4,000 towards my delegate fee, flights, hotel, inventory. That price doesn’t include the cost of our food, transportation and other various costs I covered.”
All costs for the trip were the responsibility of the vendors, says Abbey, although vendors from Saskatchewan were able to take advantage of some grant dollars from Creative Saskatchewan.
Abbey also says she ended up forking out more than $7,000 of her own to pay for numerous items, including taxis, trains, treating delegates to meals, a trip to Disneyland for 11 non-artisan delegates, and a photo-shoot.
The experience isn’t what anybody anticipated.
“The vendors knew this was the first of its kind. They were fine with that, they were joking, saying, ‘That’s okay. We’ll be your guinea pigs.’ That’s a direct quote. Maybe I’m a little naïve. I honestly thought we were in this together,” said Abbey.
Melrene Saloy-Eaglespeaker from the Kainai Nation had planned to go on this trip, but says she was contacted by Abbey four days before they were to leave and told that a second trip was planned in October to take advantage of pre-Olympic events as Tokyo would host in 2020.
Saloy-Eaglespeaker says all her attempts to communicate with Abbey since the group returned from Tokyo have gone unanswered and she will not be going with Indig Inc. in October.
Saloy-Eaglespeaker and two other artisans from southern Alberta had worked together to raise funds for the July trip. While she bowed out, the two other artisans went and she has spoken to them and others since their return.
She says the people who went “didn’t gain anything and that was the thing. They were trying to make the best of a bad situation…People were in tears telling me it was the worse experience of their life.”
Saloy-Eaglespeaker says for many of the vendors it was their first time selling internationally. She notes that their contract with Abbey said they were to get webinar training which included a cultural briefing and market place orientation, which never happened.
She adds that perhaps part of the fault lies in how the excursion was pitched.
“We were told because of the high traffic that there would be wholesale opportunity possibilities so to have a high amount of inventory. Our hopes were a lot higher because that’s how it was sold to us,” she said.
However, Abbey won’t say that unrealistic expectations sunk the trip.
“We all had high expectations, because we knew there was such an appreciation for beautiful Indigenous-made goods out there and I did everything from my part,” she said and takes exception to accusations that she profited personally.
That it took the vendors a full month to go public on Facebook with their comments surprises Abbey, although she ties it in with her refusal to reimburse them for their flights.
However, Saloy-Eaglespeaker says people were in shock.
“I think if this happened the day they came back, it would just be coming from a place of anger, it would be kind of blown out of proportion. But where they’ve had time to sit and think and feel and now they’re coming from a different place of not being angry, but wanting to tell everybody to beware,” she said.
Abbey sees it differently.
“It’s all due to the fact that they didn’t make sales. That’s where all this discontent is coming from. Everything that happened right in the delegation doesn’t matter. It’s because they didn’t make sales and that, apparently, is one hundred per cent my fault,” she said.