Page 78 - 08-Nov-Dec-2024

ANTU CHICAHUALA
PRESIDENT, ACCUSTEEL HEAVY HAUL TRAILERS
AGE 35
Among the icy land- scape of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, at the largest oil field in North America,
after he went back to school. “I grabbed a credit card, and
I went to Best Buy, and I bought
a computer. I called SolidWorks and bought a licence. I set up a little desk in the corner inside of
a Sea-Can. Said, ‘OK, now we have an engineering department — now what?’”
After running the engineer-
ing department for nine years, Chicahuala realized he was going to take over the family business — which meant he needed to figure out how to run one.
After three years as the com- pany’s vice president, he got an MBA, and today runs his family’s business as president with the values of honesty and hard work he got from his dad.
“I think he was instrumental
in not writing out and officializing our core values, but he lived them and instilled them in us.”
— LIAM NEWBIGGING
sits one of Antu Chicahuala’s most monstrous creations.
To move a drilling rig between well sites, Chicahuala’s company was contracted to design and build a custom trailer to stack the several thousand pounds worth of equipment “like Jenga” with the mast 150 feet in the air.
“It looks scary,” Chicahuala says. “Looks like a skyscraper.”
While a sizable business today, just under 30 years ago, Chica- huala’s parents were running Accusteel out of a family garage and barely broke even. His par- ents, who moved to Canada from Argentina, built up the busi- ness gradually, with Chicahuala eventually working for them as a mechanic and then an engineer
78 EDify. NOVEMBER•DECEMBER.24
JUSTINE MAGEAU
LAWYER AT WITTEN LLP
AGE 37
follow her calling: fighting for the language rights of Francophones in a predominantly English-speaking part of Canada.
But she found a second calling: represent- ing Indigenous groups fighting for rights recognition and their inherent rights to self-government.
While she’s not Indigenous, she was part of a legal team that represented a Métis band in Fort Chipewyan in its battle with the province over mineral rights. She was part of a legal team that argued a case about Métis self-determination rights at the Feder- al Court of Canada.
“When I first came into it, there was
a huge learning curve,” she says. “As a non-Indigenous person, who didn’t have background in Aboriginal law, there was a big obstacle there of sorting out in my own mind what were the stereotypes and prej- udices I had learned over the course of my life — and what was actual fact? We have so many misunderstandings that are ingrained into people.”
So, it’s about spreading messages that, no, the government does not write blank cheques to Indigenous nations. There is a right to self-determination.
She believes we’re on the cusp of many legal breakthroughs when it comes to Indig- enous rights.
“We’re in such amazing times, from a legal perspective, in terms of where the In- digenous right to self-government is going. The Indigenous right to self-government has not been widely recognized by the Supreme Court. Until now, the Supreme Court has decided cases based on anything other than the Indigenous right to self-government without making broad pronouncements on the topic. But that is not the future of Indig- enous law. I think we will see an explosion of cases.”
— STEVEN SANDOR
When Justine Mageau returned to Edmonton after finishing law school at the University of Ottawa, she thought she was going to
CT + TC