Wendy Jael shakes the hand of the Library's Director Paul Burry

By Tommy Osborne

PG Library

PG Library welcomes first Lheidli T’enneh board member

Jan 24, 2025 | 3:36 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The Prince George Public Library Board announced that Wendy Jael, a Lheidli T’enneh Councillor, will be joining the Library’s board as its first Indigenous board member. This move has been in the works for years, and both Jael and the Library are excited to finally have her on board.

“There is more than books here, and I’d like to bring that forward and bring that out to the community and also the surrounding communities,” Jael said.

“We know she’s doing so much for her own, she’s an elected official for Lheidli T’enneh, so she has that experience, that governance experience. To have her coming and bringing not only that experience, but that perspective and those learnings to our table to share them with us is just going to be fantastic, and we look forward to learning together and sharing together and just improving what the library has to offer and how we’re supporting our patrons and the community,” said Board Chair Anna Duff.

The PG Library Board was hoping to get an Indigenous board member for years, but the BC Library Act says you can only serve on a library’s board if you live in the municipality. However, after years of working with the City and the Regional District, the PG Library was able to finally get Jael on the board, as the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation is a key part of the Prince George community despite being outside of the municipality.

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“We are one of the first libraries in the province to actually be exploring this, to have people appointed to our board from outside the municipal boundary. I’m also on the BC Library Trustees Association board, so this is something I’m sharing in conversation at that board table to to share our experiences, our learnings, so other libraries across the province can maybe follow suit if they have a need,” Duff said.

“We’ve been working more and more with different agencies and different communities and different companies to spring forth not only Lheidli heritage and our nation, but also to bring everybody together as one,” Jael said.

Jael brings a lot of experience and passion with her, as she explained she has spent countless hours at the library with her family.

“I’m really excited about it because over the years my grandkids grew up in the library, my older ones, anyway, they’re in their 20s now. They used to come to the library regularly and that’s where we spent our weekends and stuff like that,” Jael said.

Having built so many positive memories and experiences at the library, Jael hopes to bring more ideas and programming to the library to continue serving community members of all backgrounds.

“I just try to encourage everybody to come to the library. Just look them up, there’s always something fun going on. There’s not only books here, there’s family, there’s community, there’s knowledge in all different forms,” Jael said.

“When I used to come here they (library staff) were welcoming, like anything we needed, as soon as you came in, somebody would notice that we walked in because I had six kids trailing me. That was my my biggest thing is that, you know, the welcoming,” she continued, when speaking about the positive environment.

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