Rebuilding relationships: The path to the Gorman-OIB partnership
By Andrew Snook
Trust is earned, not given. This is true in most relationships in life, whether they are personal or business related. In the case of the relationship between the Gorman Group and the Osoyoos Indian Band (OIB), the path to the forest management partnership that was signed this past July took many years to forge.
The recently announced forest management partnership between the Gorman Group’s Similkameen Forest Products Ltd. (SFP) and the OIB, through its forestry company, Nk’Mip Forestry LLP (Nk’Mip), began back in 2018 under the Weyerhaeuser’s ownership long before the company sold its Princeton, B.C. lumber mill to the Gorman Group in 2025. As Norm Druck, Gorman Group’s woodlands manager for South Zone recalls, it wasn’t a smooth path. “OIB leadership, hunters, and community members had lost confidence in forestry in their backyard, and that’s where the conversation started.”
The Weyerhaeuser and OIB leaderships, along with government representatives, were meeting to try and find a path forward that would work for all parties and rebuild trust in the sector.
“How do we solve this impasse? How do we get confidence back into forestry, given their territorial rights, given that the Tree Farm License TFL 59 is adjacent to all their core territorial claims and land claims. It was a lot of tough discussions, a lot of listening,” Druck says.
To help rebuild the trust of the community, Weyerhaeuser paused operations on numerous projects in the area around TFL 59, which covers about 46,500 hectares of land east of Oliver, B.C. within OIB territory. To help the OIB through the heavily regulated landscape of B.C. forestry, they hired professional forester Dan Macmaster, the current Forestry Manager for Nk’Mip Forestry.
“Weyerhaeuser did a good job in the tail end as we were putting together this understanding of managing that important piece of land, that important tenure to the Osoyoos Indian Band,” Macmaster says.
OIB and Weyerhaeuser started to pave a new path forward by drafting and signing a partnership agreement that was originally signed in April 2025. Fortunately, when Weyerhaeuser sold its mill and transferred its tenures in TFL 59 to the Gorman Group a short time afterwards, the OIB already had an evolving relationship with the company.
Under the new Gorman Group leadership led initially by Nick Arckle and then by current CEO Ashlee Cribb, the company collaboratively reviewed the partnership agreement with OIB.
“Things had been so successful since April 2025 that we rewrote the partnership agreement with Ashlee, Nick, Dan Macmaster, and eventually, this led to the signing with Nick, Ashlee, Chief Louie, Dan, and myself on July 20,” Druck recalls.
Cribb says building that trust as the new owners of the tenure and being transparent was extremely important for continuing to build a strong relationship with the OIB.
“Norm and the team that came to work for Gorman from Weyerhaeuser had that continuity with Dan, but then you also have to believe that the leadership has that same commitment to trust and to transparency and integrity,” Cribb says. “That’s something I feel incredibly strong about.”
Macmaster says that TFL 59 is of great importance to OIB Chief Clarence Louie and the entire community.
“Chief Louie refers to this land as the OIB community’s backyard and their freezer,” Macmaster says. “We’re looking at a piece of land that provides not just food, but also recreation, habitat and timber production… its proximity to the community itself, the importance of everything from water, plants, animals, and everything in between became important to make this deal.”
During the original announcement of the partnership on Sept. 9, Chief Louie stated that the partnership would help create more jobs, specific training opportunities, and longer-term revenue for the Osoyoos Indian Band and its people.
“This agreement gives the OIB a stronger and more involved role in the forest economy within our traditional territory and helps us build the skills and experience needed to take on greater responsibility in the future. Our goal is to make sure more of the economic benefits from forestry in the OIB’s backyard stay in our community,” Chief Louie stated.
Putting together the forest management partnership was a fairly complicated process, Macmaster notes.
“With the management of this tenure being turned over to the Osoyoos Indian Band, we needed to ensure we have the capacity, knowledge and skills to properly manage the land. I’m proud to say we have a number of forest tenures that we currently manage and have combined stewardship values and timber production on all of them.”
As any professional forester would know, there are many complexities to be navigated in managing a forest from the cutting permits to looking at a certain stand right through to the end and ensuring that it’s free growing again and ready for the next cut, Macmaster says.
“We wanted to make sure that’s outlined in the agreement. That there’s an understanding of accountability and responsibility at every step, because this is an important tenure for multiple objectives and values. Timber is only one objective, and I could name off another 50. So, it’s important that we all understood as partners that that’s one component, but we need to be involved in so much more on the land, and so that’s what came through,” he says.
One of the other priorities high on the list of the OIB was wildfire mitigation management, especially after the Inkaneep Creek wildfire in 2021.
“It really devastated a good chunk of the land up there. People always think a wildfire whips through but now nothing’s going to burn there for another 50 years, which is absolutely untrue,” Macmaster says.
If left unchecked the dead fuels add additional risks for future wildfires. The OIB wants to actively manage those areas to better protect the ecosystem, resources and the surrounding communities.
With the new partnership, Nk’Mip will be directing the planning and forest development work, cultural assessments, the community liaison role, pile burning, and environmental monitoring. As part of the OIB’s reforestation work, it also operates its own full seedling nursery on reserve, a partnership with K&C Silviculture based out of Oliver, B.C.
Druck says doing field tours, learning from one another in the field, making sure we understand the values, and making sure that we respect those values while working collaboratively and in partnership will rebuild confidence in forestry.
