Mother, wife, author, basketball player, weightlifter, school district trustee, educator, mentor and most recently designer of her own clothing line, Erica McLean, is kinda busy.
The title of her book wraps it up nicely.
From the Rez to the Mountaintop, Becoming Who We’re Meant To Be is a book McLean self-published and released in 2023 as she believes through love, work and the pursuit of growth, everyone can change their world.
Early years
McLean is from the Gitxsan First Nation and grew up on reserve in Hazelton.
“The beginning for me was going to an alternative school,” McLean said.
“There is one high school in Hazelton and at the time I was a struggling student. When I was younger I loved school. I loved to read and I just loved being there but life, circumstance, all kinds of factors took place and I started to fall off in eighth grade like many of my peers and I moved to Prince George for a little bit while my mom and her then husband were going to school and then I really fell behind because I dropped out of school here because I just couldn’t handle moving to a different community and trying new things and being in new spaces.”
After her family moved back to Hazelton she landed in the alternative learning school.
“Which was just a little portable out back of the main school,” McLean smiled.
“And it was lovely for me but it was a very difficult place. It wasn’t uncommon for books to be thrown, kids to be yelling and fighting with teachers and bickering amongst each other but I had this core group of friends. We talked, had lots of fun, told stories in class and it was just this really nice place to belong and it was there that I found that sense of belonging.”
McLean always had a connection to sport and in particular, basketball and soccer, since she was 10 years old, she added.
“It was something to hold on to,” McLean said. “When I was in Grade 10 I started to feel what my community was struggling with.”
Theft and alcohol use were some of the challenges McLean mentioned.
“And then of course I would see my friends and other people I cared about struggling,” McLean recalled.
“So that’s when I started to notice things weren’t good or what they could be. Meanwhile because I had this very nice circle of adult supports, these adults who cared about my success at school, and I kinda got to do the work at my own pace, I’m seeing this reality, I’m seeing this social landscape of challenges while also starting to see little glimmers of progress.”
She was 17 when she realized what she really wanted to do with her life was help people, she added.
“I had lots of dreams of what I was going to do to help people and the places that I was going to go,” McLean said. “All the schools and universities that I was going to attend, stuff like that. By the time I graduated high school, I would call myself a would-be athlete because early on I stopped applying myself. So when I graduated I actually won a ton of academic awards, which is bizarre considering the academic capacity that I felt I had coming from an alt school. But looking back, there was value to it and I did try hard to reach that milestone.”
Post secondary education
Her goal to help people sent her to Prince George after graduation where she enrolled for the social service worker diploma program at the College of New Caledonia.
“And it was amazing – the people – the faculty – you have this small core group of people – your cohort and your instructors and you worked through all these things together – these were new worlds and new challenges,” McLean explained. “So I felt a little safer.”
It was hard to leave the security of home.
“I remember we all cried in the driveway when I left,” McLean said, who is the middle child of four.
“So I just chipped away at college and really struggled being a student and living on my own and all of those things that come from leaving your reserve.”
As she was nearing the end of her time at the college she welcomed her first child, needed to take some time off and was determined to come back and finish the course, McLean added. (McLean is married to Guy and has two children, Carter, 14 and Olaf, seven.)
She completed the course as a new mom and then transferred to the university to further her education.
“So as an undergrad you do a lot of group presentations,” McLean said. “And I remember one particular session where I was telling my cohort that I love prevention and early intervention and that’s where I am going to spend all my time and my instructor was like ‘That’s great! You know what you want to do but you’re never going to work a day in your life,’ and it was funny. We all laughed but the reality is that in social work you are intervening at a crisis level. That’s the work. Very little of it is spent in prevention and early intervention.”
Despite that bit of reality, McLean really felt that was where she belonged.
“I thought there had to be a way,” McLean said. “That work is out there and after I finished my undergrad I spent the summer just kind of enjoying that because that truly was my Everest. It took me five years to finish that program and it truly felt like ‘oh my gosh, I did it!’ It was so exciting.”
She then applied for a job at School District 57 because during her practicums she had worked there and she loved it, she added.
Work life
Her first position was as an Indigenous Education Worker and realized very quickly that she had found her place.
“This is prevention and early intervention because I got to work with families and run programs that I care about, that I was passionate about,” McLean recalled.
“It was important to share with students and families and it was awesome.”
She spent seven years in that position at an elementary school.
During that time another opportunity came up as a Community School Coordinator, which is a social work role as the responsibilities lie in connecting students to the school, and then out in community as well as their families, and finding resources for the schools.
“It was essentially making connections and that was perfect for me,” McLeod said.
“Having the autonomy to build it as you see the need and having the space to be creative with the guidance of a mentor who is still a dear friend helped carve that out for me and would ask the question – ‘what do you want to make of this?’ – and then ‘go!’ And I look back at it now and wow!”
McLean spent 10 years working in education and chose to end her career at SD 57 in 2022.
“It was so tough but also good and I told everyone that I would keep working on these ideas and this voice and I’ll keep trying,” McLean said.
School board trustee
That summer a friend had suggested she run as a school board trustee in the fall election.
McLean didn’t know much about the inner workings of the school board and in the past she would do her research and vote for candidates but she’d never even sat in on a board meeting.
“I would say I was not super involved prior to embarking on this journey,” McLean laughed. “But I decided to do it anyway because that’s kind of who I am. And I thought ‘well, if this is good work and we need someone like me then OK, I’ll do it.’ So I tried and the campaign was such an experience and it was scary because it was difficult work and I felt like my voice wasn’t strong. So it was a really tough learning curve but I can look at it now as we’re two years into our term and it’s a difficult space and I showed up and I kind of just do my best work with who I am and what I have.”
McLean said she always goes back to her values.
“Here are my values and they are in stone and what I know is written in the sand meaning that I can learn, my opinion can change based on new information and I just try to do my best to do that work.”
After two years McLean said she feels good about this learning experience and that being a school board trustee has led to other work.
"Other opportunities have come up for me to lead in other ways in governance in Indigenous communities and Indigenous organizations,” McLean said. “And that’s the kind of message that I want to share with other people who look like me or who might be a woman with young children or an Indigenous person who is interested in being a leader in some way. I think there is so much value in putting yourself out there regardless of fear of what might happen or fear of people’s opinions. It’s difficult but it’s also necessary and I hope that any work that I do – any accomplishment that I might make in this work will make it more inviting for others. I hope my work inspires others to get involved.”
Her book
At the same time McLean was recording her audio book for From the Rez to the Mountain Top, Becoming Who We’re Meant To Be.
She left her career in education with the intention of doing more in sharing her voice as much as she could and in broader ways.
“I gave myself a deadline of 2022 and published on Amazon on Dec. 22, 2022,” McLean laughed.
Her book was written unintentionally in three parts, McLean added.
“Part one is love, part two is work and part three is grow,” she said.
“Part one is about learning to love the parts of myself that I wanted to hide from the world. The parts I was ashamed of. So in part one I talk a lot about growing up without money and how I didn’t realize that impacted me as an adult. Not wanting to raise my hand, not wanting to speak and always flying under the radar or be the authentic version of myself because I didn’t think my voice was valued or worthy.”
She said she really hopes she tells her story in such a way that encourages people to consider their own path.
The second part of the book - work - is about learning how to get out of your own way, McLean added.
“I realized that when we’re struggling sometimes we’re standing in our own way and once I learned to love the parts of myself that I wanted to hide and embracing the whole me and loving the whole me I realized I had to work really hard to develop that person.”
Part three, grow, is about getting to that place where you thought you wanted to be only to discover there’s another thing you want to do, another place where you want to be, McLean said.
“Part three is about all of these beautiful lessons that remind me – remind us – that the world keeps going and you need the sunshine and rosy parts but you also need the difficult heavy, challenging parts. That’s what makes the picture worthwhile. That’s what makes it beautiful. It’s all of those things.”
There is a grand intention to this book, McLean said.
“It’s to remind people that we all have a space, a strength and a voice in this world because that was kind of my realization through my own journey and I think we could all use that message,” McLean said.
Athlete
“I have always loved movement,” McLean said. “When I was younger and living on the reserve, running was probably one of my favourite things to do.”
She played soccer and basketball.
She didn’t live in a world where she knew that if she loved something that she could work really hard at it and with some luck do really well in basketball, McLean said.
“I had some natural athletic ability but around the eighth grade it was more about relationships, attention, boys,” McLean said. “It wasn’t about working hard for something you love. My friends were getting better and growing and that’s when I just kinda checked out.”
She drifted in and out of sport, still loving to run.
“I didn’t know it at that time but running was very meditative,” McLean said. “It was the space for me to think about possibilities, think about the future, think about the dreams that I had or anything that I would like to do. So I look back to that time and think how necessary it was for me to just move outdoors in nature.”
Fast forward to her mid-20s and she still felt the same way.
That’s when she found a crossfit gym with like-minded people.
“It was all about community and all about feeling strong,” McLean said. “That really clicked with me and I loved that. So I held on to that and I went down this 10-year path of finding ways to feel strong, not only for myself but for others because I started bringing that into education.”
McLean took certification training and started training young people.
“And it was awesome,” McLean said. “I don’t even know if I can tell you what it’s like when you see this little light switch go on when something clicks and you know they feel strong.”
McLean loves Olympic weightlifting which is a competitive strength sport where participants lift a barbell loaded with weight plates from the ground to overhead. Athletes compete in two specific ways of lifting the barbell overhead. The snatch is a wide-grip lift, in which the weighted barbell is lifted overhead in one motion. The clean and jerk is a combination lift, in which the weight is first taken from the ground to the front of the shoulders (the clean), and then from the shoulders to over the head (the jerk).
“I love Olympic weightlifting for its capacity to empower someone,” McLean said.
“And the reason I love that so much for others is that I know that when I had some sense of mastery in weightlifting I felt strong in the gym and I actually felt strong in all other parts of my life and that message was so important. That was probably one of the most powerful lessons I’ve ever learned and I wanted to share that with young people I worked with.”
When she left her work in education she did some community/high performance coaching for a little while.
And that evolution has come into the work she is doing now, McLean said.
Clothing Line and Giving Forward Program
She started her own athletic clothing brand called Skanii Athletics. The word ‘skanii’ is derived from the phrase in Gitxsan meaning on ‘top of the mountain’.
“I wanted something that was connected to my home community,” McLean said.
“We all have a strength, a voice and a space in the world, and that’s the message I want to get across. What I am trying to do is create a social movement through community.”
A very important lesson she has learned in education is about what people can become when you give them the space in the right environment to see for themselves how strong they can be, she added.
To demonstrate that even more strongly, McLean started Giving Forward as part of her business model at Skanii Athletics where future leaders are championed by amplifying underrepresented voices. Every purchase made helps provide sponsorship clothing packages to young leaders in sport and their communities while helping to tell their story. Indigenous communities often teach about reciprocal relationships - if you take something, you give something back. Guided by the principle of reciprocity, McLean believes in giving forward to those who uplift and inspire.
“The leadership development, that voice development is so necessary,” McLean said. “It’s also very powerful. It’s a huge opportunity in Truth & Reconciliation and that’s kind of what I want to do with that work, use it as a space to support young leaders. It’s all about building the next generation of leaders.”
For more information about McLean visit www.facebook.com/Skanii.Erica.McLean.
