FORT ST. JAMES, BC — A home described as the first of its kind now stands in the Nak’azdli Whuten community near Fort St. James, BC. The home is a prototype for an Indigenous-led housing system that uses low-grade locally-sourced wood to produce prefabricated housing kits for northern communities. The concept is to take trees from the local territory, mill them locally, and then have local workers use that lumber to build panels, which are then used to construct a house in a matter of days. …The pilot project was born out of a collaboration between Nak’azdli Whuten Development Corp. and Deadwood Innovations, a forestry startup based in Fort St. James. They partnered with researchers at the University of Northern British Columbia’s Wood Innovation Research Lab to develop the prefabricated mass timber panel system.

Additional coverage in the Vancouver Sun by Derrick Penner: Indigenous development company looks to carve niche in mass-timber housing construction in rural B.C.