Meet Teara Fraser of Iskwew Air, Canada’s First Indigenous- and Feminine-owned Airline

There are 72,428 FAA-certified feminine pilots at present, accounting for lower than 10 p.c of all pilots and simply 8.5 p.c of business pilots. It is a male-dominated trade, little question, however the ladies represented within the skies are not any shrinking violets. Simply look to Teara Fraser, pilot and founding father of Iskwew Air—Canada’s first Indigenous- and female-owned airline—and a winner in Journey + Leisure‘s 2025 World Imaginative and prescient Awards.

“The naming of the airline was intentional,” Fraser says of her firm’s title, which interprets to “lady” in Cree, a language spoken by some Métis folks, an Indigenous group that Fraser additionally belongs to. It symbolizes a reclamation of womanhood, matriarchal management, and language. “It was about disrupting present programs and advocating for fairness,” she provides.

The dream of captaining folks to their locations did not hit Fraser till later in life, throughout a fateful flight as a passenger hovering over Botswana’s Okavango Delta. “This was probably the most pivotal moments of my life,” Fraser says. “I returned to Canada and began my flight coaching. A yr later, I had my pilot’s license.”

Nonetheless, the leap from pilot to airline proprietor was no straightforward process. In 2018, she introduced her plans to begin the airline and acquired her working license in October of 2019—only a few months earlier than the worldwide pandemic modified how we journey endlessly. However nonetheless, she persevered, making certain her firm supplied equitable alternatives for everybody. She even based the Elevate Collective, a nonprofit that oversees the Give Them Wings program, which offers mentorship and flight coaching to younger folks.

“I wished to indicate my daughter, who’s my eldest baby, that she may very well be something she wished to be,” Fraser says. 

Nonetheless, Fraser did not cease there; she has additionally made it her mission to assist our world setting. Fraser’s airline offsets is emissions by shopping for credit from the Nice Bear Forest Carbon Challenge, which converts areas used for logging into protected forests. It additionally occurs to be the primary carbon offset mission utilized in Indigenous territories. 

However that is not all. Fraser can be a board member of the Aerial Evolution Affiliation of Canada, the place she helps bridge the hole between “conventional air service and the sustainable know-how of the longer term,” additional working towards “decolonizing, decarbonizing, and reworking the aviation trade for a greater future for people, all of our family members, and Mom Earth.”

She’s additionally a founding companion within the Canadian Superior Air Mobility consortium, which goals to streamline analysis and growth of each zero-emission plane and emergency service programs to higher help city and rural communities.

“Culturally, we’re taught to do good with the information and expertise we have been blessed with,” Fraser says. She’s decided to make the skies a extra inclusive area—and we’re all higher off for it. 

“I all the time say that getting my wings gave me wings for all the pieces else in my life,” Fraser says. “It gave me braveness and inspiration, and taught me the worth of onerous work—and the sensation of triumph that comes from it.”