To say it's B.C.'s Attawapiskat would be a stretch - the Red Cross hasn't been called in to provide relief supplies after all.
But a visit to the Yekooche First Nation's main reserve at the northwest arm of Stuart Lake, about 85 kilometres northwest of Fort St. James shows the community has its challenges.
There are roughly 215 band members but only about 90 live on the reserve and one would be hard pressed to agree even with that number - fire a cannonball down the main road and all you would hit is the RCMP SUV patrolling the area.
Even on a bright sunny winter's day, people remained huddled in their homes, waiting.
When Henry Joseph, who was the Yekooche chief for a tumultuous five months before he was ousted this week, drives out to the reserve, he shares a two-bedroom home with eight others, most of them either his children or grandchildren.
A large mattress occupies most of the living room, where there once was linoleum is a bare, plywood floor, moulding around the door frames is missing as are most of the cupboard doors in the small kitchen off the living room area.
Doors are also missing from the main closet where clothes are piles in a heap although the boots and shoes are laid out in an orderly way. Other than Joseph, 59, the occupants are young people, none more than 25 years old, and, with the Steve Miller Band blaring out of a sound system in one of the bedrooms, the atmosphere is like a college dorm, minus the hope and optimism.
It's not quite as bad down the road where Clayton Cameron, 30, and Caroline Joseph, 35, live with their five-month old son, Za Marie, teenage sons Jordan, 16, and Jonas, 18, and 80-year-old elder Alfred Joseph.
Even so, it's a 900-square-foot home and, due to a lack of closets, coats are hung up on nails pounded into a wall. Moulding also remains missing from the door frames but there is a mud room at the entrance.
"I don't want to live here but I have no choice because all the houses they're either condemned or they've got somebody living there that's not suppose to be living there anyway," Caroline Joseph complained.
The band council has been playing favourites with renting out the houses, asserted Cameron who claimed they had lived in a better home at one point, only to see it turned over to another band member.
"They come and tell us 'move out of there,' and they'll renovate it for us, so we were all happy so we moved here," said Cameron, who collects $808 per month in Employment Insurance while Caroline Joseph receives $375 in social assistance. "And then they gave that house to someone else."
There are other oddities. A row of two-storey homes, each large enough to hold six bedrooms, sit boarded up, while at least three other homes that burned down have not been rebuilt.
A recently-completed $4.7-million health centre sits unoccupied due to mechanical troubles. And there is a cement walking bridge over a river that runs through the community that cost $350,000 yet appeared unused except by the local dogs.
There are signs of hope. The reserve's centrepiece is the Jean Marie Joseph School. Built in 1994, the same year the Yekooche broke away from the Tl'azt'en Nation, it is covered with an eye-catching white roof in the shape of a stylized soaring eagle and is large enough to teach 20 students in three classrooms, Grades kindergarten to Grade 9.
There is also a provincial Head Start program in place to prepare children under six for the formal schooling they face in the years ahead.
That said, Attawapiskat may be an overstatement but still holds a "some truth," said Partner Schielke, who regained the chief's position this week following a struggle with Henry Joseph after he was elected to the position in late September.
"There's too much animosity in such a small community," Schielke said, particularly because family allegiances can come into conflict with the good of the community.
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It's been a highly charged atmosphere around the Yekooche finance office in Prince George for the last few months following an upset win by Henry Joseph in late September.
Joseph drew 37 votes to 22 for runner up Allan Joseph, who had been chief for nine years prior to Schielke winning four years ago. Schielke was third with 17 and Henry Joseph had what he called a "sizeable majority."
He also claimed the majority of his support came from off the reserve among people who were "tormented away" but want to return. The rhetoric did not end there - talk of corruption, financial mismanagement, bribery and threats filled the air prior to the vote.
And when the count was done, the fight had only just begun.
Henry Joseph's opponents claimed he had bought drinks for supporters and used threats against others but when no one stepped forward during a hearing in December, the vote was upheld and his name was posted on the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) website as the chief until January 2014.
There was relative peace for a spell but then Joseph started to make bold but controversial moves. He declared a "breather" on treaty talks which had reached stage five of the six stage process, indicated he was going to scrap agreements to get a logging business up and running and suggested he was going to take a harder line on the Enbridge pipeline project.
Perhaps most important, he launched wholesale firing of band employees - about 30 are on the payroll according to Schielke supporters - in the name of reducing wages and salaries while also rooting out what he claimed were inefficiencies and favouritism.
That prompted a backlash that began with a protest at the office and was followed by a recall vote that Joseph refused to recognized, claiming it contravened the band's custom election code.
But others argued otherwise. In nine days, 69 of the band's 143 eligible voting members signed the petition, more than the 40 per cent threshold claimed to be needed to force a second vote.
And then another election on Feb. 16. Schielke emerged the winner with 29 votes to Allan Joseph's 14.
Complicating matters, a letter dated Feb. 17 recounting a Feb. 7 meeting between Joseph and AANDC officials stated they have received information that the code has no recall provisions and therefore will continue to "record" Joseph as chief.
Rather than running in the election, Joseph handed out statements to members reflecting that position, stating he is the only recognized elected chief for the Yekooche.
However, by this week AANDC - Joseph's name was no longer on the ministry's website as the Yekooche's chief, replace by Partner Schielke's. Asked to explain the change, AANDC officials limited their comments to an e-mailed response:
"The Yekooche First Nation selects its leadership in accordance with its own selection process, outside the election provisions of the Indian Act
"The department has been informed of the change of leadership at Yekooche First Nation, which holds it's elections under a custom code process.
"Any specific questions with respect to Yekooche's custom election process should be directed to the community for response."
Schielke, meanwhile, said AANDC changed its mind in a response letter from the band's lawyer following the vote.
Bill Wilson, the noted B.C. native leader who helped draft the first and only amendment to Canada's constitution, was brought in by Joseph for a spell to provide advice. They parted ways after a falling out but Wilson remains a Joseph supporter and isn't taking AANDC's decision at face value.
"I've been involved in this business for 50 years and I have seen this kind of manipulation from Indian Affairs a hundred times, where actual interference with chief's elections, even fielding and funding candidates who are known and easily controlled against chiefs that are progressive and continuing to foment dissent within a group that is generally weak with all due respect to Henry," Wilson said this week.
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Talk to Henry Joseph and Partner Schielke comes across as something of an ogre.
But meet him in person and he comes across as a youthful-looking 35-year-old with an affable demeanour.
Like Joseph when interviewed, Schielke was cooperative, fielding questions while also juggling phone calls, addressing supporters concerns and hearing out the police as he stood in front of the Yekooche's Third Avenue band office in Prince George on Wednesday evening.
"He went about things totally the wrong way," Schielke said of Joseph. "When he got elected in, he started trying firing people too fast and when you get into a seat like that, you can't just just fire 10 people off the hop and then try and hire different people.
"Under our governance policies, it states it has to go through community members."
Schielke took the high road in answer to Joseph's heated talk.
"I just let him go because there's no sense in standing there arguing with the guy and bickering about it," Schielke said. "It's easier to let the process resolve itself and having the policies and having someone support those policies."
Pressed on Joseph's claim that there are almost as many teaching assistants as children at the school on the band's payroll, Schielke maintained the number is three student support workers to go along with the four teachers for 16 students.
As for the boarded up houses, Schielke said they were occupied as recently as four years ago.
"They just up an left the houses and people were partying in them," Schielke said. "So what I'd done last summer was I finally got council to support me on cleaning every house out - taking the garbage out of all of the houses - and we boarded them up because people were stripping them for stoves and washers."
According to AANDC records, the band's operating budget is about $3 million per year with funding allotted to various projects and services - the band's administration budget is about $175,000. In terms of debt, Schielke said much of it is related to housing for people who moved off the reserve and never signed away the house.
"Then the vandalism and everything took place," Schielke said. "And when that person comes back and works for the nation, we accept them back in but then we say 'o.k., we have legal right to dock 25 per cent of your wages to pay for the damages of the past and then they get all upset and they leave again."
He said rebuilding the homes that have burned down has been complicated by the fact that they remain registered with the T'lazt'en, and the health centre will remain closed until Carrier Sekani Family Services sends in someone to do the repairs.
The walking bridge was built before Schielke's time as chief. It replaced a wooden bridge large enough to support vehicles but it's used in the summer when the water is flowing but Schielke said it's in a bad location because there are no houses beyond the spot.
Adding to the woes, the main reserve sits on a high water table - dig down six feet and you'll strike water, Schielke said.
On Enbridge pipeline, Schielke said the band had not taken any position. Joseph had also been maintaining a neutral position when talking to most media but in an interview with the Citizen, he said he planned to "tear up the cheque" from Enbrige at a potlatch in April.
Wilson admits he's never met Schielke and despite an "ugly falling out," remains a Joseph supporter. However, he also described Joseph as someone who refused help when he needed it and overplayed his hand.
"He got on that high horse and I was very surprised with that and quite disappointed," Wilson said. "I've seen it a thousand times before but he's like a guy who doesn't know how to swim and you've got a life raft and you're trying to help him into it but he doesn't like the colour of it."
Wilson also indicated Joseph was turning to family members to fill positions, noting that Joseph's office manager is the adopted daughter of his wife.
"It's time for Indians to put the knives away from each other's stomachs and backs and stand up on their own two feet and do something," Wilson said. "That's what I thought Henry had the chance to do and clearly, he did, but he seems to have ignored it in favour of family and nepotism and I think just sort of in over his head."
Joseph hasn't given up, asserting Schielke's supporters were able to get the locks changed on the finance office under false pretenses.
"I know that I'm right, I'll stand my ground," Joseph said Friday, a day after the old guard had moved back in.
