Nekaneet First Nation strikes deal with Ontario First Nation for internet, phone service in southwest Sask.

Nekaneet First Nation in southwestern Saskatchewan has entered an agreement with Batchewana First Nation in Ontario to provide high-speed internet, telephone, and TV services to Nekaneet and parts of the southwest region, including Maple Creek.

Batchewana Chief Dean Sayers says his First Nation created its own telecommunications company to provide essential services for that community, which is near Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

Now, Nekaneet has joined the fold in a joint venture. 

"The Indigenous people across Canada have unextinguished relationship obligations to each other that we need to begin to revisit," Sayers said Tuesday in Regina, where the agreement was announced.

"We have collective ideologies, collective responsibilities and governance, and economic development has and always will be a part of how we relate."

Both chiefs say the agreement is important, given historical intertribal relations in the country. 

"We would meet regularly, and nations would come from all over Canada and we would have gift exchanges, and the gift exchanges were our commerce," Sayers said.

Different nations would trade snowshoes, maple syrup, furs, gloves, boots, food and wild rice, he said.

"So it was really great to be able to once again open that door to economic development with each other, and it will begin, I think, this more formal trade relationship once again that we always had."

Sayers says he believes the ancestors of the two First Nations are happy to see the tradition continue. 

Meanwhile, Nekaneet First Nation Chief Alvin Francis called Tuesday a momentous and important day.

"When you talk about intertribal trading, it has been going on since the beginning of time.... That's the way we've always done this for our entire time since we've actually been here on Turtle Island," Francis said. 

The telecommunications deal is a modern-day example intertribal trading, he said.

"[We want to] show the rest of Canada we are actually going to get into this because it's important for us First Nations to belong in the modern-day context of what we consider the economy," said Francis.

"It has been a long time coming and now that we're actually joining, we are just going to bring a better product, like a cheaper product, to our First Nations. It's going to be a good product so that we can … be competitive in this telecommunication world."

Phase 1 of the project will begin immediately, with the construction of 16 communication towers in and around the Maple Creek area, with the potential to expand services further into southwest Saskatchewan and other First Nation communities.