Nena La Caille

Of mixed European and Seneca ancestry, Nena was born and raised along the New York Pennsylvania border.  As a young adult she moved to southern Ontario and has lived around the Great Lakes all her life.  While she has traveled extensively in North and Central America, her work experience has been exclusively in Canada among Indigenous peoples.With over 45 years in Indigenous organizations, Nena has worked in the field of community development including: Native Way Education, Aboriginal Family Support, as well as human resource and organizational development training.  Nena worked for many years as a trainer/developer for the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centers. She became the first executive director for the Enaahtig Healing Lodge and Learning Centre in 1995, a position she still holds today.Throughout her career, Nena has had the opportunity to learn and study with numerous Elders and Traditional people and has actively incorporated those teachings into her personal and professional life. A mother of four, grandmother to four and foster mother to dozens, Nena resides with members of her family at the family horse farm in south central Ontario.  Aside from breeding and training horses, the farm strives to maintain indigenous seed stock through planting, sharing and storing seeds.With her busy schedule, Nena strives to stay in tune with the changing times and is usually at some government table or community board, assisting where possible in the development of our collective community, ensuring that our voice and views are shared.Often, Nena now shares from a collective memory over the past 40 – 50 years and serves as a resource for the ongoing development of community programs and initiatives whenever possible.