The founder of Iskwew Air, Teara Fraser is a proud disrupter in the aviation industry, creating opportunities for women and Indigenous Peoples
When the extraordinary women at Iskwew Air aren’t blazing trails across the sky, you can find them doing it on the ground. Owner Teara Fraser is a Métis woman who named the airline as an act of reclamation. The Cree word, Iskwew (pronounced Iss-kway-yo), means woman. “The name represents reclamation of womanhood, reclamation of matriarchal leadership and reclamation of language,” says Fraser. Cree is the language of some of the matriarchs in Fraser’s family and she uses it to honour them.
Fraser got her pilot’s license at age 30 and fell in love with aviation. She launched her first company, Kîsik Aerial Survey, in 2009. Iskwew Air was born in 2019 after Fraser became aware of a gap in air service to Indigenous communities on the southern coast of British Columbia. It is the first airline in Canada to be founded and owned by an Indigenous woman. Iskwew Air makes regular hops between Vancouver and Qualicum Beach and runs charter flights around the province.
The airline is guided by some cherished communal values. “As Indigenous Peoples, we are taught to do good with the things that we learn and the knowledge that we hold,” Fraser says. Sometimes those values target societal inequities. “The vision for the company is to be disruptive in our industry which is very male dominated with very little diversity, and to uplift women, Indigenous Peoples and communities,” she adds.
Fraser acknowledges that sexism and racism exist in the industry, but she prefers to focus on women’s accomplishments and celebrate them. One of Iskwew Air’s own pilots, Iranian-born Ziba Afshari, overcame multiple barriers to become a Canadian pilot. She is one of only a few women to earn a pilot’s license in Iran, a country of 100 million. Afshari started her training in a classroom with only three women.
“I remember I had an instructor who asked about our goals and our future plans,” Afshari says. “And when I told him I wanted to be an airline pilot, [the class] all laughed, and were like, ‘Are you kidding, you want to be an airline pilot?’ But at the end of the day, I was the only person in that classroom who finished the training and got all the licenses and all the ratings.”
Afshari moved to Canada, retrained in her profession and joined Iskwew Air last summer. “I’m happy that my first year of flying with an airline is with Iskwew Air. I’m proud of it.”
This is the kind of female victory-over-adversity story Fraser loves to celebrate. “It’s awe-inspiring!”
Just as inspiring is Kiana Hill, chief operating officer at Iskwew Air and Fraser’s daughter. “Growing up as a child of a pilot, you do one of two things: you love aviation and you aspire to be in it yourself, or you see the sacrifices and the compromises that it asks and you want nothing to do with it.” Hill says she was of the latter camp for most of her life.
Hill forged her own path, earning a master’s degree in leadership. She ran research projects with Indigenous youth across Canada and helped get Iskwew Air off the ground whenever she could. A shift came when Hill went on maternity leave. Hill was amazed that her mother had managed to grow an airline through a pandemic. “Teara had persevered through that and we were really at the stage of growth. I found myself keen to come back part-time and pick up some of what we were working on together. And that fell into an unexpected love of aviation,” Hill says.
In Canada, less than five per cent of pilots are women. Iskwew Air is working to change that.
“The fact that we have as many women on the team as we have is remarkable,” says Hill. Only 2.3 per cent of Aircraft Maintenance Engineers (AMEs) in Canada are women. At Iskwew Air, all but one of the maintenance crew are women and two are Indigenous. “We’re so proud of Kristen McAdam who is our maintenance lead and one of those very few AMEs in our country,” Fraser says.
In 2023, Fraser launched elibird aero, in Delta, B.C. The aero tech company has a focus on electric and hydrogen power, remotely piloted aircraft systems and airspace integration. “We want to reduce our footprint and walk more softly on planet Earth,” she says.
Recently, Iskwew Air received the great news that their Approved Maintenance Organization (AMO) certificate was amended by Transport Canada to include an electric aircraft, making it one of only a handful of AMOs in the country to achieve that.
Iskwew Air is a founding member of the Canadian Advanced Air Mobility Consortium. “Recently, we were privileged to be part of a Canadian delegation to Silicon Valley for discussions on how to help advance sustainable aviation,” Fraser says. With its forward-thinking ethos, communal values, and intentional focus on sustainability, Iskwew Air occupies some truly rarefied air. No doubt they will keep blazing trails.
(Source: Vancouver Sun, Hilary Klassen and Content Works, Postmedia. Photos/Josh Neufeld.)
