"Native Woman Has Intimidating Task"

VANCOUVER (CP) - Being the first woman elected to the Fort Nelson Indian band council was an intimidating experience for Carole Corcoran.

Not only was she the first female to break into a traditionally male-dominated group in 1980, but Corcoran was half the age of the other councillors.

Now she is in a similar situation as the only northerner, the only native Indian and the youngest member of the Citizen's Forum on Canada's Future.

Corcoran was appointed last month by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to the 12-member panel set up to ask Canadians what kind of Constitution they want.

She said she expects being on the panel will be similar to her early days on the band council. She will have to yell to be heard.

Corcoran, 35, had a rough time 10 years ago when she was elected to replace her father after his retirement from band politics.

The band had just been awarded $20 million from the B.C. government in a natural gas royalties settlement. Councillors decided to use the money to build new houses and Corcoran had difficulty persuading them to put some of it toward a school.

"These were the old boys that had been there forever," she said with a smile.

But Corcoran, then a pre-school teacher and single mother of three, finally persuaded them to build a reserve school that taught native culture and language.

She moved to Vancouver in 1985. Two years later she entered the faculty of law at the University of British Columbia and, after graduation, accepted an articling job with a Prince George firm. That will have to wait, however, while she serves on the citizen's forum.

At first Corcoran wondered why an unknown native woman had been named to the panel and feared she might be the "token Indian.

"I thought, maybe it's an easy way for him (Mulroney) to avoid controversy. He gets a woman, he gets an Indian, he gets a northerner. The only thing I'm not is handicapped. He basically killed a lot of birds with one stone."

Corcoran said she lived in the North long enough to know urbanites often dismiss the opinions of rural Canadians - something that "drives me up the wall.

"We're a small Indian band. We're in the far North. We live in little communities with a simple way of life. But that doesn't mean we have simple minds."