Yellowknife election 2026: Cody Drygeese interview

Yellowknives Dene First Nation member Cody Drygeese is running for Yellowknife City Council. He wants to bring back an Indigenous relations role, create more affordable housing and increase foot traffic downtown.

Drygeese has worked in the environmental science field for more than 13 years at the Ekati diamond mine, with the Nechalacho rare minerals project, and as a senior engagement specialist for the Yellowknives Dene First Nation’s negotiations on the Arctic Economic and Security Corridor.

He said he wants to advocate for all Indigenous people in Yellowknife, not just YKDFN members, and wants to see the city’s Indigenous relations advisor brought back. It was created as a term position in 2018 and wasn’t renewed in 2019 after federal funding ran out.

Drygeese wants more events in the city’s downtown to increase foot traffic and revitalize the area. Another priority of his is bringing back dignity to people experiencing homelessness by providing toilets, showers, survival supplies and “whatever else they need to feel human again and to feel like they’re able to participate in society.”

Cabin Radio is aiming to interview all 21 candidates running for eight council seats. We have asked every candidate to list their four top priorities to guide those interviews.

Melissa Syer and Garett Cochrane are running for mayor. Cabin Radio hosted a mayoral candidates’ debate on October 5 at City Hall. You can watch the debate on Cabin Radio’s Facebook page or listen to it on Spotify.

Election day is October 19. Early voting began on October 5 and runs until October 16.

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This interview was recorded on October 5, 2026. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Miriam Bosiljevac: Why do you want to be a city councillor?

Cody Drygeese: I never felt really represented in any capacity at a municipal level. I know there have been Indigenous people at that level of government, but I’ve never seen a Yellowknives Dene First Nation member be there, and I always felt the Yellowknives Dene First Nation have been sidelined or informed afterwards.

What I want to do is to bring the municipal government and First Nation together. Not just participation, but ownership of decisions the city makes for the City of Yellowknife and decisions that affect Yellowknives Dene First Nation members of Dettah and Ndılǫ.

This is the biggest priority for me. I don’t want everything to be entirely about my Indigenous background, but that influences how I approach everything. That influences my decision-making. It’s very important to me that Indigenous people feel represented at that level.

I’m not just running for Yellowknives Dene First Nation members. I’m running to represent all Indigenous people because Yellowknife does have a lot of different groups here.

Your first priority is housing, which can be all kinds of different things. What specifically about housing do you see as being the most urgent concern?

More affordable housing. There are simply not enough houses for everybody in Yellowknife, and we need land to make that more available for everybody. I really liked the Housing First program that I believe the Yellowknife Women’s Society was running, that was a great option for people who have less access to affordable housing.

We need to support those kinds of programs to help more people into housing, but also get more land not just from the GNWT, but working with the GNWT and Yellowknives Dene First Nation around the city.

What do you see as city council’s role in that?

City council’s role is to create more available land. The city needs to get out of the way and allow more developers to use the land we are making available to them.

But also, like I said earlier, working with other governments. Not just get the land and give it to the city, and then the city just says, “OK, here you go, developers, take it away,” but working with organizations and the Yellowknives Dene First Nation to create more housing – not just affordable housing, but market rental housing and more housing for Yellowknives Dene First Nation members as well, because we have a lot of members living in the city and housing is hard to get.

What do you think can be done to improve downtown revitalization?

We need more foot traffic downtown.

When I was growing up, we had great events downtown all the time like Raven Mad Daze. We had a community arena in front of where City Hall is right now. There was the Caribou Carnival on Frame Lake when I was a kid, always things for residents to do. Now we’re living in a nine-to-five economy, stores close downtown and there’s just nothing happening for residents.

Part of what I want to do is to bring back a level of community spirit that I feel has been missing from Yellowknife. Yellowknife doesn’t have a spring carnival anymore. Everyone just goes to the Yellowknives Dene First Nation spring carnival. I don’t want to just pass everything off to the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and say, “You guys got this.” The City of Yellowknife can host more things in addition to YKDFN’s Spring Carnival.

You’ve talked about collaborating with outside groups. How do you plan to work with other council members on downtown revitalization?

What I like about the current slate of candidates is there are a lot of really good ideas on how downtown can be revitalized. A lot of candidates grew up here and know what the city used to look like and how busy downtown used to be.

What I want to do is discuss with my potential colleagues and see what are the barriers to downtown businesses staying open later. What’s causing people to hop in their car and just go back uptown at the end of the workday and not stay down here? Talk to businesses to see what they need from the city to to be open later, to hold more events and what they need from us to continue bringing things back down here. One of my main tenets is just collaboration with everybody, with my colleagues and with organizations that want to host things but don’t have the space to.

One of your other priorities is homeless population rights. What does that mean to you?

That means bringing dignity back to our homeless population who are living in the encampments or walking the streets or utilizing our shelters in the city. I have a personal connection to some of the residents of the homeless encampment and it just breaks my heart that there’s not much being done for them. Or if there is things being done for them, they are excluded just because of addictions or whatever else that may be influencing them to respond to things with a background of trauma and they’re not like acceptable to Yellowknife society.

To me, it just feels like a lot of downtown residents and businesses, they’re not really treating them with a lot of dignity, and I want to talk to our homeless population and see how can the city help them not just getting them housing, but how can we bring them like basic dignity while they’re experiencing this.

How do you propose city council can achieve this, or at least what are some of the first steps?

Providing basic services to them, like bringing toilets out there and bringing them showers and other basic survival supplies and whatever else they need to feel human again and to feel like they’re able to participate in society.

Another thing too is housing them. No matter where they are, no matter what their background is, no matter how they approach things or people, making sure people are housed because you can’t recover from addictions if you’re not housed. You need access to housing, you need access to a place to sleep and a place to hang your clothes, a place to shower. If you don’t have that, you don’t have the basic dignity.

What I want Yellowknife City Council to do is to make more homes available through programs like Housing First, through more affordable housing downtown, through more development, and making things more available for other organizations to help assist with that. I know the Yellowknives Dene First Nation about six years ago hosted a on-the-land healing camp, and I think that was a very positive a positive thing for people struggling with addictions or whatever else they had.

What do you see as being the next steps for Indigenous reconciliation and participation as a councillor?

The City of Yellowknife used to have an Indigenous relations advisor term position that worked out of City Hall. When that term ended, they simply did not continue that role, and I think that was a mistake. It has to be a full-time representative of the city who will outlast the next term of council and always be the in-between Indigenous governments and the City of Yellowknife. Being a mayor is a full-time position. Being a chief is a full-time position. They don’t have time to always meet, they don’t have time to sit down at the table. But with an Indigenous relations advisor, if the chiefs ever want to talk to the city and they’re unable to get a hold of the mayor or they’re not meeting with the mayor or the city council as often as they’d like to, there would be an Indigenous relations advisor who will be that intergovernmental connection.

It’s not enough to elect an Indigenous person, it’s not enough to elect a Yellowknives Dene member. There has to be some level of continuity that will be there for years to come, and someone who will be able to tell council if we are following the reconciliation action plan, or if the reconciliation action plan even works for the City of Yellowknife and the Indigenous governments that interact with the city.

I imagine the Indigenous relations advisor role would also be a person for the residents in the City of Yellowknife to be that connection, to be that community person that they can go to. Just someone being a connection for the average Indigenous resident of Yellowknife.

If elected, I want to be like that person that the average Indigenous person can just say, “Hey, Cody, here’s what I think about the city. Here’s what we can do.” I’m not going to be a person pretending I have all the answers, or that I’m going to solve all of the city’s problems, but I’ll be a person that a resident of Ndılǫ, a resident of Dettah, or any other Indigenous person living in the city, they can just come up to me and just talk to me about their concerns and their issues as Indigenous people in the city, and I’d be happy to do that. But if there was a Indigenous relations advisor, they would have someone they can go to if I’m not elected or if the next term there are no Indigenous people. Someone who maybe not speaks their language, but understands them and thinks like them. Of course it would probably have to be an Indigenous person in that role.

Separate from this role, what do you feel is City Council’s role in terms of Indigenous reconciliation and participation?

I believe the city should be represented by Indigenous people. I’ve been seeing a lot of comments on social media saying that there should be an Indigenous majority, and I agree that there should be more Indigenous people getting involved and participating, but they have to be the right people. They have to be people who are ready and willing to be a public figure and be community participants, but also be people who can help the city, who can guide the city in their work on reconciliation.

If we have more Indigenous people on city council, we can look at things differently and look at things outside of the box and not just do things the way they’ve always been doing. Because Indigenous people haven’t always been on city council, and particularly not Yellowknives Dene First Nation members. We have an active stake in how the city evolves and grows. We’ve been here before the city has been here and we’ve had little to no influence over how the city has been run over the past 90 or so years, and I’d like to bring that voice to council to look at things differently and look at like why are things the way they are? How do we approach things in a Dene way.

Why should people vote for you?

I am a team player. I am a collaborator. Through my work on the Arctic Economic and Security Corridor for the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, we had to come to a consensus with the Tłı̨chǫ Government. The two First Nations haven’t always seen eye-to-eye. Coming to a consensus on this major project took a lot of work and it took a lot of collaboration. It took a lot of working together with different personalities and different ideas of how things should be. I’m a great collaborator, I’m great at working with others, and I think people know that the Yellowknives Dene First Nation are from this territory and they know that we’ve always been underrepresented.

Having me there is a step in the right direction. We’re not going to be able to say that the city solved reconciliation and we figured it out, but we can at least start a new path and a new era where Indigenous people are not just consulted or informed afterwards, but participating in the planning and the implementation of ideas and ownership of those decisions. Be the deciders, be the ones saying this is what the city should be doing, this is how the city should look like. And ownership of ideas from a Dene perspective is the way I think it should be going forward.

To voters, I just say what do you want your city to look like going forward, and how do you want to be represented, and what does Indigenous participation look like to you? Is it checking off a box, or is it bringing Indigenous perspectives to the table?