Science, Faculty of
Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for
DSpace
UBCV
Persaud, Anthony William
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
The legacy of settler-colonialism is manifest most potently as a dominant narrative that rationalizes First Nations compliance with Western-liberal institutions of common law, property and market-based economic growth. These have become de facto requirements for socio-economic improvements and well-being within First Nations communities. This dissertation challenges this assumption and narrative through an examination of the efforts of several First Nations in British Columbia as they pursue self-determination as central to their institutional and economic futures. I begin from the premise that the socio-economic and cultural-ecological condition of First Nations communities today is contingent upon the rules and governance structures imposed on First Nations as they interact with the settler-colonial state. Less recognized, however, are the multiple efforts of First Nations to redraw these structures and the logics that drive them through counter-institutionalizing processes. The dissertation comprises several studies of these processes, each of which are based on qualitative research conducted across four years working as a researcher and community development practitioner with First Nations in British Columbia, Canada. Chapter 2 highlights how First Nations are strategically positioning themselves – albeit in constrained ways – by leveraging the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate in order to strengthen territorial self-governance and jurisdiction. Chapter 3 examines the conflicting institutional logics at play within First Nations forestry-based social enterprises. Chapter 4 demonstrates how a growing number of First Nations communities are seeking to resolve exigent local housing challenges through the creative reformulation of relations of production, allocation and redistribution. Chapter 5 focuses on the institution of property within the context of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation as they seek to re-establish an institutional framework upon which they can take control of their title lands and new jurisdictions, while maintaining their values and visions for the future. Combined these chapters aim to make real the diverse economic efforts of First Nations and open up new possibilities to establish counter-institutional frameworks which prevail alongside or independent of capitalist and colonial pressures.
COUNTER-INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND THE ECONOMIC FUTURES OF FIRST NATIONS IN BRITISH COLUMBIA by Anthony William Persaud B.A., York University, 2008 M.A., University of Victoria, 2015 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Resources, Environment and Sustainability) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2020 © Anthony William Persaud, 2020 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: Counter-Institutionalization and the Economic Futures of First Nations in British Columbia submitted by Anthony William Persaud in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Resources, Environment and Sustainability Examining Committee: Dr. Terre Satterfield, Professor of Culture, Risk and the Environment, IRES, UBC Supervisor Dr. Harry Nelson, Associate Professor, Department of Forest Resources Management, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Jonaki Bhattacharyya, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Victoria Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Sheryl Lightfoot, Associate Professor, First Nations and Indigenous Studies, UBC University Examiner Dr. Leila Harris, Professor, IRES, UBC University Examiner iii Abstract The legacy of settler-colonialism is manifest most potently as a dominant narrative that rationalizes First Nations compliance with Western-liberal institutions of common law, property and market-based economic growth. These have become de facto requirements for socio-economic improvements and well-being within First Nations communities. This dissertation challenges this assumption and narrative through an examination of the efforts of several First Nations in British Columbia as they pursue self-determination as central to their institutional and economic futures. I begin from the premise that the socio-economic and cultural-ecological condition of First Nations communities today is contingent upon the rules and governance structures imposed on First Nations as they interact with the settler-colonial state. Less recognized, however, are the multiple efforts of First Nations to redraw these structures and the logics that drive them through counter-institutionalizing processes. The dissertation comprises several studies of these processes, each of which are based on qualitative research conducted across four years working as a researcher and community development practitioner with First Nations in British Columbia, Canada. Chapter 2 highlights how First Nations are strategically positioning themselves – albeit in constrained ways – by leveraging the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate in order to strengthen territorial self-governance and jurisdiction. Chapter 3 examines the conflicting institutional logics at play within First Nations forestry-based social enterprises. Chapter 4 demonstrates how a growing number of First Nations communities are seeking to resolve exigent local housing challenges through the creative reformulation of relations of production, allocation and redistribution. Chapter 5 focuses on the institution of property within the context of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation as iv they seek to re-establish an institutional framework upon which they can take control of their title lands and new jurisdictions, while maintaining their values and visions for the future. Combined these chapters aim to make real the diverse economic efforts of First Nations and open up new possibilities to establish counter-institutional frameworks which prevail alongside or independent of capitalist and colonial pressures. v Lay Summary Efforts to resolve long-standing socio-economic disparities within First Nations communities in British Columbia, Canada continue to be structured around models of governance and economic development that are often inappropriate to the goals and values of First Nations peoples. These prescriptions have predominantly failed to produce the kinds of benefits needed to improve First Nations individual and community well-being, and in many cases appear to inflict more harm than good. First Nations have responded to this challenge by way of measures designed to counter-act the negative effects of imposed developmental models. This dissertation seeks to highlight these diverse strategies, while also revealing opportunities that First Nations can pursue in support of their self-determined visions for economic futures. vi Preface This dissertation is my original, independent work. My advisory committee (Dr. Terre Satterfield, Dr. Harry Nelson, and Dr. Jonaki Bhattacharyya) have each provided valuable feedback throughout and have made different levels of contribution to each chapter, as discussed below. Additionally, aspects of the work benefitted from the field and networking support of Ecotrust Canada, a not-for-profit organization with whom I worked as a consultant throughout my PhD. Chapter 2 is derived from a technical study carried out as a part of my work with Ecotrust Canada. Interviews and surveys were equally designed and conducted by myself and Eliana MacDonald for the purposes of a report published by the Aboriginal Mapping Network entitled: “Referrals Software: an analysis of options”. After the publication of the report, I independently carried out an additional analysis of the results and developed an alternative conceptual framework for the writing of Chapter 2 of this dissertation. This article is now published in the journal Environment and Planning A. I am the lead author of this article and I wrote the first draft in its entirety. The second author Dr. Terre Satterfield provided important conceptual contributions and carried out multiple substantive reviews of the paper. The third author, Eliana Macdonald, contributed to the original data collection, conducted a review of the paper, and supported the process of validation of results with research participants. The full citation for this paper is as follows: Persaud AW, Satterfield T, Macdonald E. Counter-institutionalizing First Nation–Crown relations in British Columbia. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. vii 2020;52(8):1602-1621. Chapter 3 has been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I designed the research and conducted all of the interviews and analysis for this paper. I am the lead author and I wrote the first draft of this paper in its entirety. The co-authors, Dr. Harry Nelson and Dr. Terre Satterfield contributed conceptually to the paper and provided revisions in preparation of submission for publication. I intend to submit an abridged version of Chapter 4 for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I am the lead author and I wrote the first draft of this paper in its entirety. Dr. Jonaki Bhattacharyya provided conceptual feedback and revisions to the paper, and Dr. Terre Satterfield provided revisions to the paper. Chief Russel Myers-Ross provided conceptual support leading up to the initial design of the paper. An abridged version of Chapter 5 has been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I designed the study and carried out the interviews and analysis of the findings. I am the sole author and I wrote the first and final drafts in their entirety, with minor revisions offered by Dr. Terre Satterfield and Dr. Jonaki Bhattacharyya in preparation for publication. Ethics approval was obtained from the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board in September, 2019 and has been renewed once (certificate number: H19-02226, project title ‘Territorial Self-Governance, Resources, and Housing: Indigenous Economic Futures in an Era of viii Reconciliation’). This ethics approval also included the use of previous existing data for the writing of Chapter 2. ix Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................ v Preface ...................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... ix List of Figures........................................................................................................................ xiii List of Abbreviations .............................................................................................................. xiv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. xvi Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Dissertation Goals........................................................................................................2 1.2 Theoretical and Discursive Underpinnings ...................................................................3 1.2.1 Indigenous Economic ‘Development’ ......................................................................4 1.2.2 Well-Being ............................................................................................................ 10 1.2.3 Alternatives to Development .................................................................................. 12 1.2.4 (Critical) Institutionalism ....................................................................................... 14 1.2.5 Indigenous Rights, Governance and Self-Determination ........................................ 17 1.3 Research Context ....................................................................................................... 20 1.4 Overview of Methods and Approach .......................................................................... 23 1.5 Chapter Overviews .................................................................................................... 27 1.6 Summary ................................................................................................................... 30 1.7 Notes on Terminology ............................................................................................... 30 x Chapter 2: Counter-Institutionalizing First Nations-Crown Relations in British Columbia ................................................................................................................................. 32 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 32 2.2 Methods ..................................................................................................................... 36 2.3 An Ambiguous Duty: Finding Legal Meaning in a Shifting Decision Landscape ....... 38 2.4 Colonial Legacies, Governmentality and Counter-Institutional Strategies .................. 42 2.5 Counter-Institutionalizing the Crown Referrals Process ............................................. 46 2.5.1 Informing and Building Territorial Guardianship ................................................... 48 2.5.2 Building Territorial Alliances................................................................................. 50 2.5.3 Providing Evidence for Cumulative Impacts .......................................................... 52 2.5.4 Securing Strategic Funding Agreements to Support Self-Governance..................... 54 2.6 An Insurmountable Dilemma: ‘Damned if you do, Damned if you Don’t’ .................. 58 2.7 Conclusion................................................................................................................. 60 Chapter 3: Reconciling Conflicting Institutional Logics Within First Nations Forestry-Based Social Enterprises ......................................................................................................... 64 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 64 3.2 The Rise of Conflicting Institutional Logics in Forestry ............................................. 67 3.3 The Conflicting Logics of First Nations Social Enterprises ........................................ 70 3.4 Methods ..................................................................................................................... 73 3.5 Findings: The Conflicting Logics of FNCSEs ............................................................ 75 3.5.1 Individual Well-Being Vs. Workforce Productivity ................................................ 75 3.5.2 Community Building Vs. Cost-Savings .................................................................. 80 3.5.3 Social Appropriateness Vs. De-Politicization ......................................................... 83 xi 3.5.4 Increased Forestry Involvement Vs. Opportunity Costs ......................................... 86 3.6 Discussion: Can FNCSEs Reconcile Conflicting Institutional Logics? ....................... 90 3.7 Conclusion................................................................................................................. 95 Chapter 4: (Re)Building the Community Economy: Social Innovation and Housing Provision in First Nations Communities ................................................................................ 98 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 98 4.2 The Diverse Community Economy and Social Innovation ....................................... 100 4.3 Methods ................................................................................................................... 104 4.4 The Endemic State of Housing Under Colonialism .................................................. 106 4.5 Housing as Community Economy: ‘Forest to Frame’ ............................................... 108 4.6 Spaces of Ethical Economic Interaction and Negotiation.......................................... 112 4.6.1 (De) Commoditization ......................................................................................... 113 4.6.2 Needs and Surpluses Evaluation........................................................................... 120 4.6.3 Quality and Design Considerations ...................................................................... 125 4.6.4 Transactions and Rules of (In) Commensurability ................................................ 131 4.7 Conclusion............................................................................................................... 137 Chapter 5: Deepening Counter Institutions: Property, Lands, Relations and the Economic Future of the Tŝilhqot’in ....................................................................................................... 141 5.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 141 5.2 The Continued Making of Native Space ................................................................... 146 5.3 Interrogating Private Property .................................................................................. 152 5.4 Formalizing Land Relation Rules ............................................................................. 159 5.5 (Re) Creating Indigenous Property ........................................................................... 167 xii 5.6 Conclusion............................................................................................................... 174 Chapter 6: Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 177 6.1 Findings and Implications ........................................................................................ 178 6.2 Limitations .............................................................................................................. 187 6.3 Future Research Directions ...................................................................................... 190 References.............................................................................................................................. 192 Appendices ............................................................................................................................ 230 Appendix A ......................................................................................................................... 230 Appendix B ......................................................................................................................... 232 Appendix C ......................................................................................................................... 233 xiii List of Figures Figure 1: Map of Tsilhqot’in Communities................................................................................ 22 xiv List of Abbreviations AAC – Annual Allowable Cut BC – British Columbia BCCA – British Columbia Court of Appeal BCSC – British Columbia Supreme Court CANZUS - Western settler states of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA CMHC – Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation COP – Certificate of Possession CP – Certificate of Possession EA – Environmental Assessment EDC – Economic Development Corporation FCRSA – Forest Consultation and Revenue Sharing Agreement FLTC – Forest Licenses to Cut FNCSE – First Nations Community Sawmill Enterprise FNLMA – First Nations Land Management Act FNPOA – First Nations Property Ownership Act FRA – Forest and Rangeland Agreement FTF – Forest to Frame GIS – Geographical Information System IBA – Impact Benefit Agreement INAC – Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada IPCA – Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area xv IR – Indian Reserve NIE – New Institutional Economics RPA – Reconciliation Protocol Agreement SCC – Supreme Court of Canada SCR – Supreme Court Report SEA – Strategic Engagement Agreement TNG – Tŝilhqot’in National Government UNDRIP – United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples xvi Acknowledgements The writing of this dissertation would not have been possible without the appreciation, support, understanding and thoughtfulness of so many different people, both directly and indirectly. Foremost, I thank Dr. Terre Satterfield, who saw something in me so many years ago and gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to study under her supervision. I can only hope that a little of her brilliance, wisdom and compassion has been passed on to me – no doubt it is reflected in this work. I am also grateful for the support of my committee members. Dr. Jonaki Bhattacharyya who always provided the perfect amount of guidance and support at just the right time, beginning even before I started my PhD. Dr. Harry Nelson who introduced me to some of the key ideas that ultimately formed the foundation of my thesis, and who calmly pushed me to read a little further when I needed it. I am forever indebted to the Tŝilhqot'in people who accepted me into their territory, into their gatherings, and who shared with me their visions for the future. In particular, I thank Chief Russell Myers-Ross, who in his subtle way guided my research direction over the years, and kept me on track when I started to veer. My hope is that this work marks but the beginning of a long-term relationship with the Tŝilhqot'in people and their territory. I am grateful also to all of the communities and individuals across British Columbia who shared with me their precious knowledge and time. I would also thank all of the people at Ecotrust Canada who gave me the space and resources to write this dissertation. I certainly would not have been able to finish this PhD were it not for the xvii connections and relationships that formed through my work with such an incredible organization, filled with courageous people seeking to enact economic alternatives against all odds. To my friends and family who have endured my physical and emotional distance over the last few years as I went through this process, I am grateful for your patience, love and understanding. Finally, I thank my partner, Shayla Williams, for being there for me from start to finish, for keeping me motivated, keeping me from faltering, and for always reminding me about the important things in life. xviii In loving memory of my Omi, Magdalena Westen 1 Chapter 1: Introduction The economic futures of Indigenous peoples remain one of the most important foci framing processes of reconciliation in Canada. Increasingly apparent are the concerns of Indigenous groups as to not only what types of economic activities are appropriate for them, but also what institutional frameworks can most effectively ensure that benefits are accruing to communities. In what is now called British Columbia, where numerous land claims remain unsettled, increasingly evident are First Nations challenges against dominant prescriptions for development, most of which are marked by settler-colonial economic interests with little benefit to, or more commonly at the expense of, First Nations peoples and territories. Specifically, many First Nations groups are challenging the settler-colonial institutional framework, which privileges capitalist, market-based modes of production, valuation and economic transactions, and which is said to offer certainty and efficiency through mechanisms of private property and their enforcement by the common law. It is now well understood that long before Europeans arrived, First Nations and Indigenous peoples broadly, had sophisticated rules and social organizations that governed relationships with their lands and resources, with each other, and with outsiders (Bobroff, 2001; Borrows, 2015b). The dismantling of these fundamental institutions has been central to the project of settler-colonialism, manifest primarily as a process of "discovering” and conquering land, property, and people; through the degradation and making of ‘native’ space and the re-articulation of Indigeneity; through the criminalization of First Nation institutions of governance and decision making; and through illegitimate claims of state sovereignty (Altamirano-Jimenez, 2013; Brown, 2014; Harris, 2002; Wolfe, 2006). While the assimilative forces of settler-colonialism 2 and capitalism continue to pressure First Nations into the adoption of Western-liberal institutions and governmentalities (Blackburn, 2005; MacDonald, 2011; Woolford, 2002), such pressures remain limited in their depth and reach. Although settler-colonialism has severely weakened the ability of Indigenous institutions to operate (Cornell, 2007; Lee, 1992), it appears that collective interests continue to be valued, if not prioritized by many Indigenous peoples as they continue to exercise socio-economic and cultural-ecological practices that embody norms of respect, solidarity and reciprocity (Kuokkanen, 2011; Panelli and Tipa, 2007). These institutional histories and their contemporary forms are central to all thinking within this thesis. On the one hand, antecedent institutional forms, or what North (2005) calls ‘artifactual structures’, are carried primarily by cultural norms and continue serve as the central source of Indigenous resistance to settler-colonial institutions of all kinds. They are central to forms of resistance that I refer to here as counter-institutionalization, where First Nations groups engage in practices and enact logics both within and outside of dominant institutional and economic processes. These are primary acts of institution building, aimed at strengthening territorial self-governance and realizing self-determined visions for economic futures. In re-constituting Indigenous institutions, such acts represent a most vital source of cultural resilience. And, by studying these instances, this dissertation offers a new way to practice and theorize Indigenous economic futures. 1.1 Dissertation Goals The purpose of this dissertation is to build understanding of the practices and opportunities that exist for First Nations in British Columbia as they institute territorial self-governance and their 3 visions for economic futures. It does this by demonstrating 1) the ways in which specific First Nation governments are counter-institutionalizing formal structures for engaging the Crown; 2) the ways in which some First Nations communities are instituting their own values and principles into economic enterprises, initiatives, and relations of production and distribution; and 3) the possibilities that exist for First Nations to institute their own conceptions of ‘property’ within emerging jurisdictions. This work is built upon a close research relationship with Yuneŝit'in First Nation and the Tŝilhqot'in National Government in the Central interior of BC, as well as on different levels of engagement with ~ 20 other First Nations in British Columbia. Inspired by these relationships, the foremost goal of this dissertation is to support First Nations partners, both as a researcher and as a community development practitioner, in achieving their visions for economic futures. Moreover, by highlighting the diverse practices and opportunities that I have documented through my work with specific First Nations, my goal is to also challenge axiomatic economic and institutional narratives and prescriptions more broadly. Central to this goal is a theory of economic and institutional diversity that once elucidated might expand the range of choices that exist for communities, and contribute to advancing the self-determined interests of First Nations groups in British Columbia, in Canada, and – ideally -- beyond. 1.2 Theoretical and Discursive Underpinnings In this dissertation I utilize a political-economic lens which engages with several literatures as well as their critical variants. In doing so, I seek to produce results that are generative and speak to the on-the-ground ‘reality’ for First Nations partners and communities, as well as the ways in which broader political-economic realities and changes influence them. At the same time, my views have been informed by post-structural challenges to dominant narratives and prescriptions 4 which have served to undermine Indigenous worldviews and aspirations. That is, I remain cognizant throughout of the power of discourse to fashion realities as the natural order and evolution of economic and institutional worlds and not something deeply and consistently inscribed. In the following section, I describe the main bodies of theory that have contributed to my thinking, as they apply to First Nations economic futures. These include theories of Indigenous economic development and well-being, (critical) institutionalism, and Indigenous rights, governance, and self-determination. 1.2.1 Indigenous Economic ‘Development’ Theories of economic and (rural) development in Canada have been largely silent on the ways in which First Nations shape or are impacted by economic geographies. This lacuna lead me to question how First Nations institutional advancements and visions for economic futures were situated within this body of thought. Industrial resource development – the primary engine of economic growth within the Canadian context - has best been described as a staples economy of primary resource extraction and production, largely focused on the export of raw or unfinished bulk commodity products and materials from the rural periphery to the metropolitan core (Howlett and Brownsey, 2007; Watkins, 1963). Staples economies are contingent upon the continued expansion of the primary resource base at the expense of a more diversified and self-sufficient economy, resulting in local economies that are dependent on the demands of foreign markets and vulnerable to shifts in those demands (Marchak, 1983). This approach to development locks economies into a staples trap and renders them subject to the decisions of those with dominant control over the primary production industries, as well as those with political control, whose objectives are primarily to ensure the continued flow of large-scale 5 exports (Hayter, 2000). This local economic vulnerability is exacerbated by truncated development characterized as increasingly large-scale, industrial, low-cost commodity production (Halseth et al., 2014). Moreover, staples production results in a policy of resource-ism, which is the tendency to view nature as primarily a storehouse of raw materials, resulting in the depletion and destruction of ecosystems at the expense of other values (Clapp, 1998). First Nations communities, although increasingly exploiting this model of development for their own gain, have also disproportionately been impacted by it. Staples theory emerged as a Canadian-specific variation of dependency theory, which is based on the premise that capitalist development in the core entails extraction of surplus from the periphery, resulting in chronic underdevelopment of the hinterland resource providers (Morgan, 1987). Both dependency and staples theories emerged in response to long standing theories regarding modernization. These view cultural formations that are incongruous with industrial development and its complementary social and political institutions, as forms of resistance, which are viewed as deserved of elimination given their interference with the ‘natural’ progression of human advancement (Anderson and Giberson, 2003). Modernization theory lays the blame of underdevelopment with market deficiencies at the local level, putting the blame on a number of cultural, social and political hindrances to development. Staples theory, on the other hand, demonstrates that communities have gotten ‘trapped’ into staples production because of a lack of regional and local economic reinvestment by external capital (Markey et al., 2005). Regardless, modernization, dependency and staples theories all make important assumptions about the nature of development as an inevitable and desirable evolutionary process requiring growth and industrialization – assumptions which continue to rationalize economic interventions 6 in First Nations territories and communities (Anderson and Giberson, 2003; O’Neill, 2004; Usher, 2014). Since the 1980’s rural British Columbia has undergone a series of economic booms and busts creating challenging employment and development conditions, signaling the end of the post-war period of rural growth and the relative economic stability of Fordist production (Markey et al., 2012). This instability has been attributed largely to a long-term decline in the prices of commodities in forestry and other sectors, global financial crises, and a dwindling of investment in resource extraction due to a disappearing easily accessible forest resource base, and a climate of uncertainty with regard to First Nation land claims (Hayter, 2000; Hayter and Barnes, 2001; Markey et al., 2005). Neoliberalism also emerged as the predominant economic philosophy guiding rural development policy, prioritizing the market rather than the state as the institution that can best respond to changes and shocks (Arce, 2003). As a result, most rural areas have been facing economic decline relative to the growth and expansion of urban areas, and major challenges have emerged particularly for First Nation forest-dependent communities (Joseph and Krishnaswamy, 2010; Markey et al., 2005). Yet, as a new era of resource and economic development in British Columbia emerges, First Nations have the possibility to leverage their rights and title, new governance arrangements, revenue streams, and other emerging opportunities in order to achieve their own visions for an economic future. Thus, Anderson and Giberson (2003) suggest a ‘regulation theory’ based approach as a basis for Indigenous economic development, one which views development in terms of human agency and social and cultural contingency. Regulation theory posits that 7 capitalist management of the production process creates inequalities and so must be constrained by structures derived from social institutions, legitimized by the collective values from which societies draw their cohesion (Aglietta, 1998). Fordism, for example, worked for a time because the mode of regulation in play was the reconciliation of rapid increases in productivity with growth in real income – in other words incomes rose commensurately with profits (Aglietta, 1998). Similarly, David Newhouse (2001) believes that Indigenous peoples are well along the path toward embracing capitalism, but that the worst effects of capitalism can be mediated through the development of cultural and social institutions which advance Indigenous values. For First Nations then, the advancement of rights and title and the emerging institutional structures which have served to mediate industrial development processes – notably the duty to consult and potentially accommodate First Nations for resource development activities within their territories - can potentially act as a mode of capitalist regulation that has, and will increasingly influence economic development in British Columbia. First Nation involvement in new regional economies is occurring in a multitude of ways, often reflective of socio-culturally regulated models of development, but with varying results. For many First Nations who are often constrained by geography lacking easy access to processing facilities and markets, a focus on primary resource extraction jobs such as forestry has been typical (Booth, 1998; Booth and Skelton, 2011). In addition to industrial forestry, the mining and oil and gas sectors have begun to more actively engage with First Nations, creating new challenges and new opportunities while providing much needed revenue streams via impact benefit agreements and joint-ventures (Cameron and Levitan, 2014; Faircheallaigh, 2010; Martin Papillon and Rodon, 2017). Industrial mining activities have been shown to both benefit and 8 hinder the customary activities of Indigenous peoples, and also can be accompanied by negative socio-cultural and environmental impacts (Boutet et al., 2010; Lertzman and Vredenburg, 2005; Usher et al., 2003). Liquid natural gas is an emerging industry in BC that has placed major emphasis on local development and signed partnership agreements with local and regional First Nation communities, but is also seen as a continuation of the staples economy, with the extraction of raw materials through large-scale industrial processes for export to global markets (Halseth et al., 2014). Some contend that this new wave of corporate partnerships and benefit agreements are a form of neoliberal economic development designed to advance a specific and constrained type of First Nation self-determination which eliminates colonial dependencies while creating new corporate ones (Atleo, 2008; Kuokkanen, 2011). Regardless, in a review by Booth and Muir of Land use plans developed by some First Nations in BC, it was noted that all of the First Nations reviewed agreed that industrial development may and should continue on their traditional territory, so long it is practiced in a way that maintains full ecological integrity and shares in the economic benefits (Booth and Muir, 2011). Locating such a balance remains an ongoing challenge. Industrial resource based development approaches have rightly been questioned as to their ability to translate into equitable community development and well-being in First Nations communities (Rodon, 2018; Vining and Richards, 2016). This model has also undoubtedly had major impacts on the cultural-ecological fabric of First Nations communities and territories in British Columbia and Canada, resulting in both physical and ‘invisible’ losses (Turner et al., 2008). There are some First Nations groups resisting such approaches, seeking instead to create local ‘conservation-based’ economies that do not undermine ecological and cultural systems, and 9 which strengthen the position of such communities to successfully contend with industrial resource-based development initiatives. Such efforts have found formidable allies within settler civil society, particularly from environmental NGOs and other groups who have come to understand that First Nations wield bargaining power within their territories and are inherent rights holders more broadly. Indeed, the importance of Indigenous lands for the achievement of conservation goals is beginning to receive increased attention globally and in Canada (Garnett et al., 2018; We Rise Together, 2018). There are now numerous examples of Indigenous-declared protected areas or ‘Tribal Parks’ being recognized internationally (if not nationally) as legally protected areas and supported by national or international donors (Murray and Burrows, 2017; Naughton-treves et al., 2005). Stewardship or conservation-based activities such as the Indigenous Guardians Program and the Coastal Guardians Watchmen program in British Columbia have been growing in importance (Social Ventures Australia, 2016; Trousdale and Andrews, 2016). Additionally, market-based conservation approaches are being developed including carbon sequestration schemes, payment for ecosystem services, or even eco-certified small-scale forestry operations (Corbera et al., 2009; Gale and Burda, 1998; Murray and Burrows, 2017). Finally, Indigenous cultural or ‘eco-tourism’ has been heralded as an important vehicle for conservation-based development, particularly in remote communities located in north and central BC (Nepal, 2004). Conservation-based approaches to Indigenous economic development are often seen as compatible with First Nations goals as they appear to offer promise in terms of fulfilling important outcomes related to social, cultural and ecological well-being. However, there remain important questions as to their viability as an economic alternative, particularly in terms of 10 financial commensurability with the potential bounties of industrial resource-based extraction (Booth and Skelton, 2011; Coria and Calfucura, 2012; Krcmar et al., 2005). Further, aside from heavily subsidized territorial stewardship initiatives, most conservation-based approaches to Indigenous economic development thus far tend to reflect a certain logic of capitalist market-based development and modes of production, valuation and exchange (Büscher and Fletcher, 2019). This reflection of capitalist economic institutions serves to perpetuate the colonial process of Indigenous social-economic assimilation and some argue inhibits the development and (re)emergence of all the economic ‘others’ that may exist (Gibson-Graham, 2006a). 1.2.2 Well-Being A critical question relevant to the formulation of my thesis is how First Nations imagine their economic futures as inseparable from broader extra-economic values and goals. Indigenous peoples and their value systems have long been essentialized through historically static constructs such as ‘traditional’ or ecological noble (Nadasdy, 2005; Trosper, 2009). Such idealizations risk racializing Indigenous peoples, creating burdensome expectations, and in many ways precluding what is appropriate Indigenous economic activities (Cattelino, 2004; Satterfield et al., 2013). At the same time there is significant evidence demonstrating differences in the value sets between many Indigenous peoples and the dominant settler society, including understanding of what exactly well-being means, how to measure it, and how it is impacted by development activities (Panelli, 2008; Richmond and Ross, 2009; Taylor, 2008). Traditional global efforts toward measuring well-being neglect important dimensions that are particularly important in the context of Indigenous peoples such as social relationships, cultural and spiritual values, and place-based experiences (Breslow et al., 2016; Prout, 2012; Satterfield et al., 2013). 11 Different studies of Indigenous peoples and well-being demonstrate that Indigenous conceptualizations of well-being are related to place-based experiences, both material and intangible, within natural, social, spiritual and cultural worlds (Panelli and Tipa, 2007; Wilson, 2003). Understanding the importance of sense of place to Indigenous peoples both lends support to ecologically sustainable activities which support well-being, while also highlighting the interconnectivity of the cultural and ecological - and by inference economic worlds (Poe et al., 2016). In the context of First Nations in Canada, an analysis of census data between 1981 and 2001 by Cooke et al. demonstrated that First Nations people continue to have shorter life expectancy, lower educational attainment, and lower average annual incomes than other Canadians (Cooke et al., 2004). David Newhouse (2001) argues that Indigenous peoples have for the most part accepted the idea that progress is measured in material terms, indicating a need for economic activities primarily focused on turning such statistics around. However, it has also been shown that some communities which are considered socio-economically impoverished through the lens of traditional frameworks of well-being, are actually achieving local and cultural objectives well (Poelzer and Coates, 2015). In a recent study by Kant et al. (Kant et al., 2016) on general satisfaction in First Nations communities for example, there was found to be strong positive correlations amongst First Nations between social, cultural, and land use activities and general satisfaction, as opposed to a weak positive correlation between income and general satisfaction. Thus, while traditional quantitative socio-economic analyses offer insight into the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, they also risk over-simplifying Indigenous 12 values, and can serve to reinforce developmental models that are inimical to the imagined economic futures of many Indigenous peoples. 1.2.3 Alternatives to Development Broadly, there are those who question out-right the idea of ‘development’ in its predominant variations – a point of inquiry that has heavily influenced the ways in which I have explored and theorized the institutional and economic realities and futures of First Nations in the chapters that follow. Market-based, predominantly industrial approaches to economic development continue to be thought of as enabling a higher standard of living, a better quality of life, and greater personal choice for individuals (Usher, 2014). These promises come as part of an economic system that is continuously imposed upon First Nations, and that seeks to organize societies along industrial and commercial lines in order to advance universal definitions of modernization and development based on growth (Ross and Usher, 1986). Living better is correlated with having more development, and is what Walsh calls the “paradogmatic” frame within which we find ourselves (Walsh, 2010). Economic growth however, is not synonymous with development, and when definitions of well-being are broadened and externalities exposed, economic growth can be seen in many ways to contribute to diminished well-being (Daly, 1997; Shaffer et al., 2006). Thus, the major challenge of development within Indigenous communities, regardless of its form, is to ensure material improvements in well-being are occurring without losing what it means to be Indigenous (Hernandez, 2013). Post-development scholars in particular understand development as a hegemonic economic discourse rather than a universal social reality (Escobar, 1992; Gibson-Graham, 2006b). What is 13 needed, it is argued, is to move beyond the 'age of development' because it has only served to create the ecological predicament within which we find ourselves, increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, and serving to eliminate cultural diversity through the universalizing of Western institutions (Ziai, 2007). Indeed, development often appears to offer Indigenous peoples a "cruel choice" between maintaining their traditional culture and being condemned to a life of material poverty, or to one of capitalist-led material benefit (Hibbard and Adkins, 2013). There remains cynicism today when discussing traditional Indigenous economies or livelihoods as a path toward an economic future, and many scholars and practitioners alike have internalized the tenet that there are no alternatives to global capitalism (Kuokkanen, 2011). However, the diverse economies and other post-structural understandings of the economy are what Escobar refers to as the turn toward “beginning to detect a gap between the discursive practice of development and a new one” which is detached from development and can view it from afar (Escobar, 1992: 415). The ‘community’ or ‘diverse’ economy is what Gibson-Graham calls the joining of the formal economy - wage labour and capitalist enterprise - with all the economic others that sustain material survival and well-being (Gibson-Graham, 2005). It represents the sites of everyday activities and familiar institutions, where everyone, living and non-living, is a part of the economy through a negotiated interdependence which includes contributions often in different, non-market ways (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). In this sense, community or diverse economies represent the economic spaces or networks that can be constructed across multiple scales, in which relations of interdependence are democratically negotiated by participating individuals and organizations (Gibson-Graham, 2008). These relational ontologies and communal interdependencies between both living and non-living, that remain prevalent within 14 First Nations communities are the universes that have been rendered non-existent within the confines of capitalist economic discourses and frameworks of measurement (Escobar, 2011; Gibson-Graham, 2005). Recognizing the continued existence of Indigenous social-ecological economies is not to essentialize Indigenous culture or land-based ‘subsistence’ practices, but rather to reject universal definitions of ‘modernity’ and the assumed linear transition toward cultural-ecologically bounded individual consumer economies (Hernandez, 2013; Nadasdy, 2005). And, avoiding the false dichotomy of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, can then open up space for new theorizing about what Indigenous economic futures might entail (O’Neill, 2004). 1.2.4 (Critical) Institutionalism A long standing and broad body of theory related to institutional development lead me toward one of the primary questions driving this dissertation: How can and do institutions shape the diverse economic and extra-economic realities and imagined futures of First Nations? Institutions are the established and prevalent systems of social rules, both formal and informal, that structure social interactions by constraining and enabling behavior (Hodgson, 2006; Lin and Nugent, 1995). They include the rules and norms by which a community functions in relation to factors of production, exchange, and distribution (Shaffer et al., 2006). Typically knowledge of such rules is shared by the members of a community resulting in a reasonable degree of stability and predictability in social interactions (Beunen and Patterson, 2019: 13; Knight, 1992). Within the context of mainstream economic development theory, it is generally accepted that strong institutions reduce uncertainty and therefore induce economic trade and growth (Coase, 1998; North, 1992; Ostrom, 2005). This thinking has arisen particularly over the last several decades under the label New Institutional Economics (NIE), which attributes the origin of institutions to 15 deliberate design and voluntary agreement among actors resulting in a ‘logic of efficiency’ that leads to ‘objective’ institutional design (Coase, 1998; Rutherford, 2001). NIE was distinguished from the old institutional economics by its reliance on arguments for the economic efficiency of observed institutions, advancing the claim that a more efficient institution should be preferred over less efficient alternatives (Granovetter, 1992; Lin and Nugent, 1995). In this sense, NIE conceptions of institutions are reductionist, viewing them as constraints on individual behavior and reducing social organization toward the goal of producing transaction cost efficiencies (Mackinnon et al., 2009). Transaction costs are those associated with organizing, maintaining, and enforcing the rules of an institutional arrangement (Lin and Nugent, 1995). According to the transaction costs school, institutions that evolve to lower transaction costs are the key to the performance of economies (Bardhan, 1989; Goodin, 2012). Although NIE bounds the rationality of economic actors and limits their individual agency in terms of economic outcomes, it is still premised on the idea that individuals seek to maximize utilities, with institutions emerging in order to facilitate economic stability and economic growth in the face of cognitive limits, incomplete information and difficulties in monitoring and enforcement (Lownpes, 1996; Pejovich, 1999). Thus, in a world of scarcity of resources and competition, institutions serve as the structures of constraint that we impose to order that competition (North, 2005). This understanding renders NIE as relying on a set of normative assumptions or ‘logics’ related to optimal economic outcomes, neglecting alternative institutions premised on different understandings of the world and the ways in which humans relate to one another and to the land. 16 Institutional theory has predominantly been oriented around neoclassical, growth-based understandings of the economy that are amenable to the advance of capitalism. Indeed, creating economic efficiency and reducing investment uncertainty are what institutional economists tend to assume are the main drivers of institutional change and development (Ritchie, 2016). Yet, institutions arise not simply to enhance efficiency, but also to transmit culture, with what an individual will see as 'rational action' itself as socially constituted including goals much broader than simply maximizing material well-being (Hall and Rosemary, 1996). Indeed humans have complex motivational structures and establish diverse institutional arrangements to satisfy them (Ostrom, 2010). When we conceive of the practical arrangements that humans devise for managing resources and economies as being imbued with wider social and cultural significance, institutional development can more appropriately be understood as a tradeoff between distributional equality and efficiency (Knight, 1992). Within this framing, individual action is characterized both by agency and structural constraint, and rather than acting as rational economic agents, individuals are social agents deeply embedded in local cultural constructs (Cleaver, 2002). Countering the idea of a logic of efficiency in institutional design is the notion of a ‘logic of social appropriateness’, which understands economic action to be socially embedded (Alexander, 2005; Lownpes, 1996). Embeddedness in this context refers to market relations being shaped by social, political and cultural-ecological influences (Jessop, 1999; Polanyi, 1944). This alternative lens posits institutional arrangements, economic relations and concepts such as demand and supply as socio-cultural and political constructs that are geographically sensitive (Halseth et al., 2014; Hayter, 2004). Within this line of thinking, institutions do not just constrain behaviour but 17 also partially mold and enable habits, preferences, values and actions (Mackinnon et al., 2009). As such, appropriate institutional behaviour and design, and even the idea of ‘progress’ can be understood as normative judgements rooted in experience, context and social legitimacy (Hayter, 2004). Indeed, an institution might be said to be well designed not if it is rational and efficient, but if it is internally consistent and externally harmonious with its larger social environment (Goodin, 2012). Institutional change then is more than simply the dynamic consequences of constrained individual maximization, but rather is context and problem dependent and shaped by the state of knowledge, belief and values within a society or given collectivity (Rutherford, 1983). 1.2.5 Indigenous Rights, Governance and Self-Determination The central foci of institutional theory as it applies to First Nations economic futures relate to questions of rights, governance and self-determination (e.g., Cornell, 2010, 2019; Nikolakis and Nelson, 2018). One of the driving questions of my thesis derived from this body of thought and its critical variants is whether or not rights-based approaches to territorial self-governance and imagined economic futures actually serve the interests and advance the values of First Nations. Traditional First Nations governance systems and institutions deteriorated under colonialism, and particularly in Canada under the Indian Act which instituted administrative bands, empowered only to complete the accounting and financial management tasks necessitated by a paternalistic crown-First Nations relationship (Friedel and Taylor, 2011). However, since the introduction of settler-colonial legal and political institutions in British Columbia and Canada, and particularly over the last 50 years, First Nations have continued to pursue their interests in reference to a constitutional set of rights and given the unceded nature of all territory within the province of 18 British Columbia (Walter, 2016). Such an approach has resulted in some progress, with First Nations increasingly gaining strengthened powers over territorial decision-making by way of court rulings in Canada. With the recent adoption and legislation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) by the Province of British Columbia, it is fair to say that a rights-based approach to Indigenous self-determination has helped to counter the full force of the settler-colonial structure. However, some question whether such an approach is actually in the best interests of First Nations. A rights-based approach to Indigenous self-determination creates a paradoxical situation in that it at once appears to advance the interests of First Nations through what Coulthard calls a ‘Politics of Recognition’, while at the same time challenges the very existence Indigenous sovereignty (Coulthard, 2007). For many what is needed is a recognition of not just rights, but of an ‘equal’ Indigenous sovereignty that is an inherent one derived from Indigenous traditions and institutions, and that does not flow merely from its recognition from external sources such as international law, common law, or the Canadian constitution (Pratt, 2004; Webber, 2016). Contesting the legitimacy of the Constitutional order of Canada is, some argue, a losing cause for First Nations, which is why they have inevitably and with great success pursued their Section 35 constitutional rights instead (Ignatieff, 2016). Thus, advancing reconciliation and certainty in BC and Canada requires, according to Michael Asch (2014), recognizing that both First Nations and settlers are here to stay. In this light, claims of Indigenous self-determination might best be conceptualized in line with Land and Hibbard (2005), as an effort to reconfigure the terms of Indigenous-state relations through shared jurisdictions and the development of institutions to operationalize competing values. Such an approach however, has yet to be realized without a 19 certain compromising of Indigenous values, laws and governance structures. Nadasdy's work in the Yukon demonstrates that colonial processes of institutionalization, including co-management governance structures, result in an eroding of Indigenous relationships with land and animals and the replacement of such principles by colonial frameworks (Nadasdy, 2017). He argues that Indigenous people cannot at once make assertions over territory that are recognized by the state without also ‘internally territorializing’ themselves (Nadasdy, 2012). Through such a process Indigenous peoples essentially becoming complicit, however unaware, in their continued subjugation by the state and the market as they develop a type of ‘governmentality’ (Li, 2007). Essentially settler-colonialism, in response to the strength of rights-based movements, has continued its process of colonization through more subversive means and policies of recognition (Coulthard, 2014) which lead to truncated forms of Indigenous self-determination. Yet, for legal scholars like Borrows, self-determination inevitably requires engagement with the state. He argues, for example, that Indigenous peoples in the United States are much further along the path toward self-determination as a result of legislation which affords them greater recognition, autonomy and control over governance, culture, environmental conservation and development, than afforded to First Nations in Canada (Borrows, 2016). Napoleon similarly argues that First Nations in Canada today need to organize as fully functioning self-governments rather than self-administrators in order to fully benefit from the rights that they have over their lands. For Napoleon this means that First Nations must look toward conceptions of self-determination as collective autonomy through social relations, which means in practice looking beyond the colonially imposed band structures and membership rules, toward Nation-based structures (Napoleon, 2005). 20 Finally, much of the foundational thinking on Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination originates from thinkers like Vine Deloria Jr. who argue that in facing the challenge of empire and its deeply imbedded settler-colonial institutions, what is vital is self-determination over all economic, social and cultural functions including but not limited to education and welfare (1979). For others, relationships to each other and to the land should be understood as the spiritual and cultural foundations of Indigenous peoples (Alfred and Corntassel, 2013), and therefore also serve as the guiding principle for the design of governance institutions and as an integral component of individual and collective Indigenous self-determination (Kuokkanen, 2019a). 1.3 Research Context This dissertation explores counter-institutionalization and the economic futures of a number of First Nations primarily within the context of what is now referred to as the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Within British Columbia there are 198 First Nations bands, (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 2010), although many First Nations groups and people in British Columbia also or otherwise identify with national and hereditary governance structures which are not necessarily recognized by the Crown. Hanna (2018) refers to British Columbia as the "flashpoint" of the contested legitimacy of Crown sovereignty, because much of its area remains ‘unceded’ by First Nations, with very few historic treaties signed. Crown sovereignty over the traditional and ancestral territories of First Nations in British Columbia was and remains assumed, with no legitimate basis for such an assertion (Asch, 2014; Walter, 2016). This, along with the recent provincial legislation of UNDRIP, makes British Columbia an important context 21 for examining the ongoing efforts of First Nations to counter-institutionalize both relations with the Crown as well as their own internal governance frameworks. The elaboration of new institutional frameworks has become an imperative through the many modern treaty settlements, reconciliation agreements, and Aboriginal title claims which remain to be decided or negotiated, and which inevitably must work within, around or against British Columbia provincial legislative and regulatory frameworks. Parts of this dissertation focus, not coincidentally, on Yuneŝit'in First Nation and the Tŝilhqot'in Nation located within the Cariboo-Chilcotin interior region of British Columbia. The Tŝilhqot'in Nation as a whole has a population of approximately 4000 people and since 1989 has increasingly become politically unified under the structure of the Tŝilhqot'in National Government (TNG). Much of the economy of the Tŝilhqot'in Nation continues to revolve around industrial forestry, ranching and some mining, although there is a push back against such activities as the Nation seeks to achieve more ‘sustainable economic bases’ (TNG Economic Development Forum, Jan 20-21, 2020). What these entail remain to be determined, but efforts are underway to expand on cultural tourism, small-scale value-added forestry, housing infrastructure related economic projects, and agriculture. The formation of the Dandzen Economic Development Corporation at the Nation level also aims to support the development of major economic projects in the territory that align with Tŝilhqot'in values. Yuneŝit'in is one of the six Tŝilhqot'in communities, which include also Tl'etinqox, ʔEsdilagh, Tŝideldel, Tl'esqox and Xeni Gwet'in First Nations. The population of Yuneŝit'in is 485 people, with approximately 250 living on-reserve within 60 homes. The Yuneŝit’in Caretaker Area 22 stretches as far as the Fraser River to the East, Taseko Lakes (Dasiqox) to the West, Chilcotin River (Tsilhqox) to the North, and Graveyard Valley to the South. Yuneŝit'in means ‘people of the south’, and it is also sometimes simply known as Stone or Stoney and historically known as “Gex Nats'enaghinlht'i” referring to a place where people hunted rabbits (lit. rabbit-one-clubbed once). A majority of the population speaks the original language, nenqayni chi, and Yuneŝit’in- Tŝilhqot'in values and identity are expressed through land-based activities including small-scale (wild) horse ranching and fishing (Yunesit’in Government, 2020). Figure 1: Map of Tsilhqot’in Communities 23 In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada declared the Tŝilhqot'in Nation aboriginal title to a portion of approximately 1,900 square kilometres of their traditional territory within the caretaker area of the community of Xeni Gwet’in. This decision - the first of its kind in Canada - allows for full ownership, benefit and control over the title area by the Tŝilhqot'in people (Tŝilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014). As a result, the Tŝilhqot'in now have the opportunity and responsibility to enact new institutions to govern these lands in ways which respond to Tŝilhqot'in traditional laws and which support the Tŝilhqot'in vision for an economic future. 1.4 Overview of Methods and Approach All of the work reported here has been informed by predominantly ethnographic research that I carried out over the course of approximately 4 years while completing my PhD and while working as a community development practitioner for the not-for-profit organization Ecotrust Canada. It includes 3 separate studies which together account for several months of field work (particularly between January 2018 and February 2020), and 39 formal interviews with individuals, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Much of my contextual knowledge of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation and the First Nations context more broadly in British Columbia was derived through a process of relationship building, and the commitment to fostering respectful relationships with First Nations peoples and communities. This included formal research protocol agreements with the Yuneŝit’in Government and with the Tŝilhqot’in National Government which enabled access to community members, Nation staff, events and documentation. Contributing to these protocol agreements were numerous deliberations with Yunesit’in and Tŝilhqot’in leadership concerning the design of the research and the primary questions to be explored. These questions were revisited on numerous occasions with my primary contacts within the Yunesit’in government and the Tŝilhqot’in National 24 Government, and were reiterated based on numerous emerging factors including leadership priorities as well as concerns of feasibility and applicability. Throughout the duration of this research, I visited Tŝilhqot’in territory seven times during which time I interacted with community leaders, staff and members, both formally and informally in my capacity as both a researcher and a practitioner. The relationships that I built as a part of this process, and will continue to foster beyond my PhD, have been foundational to my research - a process consistent with what Kuokannen (2019) refers to as an Indigenous research method of relationality. This relationality has contributed to my own sense of obligation to support the visions of First Nations partners through my research, and to maintain these partnerships over the long term. As a researcher-practitioner it is also important to note that my process of validation of results was achieved not only by providing chapter drafts to my primary interlocutors for comment, but more often (and more reflective of the wishes of community partners) it was achieved by ‘translating’ the theoretical analyses and findings of this work into actionable processes. That is, given that much of this dissertation has been developed alongside my work as a community development practitioner, it has been foremost informed by the needs and goals of First Nations communities and partners. As such, I consider this work to be Indigenous action-based research in that it is co-designed to produce action-oriented findings intended to improve the situation for community members (Peltier, 2018). Within Indigenous action-based research what is considered a ‘reasonable’ way of arriving at knowledge should not be decided by the academic community alone. Validation then, has not ended with the conclusion of my dissertation, but rather is embedded in an ongoing process of relationship building that I intend to pursue by continuing to 25 support community partners to further advance the ideas and theories described herein through projects on the ground. I additionally travelled by car across British Columbia visiting more than 20 First Nations and speaking with leaders within these communities on issues related to economic and community development, forestry, housing, and governance. Thus, one of the main informal methods for this research was the simple act of listening and sustained conversation - a well-accepted method by those engaged in Indigenous and ethnographic research (Kunkel, 2015). The credibility of the stories, perceptions and thoughts that I heard were strengthened by my own knowledge of the topic and my experience speaking to others informally on the subject of community development. That is, I was often able to use a type of triangulation of interview responses with anecdotal conversations and meeting notes, observations from the field, and analyses of other documents and reports. In terms of applicability, each of the interviewees represented a context specific and locally nuanced situation, however given the structural similarities of First Nations communities within BC, I did find saturation of results in many cases early on. This enabled my confidence in the application of such knowledge to other First Nations contexts. For example, the specific challenges that communities face in relation to housing and property began to repeat early on, as did the conflicting logics facing First Nations community enterprises. Less repeating and more diverse perhaps, were the ways in which First Nations were perceiving these logics. I am a second-generation settler of European and West Indian descent, born and raised in what is now called Toronto, Ontario on the Ancestral Traditional Territories of the Ojibway, the Anishinaabe and the Mississauga’s of the New Credit. Although as a settler I am limited in my 26 ability to speak toward issues of Indigenous culture, governance and self-determination, I believe that the work presented in this dissertation is reflective of the diverse sentiments and goals of the First Nations people with whom I spoke and built relations. It is important to recognize that many people working in the field of Indigenous research particularly in relation to economic futures and well-being, often end up contributing to the creation of racialized identities (Kowal, 2016). Anna Kowal describes the fear that non-Indigenous peoples have working in this space as a result of the tension between difference and equality, where it is feared that the source of the socio-economic gap between Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples also feeds some sort of cultural distinctiveness that might then be erased by closing the gap (2016). She resolves this tension by arguing that the work of non-Indigenous allies can recognize and nurture Indigenous difference while also supporting its improvement. This thinking has served as an important motivation for my own research and work with First Nations in British Columbia. At the core of my methodological approach was the practice of reading for economic difference (Roelvink and Martin, 2015). That is, much of my work has sought to support First Nations partners by highlighting what are often latent or taken for granted economic activities and processes that have become marginalized under colonial-capitalist frameworks. Theorizing and practicing community economic development requires an openness by those involved to imagine development possibilities, explore seemingly ‘radical’ economic ideas, and be willing to challenge predominant assumptions and discourses about what ‘economic development’ is or should produce. Indeed, there is debate about whether alternative, community economies are actually a marginal set of activities, or if they are simply ‘performatively’ marginalized (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Healy, 2008). Following Gibson-Graham (2008), I believe that in order to make 27 community economies real and visible, researchers must engage in ‘performative practices’ which deny the hegemony of capitalist relations of production and by extension the reach of neoliberalism, instead focusing on the marginalized economic practices and enterprises which play such an important role in constituting communities. In this sense, performativity requires action research and discourse which illuminates and strengthens the realities of community economies. 1.5 Chapter Overviews Chapter 2, Counter-Institutionalizing First Nation-Crown Relations in British Columbia, examines the ‘duty to consult and accommodate’, and the efforts that First Nations in British Columbia have made to work within the confines of this legal doctrine to advance their own interests. In this chapter I address pertinent critiques of First Nation-crown relations, which argue that institutional forms of engagement derived from the Crown’s responsibility or fiduciary duty is detrimental to Indigenous sovereignty and is also an impediment to alternative economic futures imagined by First Nations groups. Through an analysis of the Crown referrals process in BC, I demonstrate how First Nations are finding ways to reshape colonially derived and imposed forms of institutional engagement such that they better support their own efforts for self-determination and territorial self-governance, though not without significant challenges. Engaging with institutional theory, I introduce the idea of counter-institutionalizing practices, wherein dominant institutions, ostensibly meant to create economic and legal certainty for the settler-state, are instead appropriated by legally and constitutionally encouraged First Nations groups to advance their own interests. 28 Chapter 3, Reconciling Conflicting Institutional Logics within First Nations Forestry-based Social Enterprises, engages a growing body of literature which addresses the ways in which organizations navigate and overcome conflicting institutional logics. I examine these conflicting logics within the context of First Nations Community Sawmill Enterprises (FNCSEs), which have become a common vehicle for advancing diverse goals for social, economic, and cultural-ecological well-being through forestry-based activities. I posit that the central choice for FNCSEs, as with most social enterprises, is how to balance social value creation with value capture, or framed differently, how to manage the tradeoff between distributional equality and efficiency (Knight, 1992; Lounsbury and Boxenbaum, 2013). In navigating these choices, I posit that FNCSEs act as a site of potential institutional change within First Nations communities, where dominant logics of a prevailing ‘productivist paradigm’ of forestry are meaningfully countered such that First Nations communities can work toward an ‘Indigenous forestry paradigm’ which prioritizes Indigenous institutions, values and knowledge as the basis for an economic future. Chapter 4, (Re)Building the Community Economy: Social Innovation and Housing Provision in First Nations communities, uses the example of First Nations housing in British Columbia to explore how First Nations communities are advancing their own values and satisfying basic needs through social innovations designed to overcome the deficiencies of top-down, state-led housing efforts. Specifically, I examine the ‘forest to frame’ concept which originated within the community of Yuneŝit'in and which envisions housing outcomes as dependent upon community economic institutions which oversee the utilization of territorial forest resources for the production and distribution of housing materials locally. In doing so, I ask what frameworks of 29 socially-embedded ethical decision making can enable communities to begin to think of productive forestry processes as linked to the satisfaction of basic material needs? And, what innovations are needed within First Nations communities in order to reimagine relations and negotiations of interdependence and mutual reliance between end-users and producers? Ultimately, I demonstrate how different First Nations communities are navigating (often in latent ways) complex sites of decision-making through ethical negotiations which challenge the conventional logics of capitalist-market institutions. Chapter 5, Deepening Counter Institutions: Property, Lands, Relations and the Economic Future of the Tŝilhqot’in, examines the institution of property within the context of the decision making power that has been conferred on the Tŝilhqot'in people as a result of the 2014 title decision. The challenge for the Tŝilhqot’in is to articulate and enact new laws over their title lands and other emerging jurisdictions in ways that respond to their modern socio-economic and cultural-ecological needs and goals without betraying their fundamental principles. Complicating this is a dominant narrative which rationalizes First Nations compliance with western-liberal institutions of common law, property and market-based economic growth as requirements for socio-economic improvements and well-being within First Nations communities. This chapter interrogates some of the logics and fundamental assumptions that underpin the arguments of liberal property rights enthusiasts, questioning their applicability to the values and aspirations of the Tŝilhqot’in people and First Nations broadly. The Tŝilhqot’in, empowered through title, at once resist liberal private property while at the same recognize the need for institutional developments in relation to lands, housing, and ‘ownership’. This chapter elaborates on the need 30 for new legal conceptualizations of property that are more comprehensively rooted in, and reflective of, Indigenous laws and land relations. 1.6 Summary As a whole this dissertation examines the diverse instances of First Nations to counter-institutionalize Western-liberal and colonial structures and processes, and to (re) establish the institutional foundations upon which they can enact their self-determined economic futures. Through this examination this dissertation makes important empirical and theoretical contributions to the disciplines of economic geography, anthropology, institutional economics, and critical Indigenous studies. Cutting across these realms, this dissertation also informs scholarship on Indigenous community economic development and well-being, housing, forestry, governance, resource management, land use planning and Indigenous law. In conclusion, I highlight the main findings of this dissertation, the limitations, and the implications. I expand on how recognizing and nurturing diverse institutional logics and values is a prerequisite to meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and I make recommendations for future research in support of First Nations counter-institutionalizing practices. 1.7 Notes on Terminology Throughout this dissertation I use the terms ‘First Nations’ or ‘First Nations groups’ interchangeably to refer to specific Indigenous Nations, governments or other organized groupings including hereditary governance structures in British Columbia. I use the term ‘Indigenous peoples’ or ‘Indigenous Nations’ more broadly in reference to First Nations, Inuit, Métis and non-status Indigenous peoples and Nations across Canada. The term ‘Aboriginal’ or 31 ‘Indian’ is used only in reference to Canadian legal-constitutional rulings, laws, policies, processes, or ideas - for example ‘Aboriginal rights’ or the ‘Indian Act’. I also use the term ‘Crown’ and ‘State’ interchangeably to refer to both the Provincial government of British Columbia and the Canadian Federal Government. 32 Chapter 2: Counter-Institutionalizing First Nations-Crown Relations in British Columbia 2.1 Introduction Throughout much of the 20th Century in Canada resource development within the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples moved ahead relatively unencumbered, with the value of resource developments affecting those territories today ranging anywhere between $400 billion to $600 billion (Schmidt, 2018). This figure is itself a mere drop in the bucket of the total economic and non-economic loss and suffering imposed on First Nations as a function of colonialism; the overwhelming majority of this uncompensated as land or money. More recently, this long history of unfettered access to Indigenous territory has begun to shift, in British Columbia in particular. A series of key legal decisions have found that resource extraction activities within the traditional territories of Indigenous groups infringe on Aboriginal and treaty rights, requiring a duty to consult and potentially accommodate those affected (Christie, 2006). These decisions along with the 2014 Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia Supreme Court of Canada title decision (Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia [2014] SCC 44) have enabled First Nations groups to highlight and assert their right to an equitable place at the table as governments. This is true across sectors, but most acutely felt in relation to natural resource development within First Nations traditional territories (Coates and Newman, 2014), with Indigenous political claims instituting new forms of regional regulation and shifting the jurisdictional landscape in British Columbia and Canada (McCreary et al., 2016). Importantly, this shift has been accompanied by a growing sense of uncertainty for the Crown and corporate 33 interests as a result of the perceived threat that Aboriginal rights and title might pose to investment and economic development as it has been conventionally practiced and understood – especially as dependent on clear rules of property, ownership and jurisdictional authority. This desire for economic certainty, coupled with growing political pressure and legal requirements has, however, provided the ground upon which the settler-state has sought to advance a new relationship with First Nations groups (Turner and Bitonti, 2011). Increasingly manifest are an evolving set of institutional processes and structures, buttressed by Aboriginal rights and title claims, which speak to territorial self-governance. These arrangements include negotiated agreements such as modern treaties, reconciliation protocol agreements (RPAs), impact benefit agreements (IBAs); environmental assessment (EA) processes; and the Crown referrals process. The particularities of these arrangements are context dependent across British Columbia, and in some cases are reflective of different Nation to Nation methods of engagement (Low, 2018). They are also indicative of power imbalances where some First Nations groups are afforded government status, with others relegated to stakeholder at best. These differences are also derivative of an inherently colonial history whereby western-liberal economic and legal institutions were imposed on Indigenous peoples and indeed continue to frame engagements with them (Coulthard, 2014). All such agreements are related to the duty to consult and accommodate - a duty that is most frequently satisfied through the Crown referrals process. Oddly, however, there remains a paucity of information on the Crown referrals process even though concurrent byproducts of consultation such as IBA and EA processes have been well studied (Fidler, 2010; Papillon and Rodon, 2017). This shortcoming is significant given that 34 Crown referrals represent the most direct and frequent form of institutionalized engagement between First Nations groups, the Crown and resource development proponents. A referral is, quite literally, the most common enactment of the legal duty to consult with a First Nation group anytime the Crown is about to make a decision that may impact Aboriginal rights. For many First Nations groups in British Columbia, receiving dozens of detailed referrals on one or within a few days is typical. Given this frequency, the Crown referrals process holds the potential to empower First Nations groups in their relationship with the Crown. But just as easily, this sets up the opposite: an impossible task and heavy burden for First Nations groups wherein the capacity to respond effectively and strategically requires robust ‘state-like’ institutions which, in the process of building, can risk a certain acquiescence to more dominant western-liberal structures and economic forces (Nadasdy, 2017; Pasternak, 2015). This paper thus explores the question of whether the Crown referrals process is indeed a particular space of institutionalized engagement that serves well the ability of First Nations groups to improve self-determination and territorial self-governance. Is it a viable and under-appreciated space of opportunity? What tradeoffs are posed? And how does or might the referrals process intersect with other emerging and negotiation-dense institutions that are shaping Indigenous futures? We begin by reviewing the history of the ‘duty to consult and accommodate’ legal doctrine, demonstrating the paradoxical nature of court decisions which simultaneously confer escalating power upon First Nations groups while increasingly complicating the contents and responsibilities which feed that power – namely, the duty to consult and accommodate. We then address pertinent critiques, which argue that institutional forms of engagement derived from the Crown’s responsibility or fiduciary duty is detrimental to Indigenous sovereignty and is also an 35 impediment to alternative economic futures imagined by First Nations groups. While not refuting that premise, we contend that First Nation – Crown relationships cannot be understood through critical frameworks on colonial and corporate institutions alone. We suggest that constitutionally empowered First Nations groups, emboldened by the duty to consult and accommodate and other legal-political changes in British Columbia and Canada, are finding ways to reshape colonially derived and imposed forms of institutional engagement such that they better support their own efforts for self-determination and territorial self-governance. Utilizing insights from institutional theory, we characterize these as counter-institutionalizing practices, wherein dominant institutions, ostensibly meant to create economic and legal certainty for the settler-state, are instead appropriated by legally and constitutionally encouraged First Nations groups to advance their own economic and cultural interests. By analyzing the Crown referrals process and First Nation-Crown relations through the lens of colonial governmentality and Indigenous counter-institutionalism, our findings broaden understandings of the power geometries operating through the processes and workings of resource governance in British Columbia. Strategically, some First Nations groups are changing or creating the rules of the game without challenging or resisting the fundamental premise of the institutions themselves. When it works, there are evident signs of First Nations groups establishing their own self-determined conditions for certainty within their territories, rather than accepting those conditions as subjects of the Crown. Such measures, we argue, can assist First Nations groups entreaty for territorial agency, and can aid protection and cultural survival and so potentially offset the pressures of assimilation (Woolford, 2002). And when it does not work, also evident are a series of impossible and detrimental tradeoffs that indeed pressure First Nations groups into predetermined approaches, 36 outcomes, and ways of being in the world in order to simply remain as strategically positioned as possible in the face of more dominant institutions (Nadasdy, 2017). The results demonstrate that although the Crown referrals process is in many ways problematic, this situation can and has been strongly contested by First Nations groups that are well positioned to leverage any growing powers. Counter-institutionalizing, we conclude, is a way of living with and contesting rather than accepting the dilemmas inherent in Indigenous-state relations. 2.2 Methods This paper emerged out of a technical study led by the authors with the aim of inventorying and analyzing the options and effectiveness of software systems in supporting First Nation’s management of the Crown referrals process. We as the authors, are first and second generation settlers of West Indian, Eastern European and British origin who maintain professional relationships with various First Nations throughout what is now called British Columbia and Canada. In the researching and writing of this paper, we did not work for any government, business, or First Nation group and did not benefit personally, professionally or in any other way from the findings reported in this paper. We recognize that our position as settlers restricts our ability to speak to Indigenous self-governance and decolonization, yet we felt compelled to bring to light here the reflections of First Nations individuals with whom we spoke at length. These conversations revealed important themes about the efficacy, fairness, implications and possibilities stemming from the referrals process itself. The findings are derived from face-to-face and some phone interviews carried out with referrals management staff and experts from 12 different First Nations groups, as well as a questionnaire 37 responded to by 42 First Nations group referrals staff across British Columbia (see also Persaud and Macdonald, 2017). Potential participants were identified via their membership in the Aboriginal Mapping Network - a collaborative, not-for-profit website dedicated to supporting Indigenous groups facing common issues around land claims, land-use planning, GIS, and consultation and accommodations processes. Emails were sent out to members requesting participation in the questionnaire, and respondents of the questionnaire were then asked to participate in interviews intended to reveal ‘cases’ of First Nations group’s experience of the Crown referrals process. This case study approach is suitable for this type of qualitative research in that it allows for an examination of a small number of cases in order to develop theoretical rather than statistical generalizations (Yin, 1994). The findings represented in this paper are however limited to the opinions, ideas and knowledge of the individuals who participated in the study and are not representative of the position of any one First Nation or group. Given the heterogeneity of opinions characteristic of most First Nations in British Columbia, particularly as concerns matters pertaining to governance and economic development, we recognize the inherent limitation of this approach, but nevertheless believe that it offers important insights into an otherwise understudied phenomena. In order to develop the current analysis we utilized a manual coding process (Saldaña, 2015) to identify the main recurring ideas emerging from both the questionnaire and semi-structured interview responses. These were grouped into several categories, which include (but are not limited to) the spatializing of referrals for territorial agency and guardianship; the building of territorial alliances; the collection of data to provide evidence for cumulative impacts; the securing of strategic funding agreements for self-governance activities; and the problematic 38 nature of the Crown referrals process. Consent was obtained from all of the participants for the use of their responses in the publication of reports and papers, and a final draft of this paper was sent out to participants for their review of the findings. Throughout the paper we utilize ‘First Nation groups’ to denote specific Indigenous Nations, governments or other organized groupings in British Columbia, and Indigenous as a term referring to First Nations, Inuit, Métis and non-status Indigenous peoples across Canada. The term ‘Aboriginal’ is used only in reference to Canadian legal-constitutional rulings, processes, or ideas. 2.3 An Ambiguous Duty: Finding Legal Meaning in a Shifting Decision Landscape Briefly stated, a series of Aboriginal rights-supporting and clarifying decisions by the Canadian courts have influenced the nature of resource development in British Columbia. Together these have rendered Indigenous interests as arguably the most critical factor influencing land-use decision making today (Tesluk, 2014). Key among these is the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Calder (Calder et al. v. Attorney-General of British Columbia, [1973] S.C.R. 313), which recognized the existence of Aboriginal title and ownership interest in traditionally occupied lands wherein title had not been extinguished (Asch, 2002). It also prompted in 1982 the inclusion of Section 35 in the Constitution Act which recognized and enshrined in law the existence of Aboriginal and treaty rights, with the courts defining Aboriginal rights as the practices integral to the distinctive culture of an Indigenous group at the time of contact with Europeans (Borrows, 1998). The first test of the scope of Aboriginal and treaty rights was developed as a part of the 1990 Sparrow decision (R. v. Sparrow, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 1075), through a set of criteria known as the Sparrow test, which seeks to define whether or not a right has been infringed upon and also when it is justifiable to infringe upon those rights (Asch and Macklem, 39 1991). This was the first ever mention of the Crown’s duty to consult and it made the fiduciary relationship of the Crown to Indigenous people stronger. It charged the Crown with the duty to protect Aboriginal rights and established the need to consider the accommodation of Aboriginal and treaty rights given any legislative or regulatory scheme, while also extending to the Crown a practically unlimited power to infringe upon such rights (Christie, 2006). Despite early nods to consultation in 1990 with Sparrow, the duty to consult only emerged as a necessary practice with the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Delgamuukw (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia [1997] 3 SCR 1010), where for the first time Aboriginal title and the responsibilities associated with it were comprehensively treated (Christie, 2006). These decisions along with other political-economic factors also forced the federal government to begin negotiating land claims agreements, with the intent of providing First Nations groups with a viable traditional economy as well as a share in political economic power (Anderson et al., 2006; Pratt, 2004). The case that has perhaps been the most instrumental in the development of the modern day consultation process in British Columbia is the 2004 Haida decision (Haida Nation v British Columbia (Minister of Forests), 2004 SCC 73; Harris, 2009). This case further established the duty to consult and accommodate even where title has not yet been proven, and it established that such a duty should escalate proportionally to the strength of the claim for a right or title, and to the seriousness of the potential effect upon that claim (Christie, 2006). The Haida decision, then followed by the 2004 Taku River Tlingit decision (Taku River Tlingit First Nation v. British Columbia, 2004 SCC 74), and the Mikisew Cree decision (Mikisew Cree First Nation v. Canada, 2005 SCC 69) further defined the duty to consult and accommodate, and are now referred to by some as the 2004-2005 Supreme Court Trilogy (Newman, 2014). 40 The continuously evolving nature of the duty to consult and accommodate has added, some argue, to a sense of ambiguity in terms of how, when and with whom consultation is practiced. Between 2011 and 2015 alone there were 19 court decisions inclusive of the duty to consult in BC, which some conservative thinkers suggest is detrimental to the economic landscape in BC (Bains and Ishkanian, 2016). From this perspective, the Crown and corporate resource development interests view Indigenous peoples as liabilities, and the duty to consult and accommodate a barrier to investment (Stanley, 2016). From another perspective, Bruce McIvor argues that since the 2004 Haida decision, the hundreds of decisions passed by the lower courts have made clear rather than obfuscate what is required of government and industry with regards to the duty to consult, but that any confusion can best be quelled by obtaining First Nation consent (Mcivor, 2018). We tend to agree, and we further suggest that if any uncertainty around the duty to consult does exist, it has to some degree enhanced the position of First Nations, which is a positive development within the context of historically and continuing asymmetric First Nation-Crown relations. Where there remains uncertainty perhaps is in what ‘adequate’ or ‘meaningful’ consultation and accommodation means (Budhwa, 2005; Gregory et al., 2008; Peach, 2016). What is apparent is the need for engagement and joint decision-making processes that encompass two continua: potential impacts and strength of claims. This might mean simple notification of activities on one end, to the requisition of full consent and/or accommodation of First Nations groups prior to government action on the other. However, the ability of First Nations groups to participate effectively and meaningfully often remains challenged given a lack of resources and capacity (MciLwraith and Cormier, 2016; Morellato, 2008; Persaud and Macdonald, 2017). This is a critical barrier given that some interpretations of the doctrine see 41 First Nations groups as ultimately carrying the responsibility to identify rights claims potentially affected (Newman, 2019). Finally, in 2014 the Supreme Court of Canada produced a landmark decision recognizing Aboriginal title not only in theory, but in area and in reference to the Tŝilhqot’in Nation. They also defined these as “ownership rights similar to those associated with fee simple, including: the right to decide how the land will be used; the right of enjoyment and occupancy of the land; the right to possess the land; the right to the economic benefits of the land; and the right to pro-actively use and manage the land.” (Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia [2014] SCC 44). Importantly, as a result of the 2014 Tsilhqot’in decision, outstanding Aboriginal title claims are stronger than they appeared to be before, and may well have increased the depth and intensity of consultation requirements, including where title has not yet been proven (Coates and Newman, 2014; Mcivor, 2018). However, because the court has also provided a test for proof of title and has said that Aboriginal title can be infringed by economic development or environmental protection activities ‘of broader societal interest’, the focus of consultation and accommodation will continue to shift from arguments as to the strength of claim of title, to those focused on the justification of infringement of title (McCrossan and Ladner, 2016). Consequently, as Christie argues, the Supreme Court in Tsilhqot’in has made clear that meaningful control does not necessarily flow from holding Aboriginal title. For First Nations groups to enjoy true self-governing jurisdictions requires that they work 'outside' the limits of Canadian jurisprudence and institutional frameworks, and assert their own rule-generating forces (Christie, 2015). This in turn requires perhaps, as Napoleon and Borrows both assert, an acceptance that Indigenous laws can be understood and applied across societal bounds (Borrows, 2015a; Napoleon, 2015). 42 2.4 Colonial Legacies, Governmentality and Counter-Institutional Strategies There is a growing body of critical scholarship, which scrutinizes the consultation and accommodation process and other forms of institutional engagement between the Crown and Indigenous peoples. These argue that such engagement is inherently unequal, and serves to entrench colonial power and advance [neo]liberal economic agendas (King and Pasternak, 2018; Stanley, 2016; Youdelis, 2016). This ‘politics of recognition’, following Coulthard, is an "expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to reconcile Indigenous claims to nationhood with Crown sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identities in some form of renewed relationship with the Canadian state” (Coulthard, 2007: 438). Thus despite providing spaces for recognition of Indigenous rights and self-governance, processes of accommodation often simply devolve to a truncated form of self-determination and sovereignty, thereby limiting the decision making power of Indigenous groups (MacDonald, 2011). Hale contends for example, that collective land rights (such as those understood within modern treaties in Canada), help advance neoliberalism by rationalizing land tenure or private property, and by compartmentalizing broader claims to territory or alternative development models (Hale, 2005). Simply put, a politics of recognition is viewed as a threat to Indigenous peoples because it takes for granted the authority of the settler state and because it transforms the ways in which Indigenous peoples relate to one another and to lands and animals as they seek recognition of dominant institutions through sovereignty (Nadasdy, 2017). Within the context of First Nation – Crown relations, such a transformation can be understood as a shift from paternal state control to one of market discipline, where First Nation groups are 43 compelled to adopt and self-impose the logics of bureaucratic statecraft and capitalism (Woolford, 2002). Blackburn, following Foucault, labels this reconfiguration of First Nation-Crown relations as a form of ‘governmentality’, which involves the creation of institutions designed to mediate the interactions between populations and economies, allowing the economy to run freely for the welfare of the state, and free of influence from subgroups (Blackburn, 2005; Foucault, 1991). Governmentality refers to the ‘conduct of conduct’ and the latent inculcation of desires, habits, aspirations and beliefs such that individuals themselves reproduce the conditions under which they already suffer (Li, 2007; Rose et al., 2006). In its contemporary ‘neoliberal’ form, governmentality is about the art of exercising power in the form of economy and the individualizing of subjects (Foucault, 1991; Gordon, 1991). Indeed, it is through the facilitation of community self-determination processes that ‘mentalities’ of market discipline, consumerism, and competition among others are encouraged (Woolford, 2002). Technologies of governmentality invariably accompany these processes, including in the context of Indigenous-Crown relations according to Harris as maps, numbers, the common law, and a new human geography which makes explicit what is and is not ‘native space’ (Harris, 2004). Peluso and Lund further explain governmentality as stemming from a type of territorialization in which the control of land is secured through the production and maintenance of new and existing power relations (Peluso and Lund, 2011). Territoriality is understood as a particular kind of political strategy, one that focuses on controlling people and processes through the demarcation and control of space (Nadasdy, 2012). Within this framing, the Crown referrals process in British Columbia is seen as a way for the Crown to maintain control over territorial governance and First Nation groups in order to advance a [neo]liberal economic development agenda (Kotaska, 2013). 44 If we accept, as does Nadasdy, that modern state power is largely an exercise in territoriality (Nadasdy, 2012) – then what are the implications and requirements of First Nations groups seeking territorial self-governance and jurisdiction? It is legitimate for critical scholars to ask whether or not Indigenous peoples are subjects reacting to industrial development within their territories and at the behest of power holders, be that industry or the Crown. First Nations groups in British Columbia despite increasing ‘authority’ over territories still very much must confront those which hold economic power over them, including the resource extraction corporations and the state apparatus supporting them. Exerting economic power is more than simply exerting authority – a group can have authority without the power to exercise economic decisions (Klein, 1994). This is precisely the case, for example, with Wet’suwet’en First Nation wherein hereditary chiefs have protested strongly against the Coastal Gas Link’s proposed liquid natural gas pipeline. The chiefs of all territorial houses are asserting territorial jurisdiction and so decision authority, including the right to a different economic future. The recent British Columbia court decision has dismissed that claim, once again asserting the province as final decision authority (Coastal GasLink Pipeline Ltd. v. Huson, 2019 BCSC 2264), and is using its full coercive might to enforce that decision (Dhillon, 2019). This case exemplifies the importance of not oversimplifying or naively concealing the still aggressive power of the state. However, we do point toward the fact that there remains and continues to evolve a complex web of relations and (counter) institutional innovations, which continue to resist, regulate and transform resource and economic development in First Nation territories. 45 As a new era of resource and economic development in BC emerges, First Nations groups in particular have begun to leverage such real-world agency as concerns rights and title assertions, governance arrangements, revenue streams, and other emerging opportunities in new and creative ways. Many are also very much in service of their own development visions (Anderson and Giberson, 2003). Indigenous communities are not simply subjects of circumstance, they can and are creating their own paths through strategic and pragmatic engagement with industrial resource interests resulting in not one hierarchy of power, but many (Iversen and Caine, 2017). Power, in the now infamous spirit of Foucault, is never fixed or given but rather an endless and open strategic game (Gordon, 1991). From this view, First Nations groups are not only victims of a pernicious Crown, nor necessarily subjects of the settler-state. Rather, many First Nations groups are strengthening their economic, political and cultural positions as they seek self-determination and territorial self-governance, opening up what some see as new possibilities for reshaping and reimagining resource development based on traditional social institutions and values (Slowey, 2008; Tesluk, 2014). Put differently, the advancement of rights and title and the emerging institutional structures which have served to mediate industrial development processes – notably the requirement to consult and potentially accommodate Indigenous peoples - may be characterized as a mode of capitalist regulation that has, and will increasingly influence economic development in British Columbia (Anderson and Giberson, 2003). Taken further, it could be said that First Nations groups, through constitutionally- and court-empowered institutional assertions, are beginning to create the space to not simply influence economic and resource development in British Columbia, but where desired to continually and strategically nudge so as to transform the neoliberal and governmental logic which drives it. 46 2.5 Counter-Institutionalizing the Crown Referrals Process The goal of the Crown to pursue certainty through new institutional arrangements with First Nations groups, be they treaties, reconciliation agreements, or other arrangements, is also consistent with theoretical understandings of the importance of institutions for economic development. Institutions are established and prevalent systems of social rules, both formal and informal, that structure social interactions and constrain and enable behavior (Hodgson, 2006; Lin and Nugent, 1995). Strong institutions, it is argued, lower the costs of exchange by reducing uncertainty and inducing economic development (Coase, 1998; North, 1992; Ostrom, 2005). Yet, the goal of certainty is not something unique to the settler state and to capitalist economies – the self-determination and functioning of First Nations groups or any other government or society is contingent upon the stability derived through social institutions of formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics (North, 2005). Further, within the context of Indigenous territorial self-governance, the rules of the game that mediate government to government relations within and across contested spaces, values and developmental aspirations are critical. Indeed, institutional innovations are necessary for the successful integration of disparate knowledge bases and epistemologies, which lead up to negotiated agreements, particularly in the context of contested forest landscapes (Clapp et al., 2016). This is not to say that institutional development is necessarily tied to an adherence to neoclassical economic doctrine or economic liberalism, but rather that First Nations groups who participate in and assert the design and structure of institutions challenge entrenched interests and power and in doing so challenge the economic logic dictating these structures (Hayter, 2004). 47 The ability to craft institutions, even if they are founded within the parameters of the status quo, can according to Kashwan et al. counter-balance the monopoly on power by the state “promoting new economic opportunities, political solidarities, and subversive discourses” (2019: 131). In this sense, we accept the inherent limitations of colonially-imposed Indigenous institutional structures rooted in a legal system that continues to assume Canada’s authority over or paternalistic duty to Indigenous peoples (Coulthard, 2007). But, we also disagree with the premise that the menace of [neo] liberal governmentality precludes all options of economic futures by and for Indigenous peoples who engage those forces. Our worry is that doing so silences the many strategic actors who are First Nations working within these confines to find in the cracks sometimes significant leverage to control their economic futures. Ignoring the state and its formations may be a desired path by Indigenous peoples, and in some cases check state power, but it will not serve to limit the ability of the state to despoil and exploit Indigenous lands, people and resources (Borrows, 2016a). Rather, Borrows accepts that “self-determination and self-governance are justifiably critiqued for blocking Indigenous aspirations (and can be misused as abstract forms), [yet] perfection can also become the enemy of the good if such critiques obstruct the exercise of Indigenous agency in real-world situations” (2016a: 164). Ironically even, some First Nations groups have opportunities to advance the kind of certainty that they desire by leveraging the uncertainty brought about by the duty to consult and accommodate. What that certainty means to First Nations groups is varied and context-dependent, both across and within those groups, and is undoubtedly influenced by capital and the state. However, it also includes some fulfillment of Aboriginal and treaty rights, and a certain territorial agency and cultural continuity. And while we concur with the suggestion that 48 neoliberalism functions through the cultural recognition of Indigenous difference (Altamirano-Jimenez, 2013; Pasternak, 2015), we contend that such forms of recognition can be utilized and turned upside down to not only advance the varied interests of First Nations groups, but to also challenge the forces of economic capitalism that so desperately require Indigenous cooperation. As Li notes, the potential for challenges from within [and] against the institutionalized embodiment of governmental rationality can only be understood by examining concrete examples and particular conjunctures of these struggles, where power can be examined empirically, and its instability and multiplicity revealed (2007). As new First Nations jurisdictions continue to emerge, the Crown referrals process, as we will see, serves as but a starting point for understanding challenges against the assumptions inherent in Crown and capital led institutional and economic development. 2.5.1 Informing and Building Territorial Guardianship As we have seen with modern treaties, land-claims, self-government agreements, and most recently the Tŝilhqot’in title case, the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples (beyond those lands within final agreements) remain relevant and important to Indigenous territorial self-governance (Hoogeveen, 2016). The Crown referrals process in British Columbia offers a starting point and forum for First Nation groups to receive information on all activity occurring within those traditional territories, to analyze and influence that activity, and in the best of cases, to prevent that activity. An interview with a referrals staff member of Lil’wat Nation provided an example of a group that is asserting guardianship over its territory in a number of ways in relation to the Crown referrals process. This has included the building of a master trails plan; the requirement of any forestry company requesting to operate in its territory to sign a forestry 49 agreement with the Nation; and by working collaboratively with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to understand impacts of requested activity by including environmental and fisheries monitoring (Persaud and Macdonald, 2017). The interviewee stated that the Nation “…considers the management of referrals to be a vital part of this guardianship.” For a long time Lil’wat Nation had been receiving referrals by email as notifications of activity, but as they built up their efforts to assert guardianship over territory, they began requiring proponents to submit referrals via their customized internal online system, and they created their own consultation policy to help guide the process and assist the referrals analysts to decide if a referral should be escalated to Council or not. Once within their referrals management system, the referrals are compared against spatial data, including Lil’wat’s traditional land use plan, thereby enhancing their capacity for consistently informed decisions that correspond with their territorial goals. Many of the First Nation’s referrals protocols reviewed as a part of this study are following a similar strategy, beginning (as above) to require government and proponents to submit all referrals through online portal systems that those First Nation groups have independently created. This includes but is not limited to setting their own timelines for responses (Persaud and Macdonald, 2017). Other First Nation groups are also utilizing land-use plans and evaluation frameworks, which enable them to provide justification and formal rationales for the rejection of certain developments through the consultation process (Murray and King, 2012). A staff member from Salteau First Nation, for example, told us that they now require that proponents submit referrals digitally and include GIS information – information with which they are “…able to develop analyses and formulate responses utilizing a team of technical specialists to engage with the proponent to ensure that environmental and cultural concerns of the Nation are addressed.” They explained that by doing so, they are often able to ensure the withholding of permits until 50 impact mitigation is achieved. These are but a few counter-institutional strategies in support of territorial guardianship, designed to shift the rules of the game to better serve the interests of First Nations groups. 2.5.2 Building Territorial Alliances Another common critique is that consultation itself - as an ‘honour of the Crown duty’ - has failed to materialize as truly shared decision-making processes for First Nation groups (Morellato, 2008). This is partially the result of ‘consultation fatigue’ amongst poorly resourced First Nations groups who continuously struggle to respond to Crown referrals, which they receive in abundance (MciLwraith and Cormier, 2016). This raises questions as to who it is that must be consulted, with case law thus far demonstrating a need for consultation processes to be carried out at a representative level for the sake of practicality, rather than referencing only an individual land-user level (Peach, 2016). Aggregating up and so enhancing agency is also realized by the advancing of individual First Nation interests via bodies representing multiple smaller First Nation groups. By working together, First Nations groups can reduce problems of overlapping territorial claims, gain the advantages of having a larger population and territory to draw from to develop their economies and human resources, and enable economies of scale for governing institutions and service provision (Kotaska, 2013). The benefits and advantages of territorial alliances between First Nations groups that has in many cases been catalyzed by the Crown referrals process itself has encouraged new levels of nation to nation cooperation. For example, an interviewee from the Stó:lō Nation referrals staff told us that before 2012 the different bands comprising the Stó:lō Nation were all responding to 51 referrals independently, even though their territories often overlapped. This system was disorganized and meant that referrals often never received a response, which led proponents to believe that they had carried out their duty to consult and could proceed. In 2012, all of the signatory Stó:lō bands and the BC government signed a strategic engagement agreement (SEA) which consolidated the consultation and referrals process. Out of this institutional innovation the Stó:lō portal was born, with sixteen communities/bands now participating. The portal offers a consensus-based approach to development projects (with the most affected communities tasked with the most important vote), and includes a strategic decision-making and community consultation system where community liaison officers represent affected communities and consult on potential impacts (Persaud and Macdonald, 2017). Other territorial alliances have been formed in British Columbia around the referrals management process. An interviewee from Metlakatla for example, told us that “being a part of the Coastal First Nation Alliance, [offers] benefits which support the management of referrals. This includes having reconciliation and engagement protocols between the Coastal First Nations and government already in place, a checklist of complete information required for a referral, and also funding support from the Alliance.” Another example is the Tŝilhqot’in National Government’s (TNG) Stewardship Portal which is “a web-based, land-use information management and planning support system” (Tŝilhqot’in National Government Stewardship Portal, 2019). This portal was asserted as a counter-institutionalizing process by the TNG as early as 2007, but did not receive buy-in from the government until 2011 and was further reinforced by the Tŝilhqot’in Stewardship Agreement between TNG and the Province of British Columbia. It provides a valuable service to many of the small Tŝilhqot’in Nations comprising the 52 National government, saving the communities time and resources in the referrals management process (Persaud and Macdonald, 2017). There remains, however, a question of who is still left out and so whether state recognized governing and elected bodies should be the only focus of consultation efforts. Indeed, an instructive example which goes to the heart of this matter is the sustained assertion of hereditary governance structures within Wet’suwet’en territory. Blockades on behalf of hereditary chiefs regarding the Coastal Gas Link liquid natural gas pipelines has delayed construction and has received widespread support across the country (Bellrichard and Barrera, 2020). Whether the Crown and company will recognize the position of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and move the pipeline out of their territory or abandon it all together was unresolved as this paper was being revised. This fundamental battle over territorial sovereignty remains a challenge for many non-Indian Act First Nations governance structures, but we believe that the legislation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in British Columbia should serve to further support groups such as the Wet’suwet’en and may contribute to the ongoing process of both counter-institutionalizing and decolonization more broadly. 2.5.3 Providing Evidence for Cumulative Impacts Our findings also point toward a critical link between the Crown referrals process and the ability of First Nations groups to carry out cumulative impact assessments within their territories, both as a part of the referrals assessment itself, and as a part of development-required environmental impact assessments (EIAs). Given the frequency and thoroughness of the consultation process with regard to development activities, those First Nations groups that are able to set up strong 53 systems to monitor activities across time and space and assess them against their own cultural and ecological databases are potentially able to advance an unprecedented degree of cumulative impact assessment and monitoring over their territories. Indeed, many First Nation groups are beginning to not simply respond to Crown referrals, but to utilize the information that they are receiving in order to build a knowledge base of comprehensive and cumulative understandings of disturbances within their traditional territories. This is imperative given that there appears to be an element of shared responsibility between government and First Nation groups over the identification of a rights claim and its assessment (Newman, 2019). It is also important given that government’s efforts to understand and incorporate cumulative effects in its decision making frameworks has been lackluster thus far. Counter-institutional measures in general are positioning First Nations groups to be better able to identify and respond to any potential threats to their rights. For example, an interviewee from Tl’azt’en First Nation explained how they are a signatory of the Stewardship Working Group, which is a collaborative agreement between various provincial government departments and seven First Nations where high level issues that have impacts on Aboriginal rights and title are discussed. This agreement has provided Tl’azt’en the opportunity to develop a cumulative impact assessment and analysis, and they now have access to maps that show [these] impacts. The interviewee explained that “the right to meaningfully exercise Aboriginal rights is the term used when the cumulative impacts are high.” If a referral shows up as having a high cumulative impact, it goes up to the Stewardship Working Group, allowing important referrals to be addressed at a strategic engagement level. TNG also described their customized referrals analysis 54 system as providing for a level of cumulative analysis and assessment that was previously not possible. These counter-institutionalizing processes of asserting cumulative effects as a part of the duty to consult is beginning to force government and industry to move beyond discrete decision making without acknowledging overall project impacts. Cumulative impacts are also increasingly recognized as important considerations in deliberations over impacts on Aboriginal rights and interests. The 2011 West Moberly decision (West Moberly First Nations v. British Columbia (Chief Inspector of Mines) 2011 BCCA 247), for example, demonstrated that historical breaches may bear on forward-looking effects of present decisions as a result of cumulative impacts (Newman, 2019). At the time of writing, the Blueberry River First Nation and the Province of British Columbia agreed to adjourn litigation alleging breach of Treaty 8 based upon the cumulative impacts of industrial development in their territory, instead opting to negotiate a number of issues related to land use planning and sustainable resource development outside of the courts (BC Gov News, 2018). Those First Nations groups who are easily able to document those cumulative impacts, as in the TNG and the Tl’azt’en examples described above, will be best positioned to leverage such data as a part of reconciliation and other negotiations going forward, and will be better positioned for effective territorial self-governance. 2.5.4 Securing Strategic Funding Agreements to Support Self-Governance Given that the vast majority of First Nations groups in Canada are adjacent to commercially harvestable forest resources (Booth and Skelton, 2011; Curran and M'Gonigle, 1999), and approximately 190,000 hectares of timber are harvested annually in British Columbia (BC 55 Government, 2018), it is no surprise that forestry referrals are one of the predominant requests that come through First Nations referrals departments in British Columbia. As a result, most First Nations groups have funding agreements in place to ensure that they receive at a minimum some economic benefits from harvesting occurring within their traditional territories, which then is supposed to provide a steady flow of funding for referrals departments. The early iteration of such arrangements were Forest and Range Land Agreements (FRA), which have been characterized as First Nations groups accepting known quantities of revenue and timber in exchange for an unknown amount of possible infringements of their Aboriginal rights (Christie, 2006). FRAs and Forest Tenure Opportunity Agreements were replaced by Forest Consultation and Revenue Sharing Agreements (FCRSA) under the New Relationship, government-to-government approach of the BC government in 2005 (BC Government, 2017). In addition to the FCRSA, several groupings of First Nations have developed strategic engagement agreements (SEAs) with the province. These are established within the context of a policy of ‘incrementalism’ in BC designed to build the capacity of First Nations groups to ensure the success of final agreements once they are put in place. But they also aim to create a sense of certainty for potential investors in the territory - and so perhaps constitute a further example of the threat of governmentality (King and Pasternak, 2018). Although many of these agreements have had some success, our findings also indicate that government funding for consultation processes is far from adequate and has forced many First Nations groups to establish their own alternative sources of revenue in order to strengthen their decision-making power in relation to development within their territories. First Nations groups are thus leveraging the duty to consult and accommodate in order to secure funding 56 arrangements, independent of Crown support, which they are then using to fund their consultation and accommodation processes. Through engagement with industry these arrangements often materialize in the form of impact benefit agreements (IBAs). Indeed the shift in Canadian policy to recognize Aboriginal rights to territory and resources has given First Nations groups a bargaining chip with corporations who require access to land and resources (Anderson et al., 2005). IBAs are the result of First Nations groups engaging with industry early on before a referral is received, or as a result of the referrals process where accommodation has been deemed necessary. IBAs are often paying for referrals staff, for the purchase of equipment and land management software, and for hiring cultural/community monitors and technical specialists to support ‘ground-truthing’ research, particularly in relation to Social-Environmental Impact Assessments (Persaud and Macdonald, 2017). An interviewee from Salteau First Nation explained to us that they establish agreements with large companies to ensure that there are cultural monitors funded and in place before and during operations. They also receive funds for participation from whichever regulator is reviewing a project, and then make up the shortcoming of funds by engaging the proponent. Another First Nation referrals staff told us that although they never had success achieving their goals through Crown referrals processes, they did have luck engaging directly with proponents early on. Companies, for example, explained to them that if they knew that there was something important about a piece of property they wouldn’t have purchased it in the first place. The interviewee from Salteau First Nation explained to us that they receive some funding for managing referrals through various agreements with government departments, but that this alone would not support their entire team. Rather, much of their funding comes from the proponents themselves, and that 57 due to the rich resources in the region they were able to negotiate funds to set up the community liaison positions, making their referrals department one of the largest within their group of Nations due to industry funding. There is no doubt that for some First Nations groups IBAs have become of primary financial importance to territorial self-governance, which is in many ways alarming and indicative of a developmental fait accompli (Dylan and Smallboy, 2013). Although these negotiated agreements are seen to address the deficiencies of other funding and impact assessment processes, and even act as cultural and social permits for development within First Nation territories, their impacts are still poorly understood (Galbraith et al., 2007). It is therefore legitimate for scholars to question whether or not these agreements are of benefit to First Nation groups, and whether they are de facto a type of privatized negotiation of consent manifesting the very neoliberalization of the consultation and accommodation process that is a worry (Cameron and Levitan, 2014). Further, few interviewees expressed clarity as to the relationship between IBAs and the consultation and accommodation process. One argument is that the government appears to be increasingly treating IBAs as evidence of adequate consultation and accommodation (Fidler and Hitch, 2009). Thus IBA’s may only mean that developments are moving forward despite their being detrimental to the needs of First Nation groups, and thus are best understood as attempts to manage the effects of extractive projects (O’Faircheallaigh, 2012). However, as we have seen they often play an important role in supporting the ability of First Nation groups to assert territorial self-governance through the Crown referrals process. In the best of cases, First Nation groups are developing counter-institutionalizing strategies through the IBA process itself, by securing the authority of the First Nation group to assess project impacts (as a part of a specific 58 IBA). The Squamish Nation for example had the added benefit of establishing the precedent of using the Nation’s own impact reports instead of those normally tabled by governmental regulatory bodies – in other words, reports that do not recognize independent community impact assessment processes (Papillon and Rodon, 2017). 2.6 An Insurmountable Dilemma: ‘Damned if you do, Damned if you Don’t’ Despite a growing suite of relatively more effective strategies, it has to be said that the referrals process has created a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ tradeoff for most First Nations groups. Failure to participate in the flawed process means not having cumulative knowledge or information of the activities occurring within their territories, not having records of dissent against specific activities, and potentially not having the funding sources needed to effectively self-govern. Some conservative commentators argue that non-participation in the referrals process as a protest against the system is likely not a favourable approach since the courts have made it clear that consultation is a two-way process. That is, they argue that First Nations groups must also meaningfully engage so as not to compromise their legal position (Newman, 2014). Yet, this requirement ignores the fact that responding in specific ways to all of the referrals within established timeframes is nearly impossible for many First Nation groups. As one interviewee who had many years of experience working on referrals for different First Nation groups stated: “it is a very frustrating and unfair process. You have entire governments and departments on the other end, and on our end, you have very little money and staff. It was all very reactive rather than proactive.” 59 Another interviewee explained that they were overwhelmed by the number of referrals being received and by the inability to make meaningful decisions regarding those referrals. In their words: “we are not overly concerned with spending thousands of dollars on organizing referrals that just become garbage or are ignored.” The financial and human capacity of First Nations groups to respond to referrals varies across British Columbia, and is often based on the population size of the group and the endowment of natural resources within their territories. While some First Nations groups have leveraged these factors to build the capacity to engage and indeed counter-institutionalize the duty to consult and accommodate, others are clearly left behind. Also problematic is the fact that the referrals process often simply amounts to token consultation, allowing industry to ensure that it has ticked off the ‘consultation’ check box. One interviewee for example, told us that it is the province that determines the level of consultation required, which often typically amounts to simple notification. As we have shown above, many First-Nations groups are pushing back against this by demanding a certain amount of information to accompany those notifications, and by employing organized efforts to demonstrate potential infringements, but in many cases it is clearly not enough. As such, for some First Nations groups the referrals process is seen as a waste of time, because even if the group disagrees with the proposed activity, it will often go ahead. One interviewee stated: “Referrals are the legal pathway for the Province to be able to infringe on rights.” Another interviewee told us that as the referrals came they would assess them for importance, then based on this assessment an elder and monitor would go out and view the property in question, and then they would come back and write a letter of response: “…but really to what end? With the oil and gas commission referrals 60 particularly, they could be stalled with studies, lawyers, etc. But ultimately it was already decided that it would be approved, there were no referrals that could be reversed.” Indeed, although Aboriginal title is found to be constitutionally protected, the power of the Crown to infringe upon this right is practically unlimited, and as Christie points out, when the Crown consults Indigenous peoples, it is typically in relation to how its vision of land use will be implemented, not about the vision of the group in question (Christie, 2006). Despite this clear power imbalance, there appears to exist an underlying necessity for First Nations groups to continue to engage lest they lose hope for any claims, and any form of meaningful control over territory. The pursuit by First Nations groups such as the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs for inclusion in consultation processes is evidence of the importance of this institutional form of engagement for the exercise of territorial self-governance. Further, the Tŝilhqot’in title decision has indicated that Indigenous control over territory does not necessarily flow naturally from holding Aboriginal title, but rather must be asserted and gained by First Nations groups (Christie, 2015). As we have seen, for many First Nations groups, the one way of living with, contesting and incrementally overcoming the dilemmas inherent in First Nation-Crown relations is by engaging in acts of counter-institutionalizing, including within the Crown referrals process itself. 2.7 Conclusion Within British Columbia, where outstanding First Nations land claims cover much of the provincial territory, the implications of consultation and accommodation processes are significant. Resource extraction and energy interests continue to be served with injunctions 61 against their activities – be they handed down by the courts, or by other policy enforcement. Nevertheless, First Nations territories are under relentless pressure from industrial development requiring immediate action on the part of First Nations groups to protect the ecological and cultural integrity of their territories whilst they continue to assert and negotiate their equal status as decision makers. It is within this high-stakes context that the Crown referrals process as the primary mode of institutional engagement between First Nations groups, the Crown and resource development proponents becomes a critical space of interaction. Although some institutional innovations can offer space and support for First Nations interests, the dilemma remains that existing forms of institutional engagement still risk perpetuating certain power imbalances that invariably compromise Indigenous self-determination. At the same time, the goal of certainty as a requirement for the political-economic stability and development of the settler state has catalyzed consultation and accommodation processes through a logic of governmentality. These incremental and fundamental institutional changes can open up opportunities for First Nations groups to shape and counter this process in support of their own values and development aspirations. To do so is to not complacently accept the concessions of power that are offered to First Nations groups by the Crown, but rather to assert their own ideas of what that power entails and requires. We have argued throughout this paper that many First Nations groups are best addressing this dilemma through the act of counter-institutionalizing. For the most part, resistance or outright refusal is rare. Instead, our findings point to the fact that many First Nations groups are willing or are forced to accept the tradeoffs that participating in liberal ‘recognition’-based institutions 62 entail because they see these as inevitable and thus better faced through counter-institutionalizing practices which at a minimum work to reduce entrenched power imbalances. We also recognize the inherent limitation of an analysis which predominantly reflects the sentiments of interviewees involved in elected and not hereditary First Nations governance roles. This shortcoming limits our understanding of the ways in which neoliberal and governmental forces also impact individuals or other collectivities within First Nations groups. Following Alfred and Corntassel we acknowledge the importance of recognizing the multiple sites of resistance to the institutional manifestations of these forces, as they remain vital to the process of decolonization (Alfred and Corntassel, 2013). Ultimately, these are and remain colonial institutions. While it is beyond the purview of this study to speculate on what the desired outcomes of any anti-institutional resistance may be, Pasternak’s notion of the “grounded authority” of Indigenous law and as resistance to colonial land claim settlements in Quebec is certainly a form of jurisdictional assertion based on inherent rights (Pasternak, 2017). So too, Nadasdy’s concept of anti-sovereignty in the Yukon also presents an ample starting place (Nadasdy, 2017). In our analysis, counter-institutionalizing means First Nation groups move beyond the rules of the game set out by industry and the Crown with regard to consultation and accommodation processes and territorial self-governance, and begin to assert their inherent and constitutional rights and laws over their traditional territories. It requires ‘remapping’ to challenge colonial boundaries and industrial tenures as well as contesting definitions of resource values and development itself (Clapp, 2004; Clapp et al., 2016). It also includes ‘transformative planning’ (Lane and Hibbard, 2005), Indigenous-led land-use planning (Booth and Muir, 2011), as well as ‘counter-mapping’ to identify and assert control over not just the places of importance to 63 Indigenous peoples, but also what MciLwraith and Cormier (2016) refer to as the “the spaces between the places” which represent an interconnected cultural territory. Importantly, counter-institutionalizing includes and requires the efforts of various engagements from within First Nations groups, including elders and community activists. Nadasdy, in his call for anti-sovereignty, cites examples of what we would refer to as counter-institutionalizing processes: where the Kluane and White River elder’s refusal to draw clear territorial boundaries between their respective First Nations resulted in a solution of shared jurisdiction (Nadasdy, 2017). Most recently the Tŝilhqot’in Nation has enacted the Nulh Ghah Dechen Ts’edilhtan (“Wildlife Law”) within its declared title area, which regulates hunting for both Tŝilhqot’in and non-Tŝilhqot’in people in order to ensure wildlife populations are conserved and protected for future generations (Dyok, 2019). This enactment of Indigenous law is part of a process of asserting guardianship and control of the still uncertain jurisdiction that has arisen from the Tŝilhqot’in title declaration. It sets precedent for the depth of counter-institutionalizing that we may continue to see as Indigenous interests advance in Canada. The hope is that such forms of counter-institutionalizing will eventually serve to enable self-governing First Nations groups to realize their territorial visions for sustainable economic futures, offering a much-needed alternative to development in its current forms. 64 Chapter 3: Reconciling Conflicting Institutional Logics Within First Nations Forestry-Based Social Enterprises 3.1 Introduction As a result of settler-colonialism and the pressures of extractivist models of development, institutional diversity and conflicting logics have become commonplace within First Nations communities in Canada, arising from First Nations-led forestry enterprises that have been created to generate value for those communities. First Nations-led forestry enterprises face regulatory, cultural and normative influences at the local level that often run into conflict with provincial, national and global rules, values and practices that have become increasingly homogenized within an industrial, productivist paradigm (Pache & Santos, 2010). A downturn in the forestry sector over the last several decades coupled with increasingly strengthened First Nations territorial decision-making offers new opportunities for institutional changes in relation to the forestry sector in British Columbia. However, approaches being promoted and pursued by First Nations tend to remain tied to a productivist paradigm of forestry which understands development as dependent upon industrial extraction primarily for export-focused commodity production (Markey et al., 2008; Mather et al., 2006), rather than how those activities can benefit the community. The challenge for First Nations engaging in forestry is to find ways to improve their material well-being without losing fundamental principles at the core of their worldview (Hernandez, 2013). To do so inevitably requires the creation of forestry enterprises that are successfully able 65 to reconcile institutional logics of equity and social value creation with dominant ‘commercial’ logics of efficiency that have become commonplace within First Nations economic development efforts. Commercial logics tend to be embedded in broader societal market logics and are structured around the goal of "selling products and services on the market to produce an economic surplus that can ultimately be legitimately appropriated by owners" (Pache & Santos, 2013, p. 980). These dominant institutional logics that come to bear upon First Nations organizations are often the values and beliefs of powerful actors (Reay and Hinings, 2009), or as Lawrence (2008) points out: the result of systemic forms of power and practices that are routine and ongoing and which are often taken for granted. Within the context of First Nations such ‘disciplinary’ practices can be understood as a form of governmentality which renders First Nations leaders and members alike in contributing, through various processes and activities, to the free flow of the capitalist market economy (Blackburn, 2005; Foucault, 1991). The shared values, existing norms and governance structures within a community influence the ways in which conflicting logics are navigated, yet within the context of First Nations economic development and forestry, the challenge is that dominant institutional prescriptions continue to privilege efficiency as the roundabout solution to equity, claiming that efficiency gains made through certain measures of governance, productivity, and viability create the type of wealth which can then be re-distributed (Rosser, 2005). This claim is what really lies at the heart of neoliberal and other institutional prescriptions for Indigenous approaches to economic development, one which has taken hold in many First Nations communities, and which tends to limit experimentation with alternative and more direct pathways toward well-being (Graham and Healy, 2008). 66 There is an identified need for new structures and institutions that better enable First Nations communities to control and benefit from local resources in ways that are informed by their own knowledge and governance systems without compromising their values (Booth, 1998; Wyatt, 2008a). Wyatt and Nikolakis call this new, and heretofore unrealized form of ‘aboriginal forestry’ a paradigm which respects and is led by Indigenous values and institutions (Nikolakis and Nelson, 2015; Wyatt, 2008a). Realizing this new form of what we call Indigenous forestry must be predicated on institutional change – where when one dominant logic shifts to another, thereby affecting the strategic decision making of organizations (Reay and Hinings, 2009). This also requires an understanding of Indigenous economic development and well-being that balances and makes trade-offs between multiple values, and which attempts in substantial ways to reconcile social value creation (equity) with financial sustainability (efficiency), without the former being subsumed by the latter. We contend that a key component of Indigenous forestry as an economic activity is its ability to contribute, in both direct and indirect ways, to the basic needs, aspirations and well-being of First Nations communities through the development of Indigenous forestry social enterprises. This means forestry practices that result in much more than ‘trickle-down’ revenues from primary logging activities, including more direct control in the type of forestry being carried out. It also means more value-added and socio-cultural benefits from forest resources across the entire value chain of a forest product, and more direct use of forest products to satisfy local community needs (i.e. construction and housing projects). In this paper we explore the case of small-scale First Nations community sawmill enterprises (hereby referred to as FNCSEs), which offer an opportunity for First Nations to directly 67 participate in, and ideally define forestry within their territories. A focus on FNCSEs is justified in particular because this is the scale of operation most common across First Nations in British Columbia due to relatively low entry requirements. This model has proliferated of late as a seemingly practical and intuitive economic strategy for First Nations seeking to extract multiple values from local forests. Wyatt et al. (2013) for example posit that the greatest benefits and control for First Nations typically results from the creation of wood transformation facilities including sawmills. Further, the small-scale value added industry typically employs more people per m³ of logs, which is considered a critical indicator of success for many First Nations (Grace et al., 2018; Hayter, 2000). The smaller mills so associated are also pursued for a combination of social, cultural, ecological and economic goals, offering opportunities to directly connect forestry related activities with community needs and well-being (Bull et al., 2014b). Hence, although FNCSEs face conflicting institutional logics, this also means that they have access to a broad array of institutional templates that they can combine, making them ideal vehicles for the type of innovation that First Nations communities require (Pache & Santos, 2013). This makes them a useful focal point for understanding the interplay of institutional control, agency and resistance - what Lawrence calls the "contours of institutional politics" (2008: 20) - facing First Nations communities in relation to forested territorial resources. 3.2 The Rise of Conflicting Institutional Logics in Forestry Despite efforts to increase First Nations participation in forestry-related economic development, particularly over the last few decades, participation rates remain relatively low across Canada. Where it has occurred, some question the extent to which it has actually contributed to the economic and social well-being of communities (Beaudoin, 2012). The increased allocation of 68 timber tenures to First Nations over the last several decades has been carpeted in rhetoric related to economic development, jobs, and a ‘new relationship’. While some equitable arrangements have been realized, others point out that such policy has also been a political-economic response to growing rural discord between big industry and First Nations, wherein a key objective is a smooth flow of fiber to production facilities and to (non-First Nation) markets (Nikolakis and Nelson, 2015). Lost are the moditional livelihood forestry activities that First Nations were able to so successfully navigate in the early days of rising industrial forestry. Today, First Nations that enter into economic relationships with forest companies in an attempt to limit and recover economic losses are often forced to accept existing forest management systems and the institutional logics which drive them (Wyatt, 2008a). Reconciling the cultural-ecological values of First Nations with commercial forestry operations has proved elusive, particularly because the social and environmental demands of such value systems render First Nations forestry operations much more challenging than purely profit and efficiency driven commercial operations (Booth & Skelton, 2011; Booth, 1998; Krcmar et al., 2005). Current annual allowable cut (AAC) levels for the most part are unable to accommodate traditional First Nations economies or enterprises, many of which seek to balance conservation and social wealth with extraction (Booth & Skelton, 2011). This has lead some to call for a redesigning of the tenure system and associated “cut it or lose it” rules related to AAC allocations, in order to ensure that First Nations are able to benefit economically from forests while not being beholden to a high-volume, short-term-profit driven industrial model (Passelac-Ross and Smith, 2002). Compounding this problem is the continued reliance of the forestry industry on a predominantly capital-intensive, high-volume, low-labour production strategy 69 which produces fewer jobs per unit of wood than other industrial forest economies (Hayter, 2000; Markey et al., 2005). Although alternative forestry business models do exist, the predominant commodity-export model itself requires keeping the cost of production low, resulting in a push to keep harvest levels high to gain economies of scale and adopt labour-saving technologies. Hence there remains a tendency for large forest companies to build ‘super’ mills that require less people to operate and tremendous amounts of throughput to keep operable. Invariably, long term sustainability of these plants is jeopardized due to shortages of fibre, with the average lifespan of an industrial plant for wood being less than 8 years (Baldwin, 2005). An overall decline in industrial forestry over the last 30 years has followed, with the number of large and medium size sawmills in BC declining by 47% between 1990 and 2015, including 27 sawmills on the coast closing since 2005 (Williams, 2018). Discontinuation of appurtenancy in 2003 (the requirement that logs be milled near the region of extraction) is considered by some as contributing to this problem and therefore detrimental to the forestry sector (Williams, 2018). Whereas others have seen cancellation of appurtenancy as creating opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) including First Nations communities to obtain greater access to the forest resource and to create value-added enterprises (Passelac-Ross and Smith, 2002). Indeed, as large mills continue to shut down there exist new opportunities for First Nations to not only participate in, but also transform the way forestry is carried out within their territories. One way of achieving this is through the creation of forestry-based social enterprises which seek to balance multiple values in the pursuit of diverse socio-economic, cultural and ecological goals. 70 3.3 The Conflicting Logics of First Nations Social Enterprises Social enterprises, or social purpose enterprises, have emerged as the predominant organizational forms that cross between the private, public and non-profit sectors, often acting as a link between government and free market enterprise in order to facilitate social goals (Doherty et al., 2014; Wallace, 1999). They have risen in popularity as a type of ‘middle path’ vehicle to address problems of poverty, social marginalization and environmental degradation, given the inability of government and traditional businesses to do so (Dacin et al., 2011). Unlike profit-oriented enterprises, social enterprises are considered to be more concerned with ethical questions about needs and surplus uses (Cameron, 2008), rendering them a seemingly suitable vehicle for the interests of many First Nations. Some define social entrepreneurship simply as “creating social value by providing solutions to social problems” (Dacin et al., 2011: 1204). Others offer a broader definition that refers to the process of combining resources in the form of new products, services or organizations in order to explore and exploit opportunities, create social and economic value, stimulate social change, or meet social needs (Newth and Woods, 2014; Short et al., 2009). This definition is useful to our study because it covers both traditional understandings of entrepreneurship as well as social entrepreneurship, allowing for an analysis of the ways in which these distinct models manifest logics which resist and influence one another towards the shaping of outcomes (Newth and Woods, 2014). Within First Nations communities today there exists a great degree of ambiguity about whether formal economic activities and the institutions/organizations facilitating them can rightly be defined as social enterprises. The paucity of data and studies in relation to First Nations social enterprises raises questions about whether such institutional configurations have been able to 71 reinforce local and cultural logics of production and redistribution, or simply emulate capitalist-market businesses. Sengupta et al. contend that the distinguishing feature between Indigenous social enterprise and non-Indigenous ones is the role of culture, and there is often an assumption that because Indigenous businesses are for the most part band (collectively)-owned, rather than individually owned, they will operate for the benefit of the community (2015). For example, Anderson et al. argue that Indigenous entrepreneurship is inherently ‘social’ because it includes economic self-sufficiency, protecting land ownership and use, strengthening economic circumstances, and revitalizing traditional culture (2006). Dana (2015) also provides examples from around the world which demonstrates that Indigenous entrepreneurship always has non-economic causal variables. Some argue that Indigenous values and institutional logics are reflected in not only band-owned enterprises but also First Nations development corporations (EDCs), and that they therefore fit within the definition of social enterprises (Curry et al., 2016; Hotte et al., 2018). However, Curry et al. in their study on Indigenous EDCs found that 60% of the development corporations surveyed selected profit generation as the primary goal or mission, followed by employment, and then workforce training (Curry et al., 2016). They assert that because surpluses from development corporations will flow to communities at large they should be considered a type of social enterprise. Renderings of social enterprise which resort to trickle-down financial benefits appear to confirm claims that the literature on social economy and social innovation in Indigenous communities tends to be subsumed by capitalist market-based discourses and logics (Sengupta, 2015; Wallace, 1999). This tendency invariably becomes reflected in practice. For example, the production of commodities for export with surplus marshaled for use of the 72 community is a typical strategy of social enterprises. However the challenge that such formations face due to their often dual mission and hybrid nature is the potential for 'mission drift', particularly as the social objectives of a social enterprise are sacrificed to achieve financial viability (Doherty et al., 2014; Graham and Healy, 2008). The shift of socially focused enterprises toward commercially productive activities can be explained by the need to deliver goods and services without creating dependencies (Wallace, 1999). The dual mission of achieving financial sustainability and social value means that social enterprises bridge institutional fields and face conflicting institutional logics. Institutional logics are a derivative of the regulatory, social and cultural contexts in which individuals and organizations exist (Doherty et al., 2014). They are the product of higher order institutional forces and represent a mix of interests, values, identities and assumptions (Thornton and Ocasio, 2008). Institutional logics shape and constrain organizational behaviour and action by providing guidance as to what constitutes legitimate goals, and by indicating what means are legitimate to achieve those goals (Pache & Santos, 2013; Pache & Santos, 2010). In this sense, institutional logics also provide frames of reference and evaluation for actors and organizations, rooted in established rules, norms, and habits (Herrera, 2016). A key distinction between social entrepreneurs and commercial entrepreneurs then, is that the former are typically driven by a logic of empowerment of others, whereas the latter are driven by a logic of control (Santos, 2012). Hence, the central choice for organizations like FNCSEs facing conflicting logics is how to balance social value creation with value capture, or framed differently, how to manage the tradeoff between distributional equality and efficiency (Knight, 1992; Lounsbury and Boxenbaum, 2013). 73 3.4 Methods The ideas and materials discussed in this paper are based on findings from 18 semi-structured interviews with experts and leaders involved in FNCSEs primarily in British Columbia. In addition, we draw on interviews, observations, meetings and conversations - most of which occurred while the first author was working as a community development practitioner with a not-for-profit organization in this sector over the last four years. Given that many FNCSEs operate informally, are discontinued, or otherwise are not part of the public record, there does not exist any official inventory or list of enterprises within this category. Roughly speaking, but not fully verified, about 190 (of 203) First Nations bands in British Columbia have operated small sawmills at some point over the last century.1 Generally accepted criteria for small forestry operations (including sawmills) are operations with fewer than 100 employees and consuming no more than 20,000 m³ of timber annually (Nelson et al., 2020). Some examples of what are considered ‘small’ sawmill operations in Canada range in log consumption of between 700 – 14,000 m³ per year and employing 4-5 full-time staff (Houdek and Baumeister, 2007). Most of the community sawmills researched as a part of this study fell within a similar range, with one exception of a mill which employed 20 people. 1 To our knowledge there exists no formal or informal inventory of First Nation community sawmill enterprises, and because they are often started informally and are short lived the records of their existence are limited. The lead author’s experience visiting different First Nations communities and speaking with different people involved in First Nations forestry and economic development initiatives point toward the fact that it is a strategy that has been widespread in First Nations communities in British Columbia and the rest of Canada. Some literature also points toward the strategy (see for example Hickey and Nelson, 2005) 74 Purposive and opportunistic sampling (Bradshaw and Stratford, 2010) was used in this study to identify interviewees in a network of existing First Nations community partners and practitioners, and through a comprehensive review of communities and specialist knowledge holders represented in both the academic and grey literature on Indigenous forestry and the value-added forestry sector in British Columbia and Canada. A web-based search for news stories or other announcements related to FNCSEs was also used to identify potential interviewees. Together these sources provided an initial list of the aforementioned forestry and sawmill experts. Particular focus was paid to any First Nations leaders or experts with experience in FNCSEs able to participate, and primary contact was made via email requesting their participation in the study. Although the sample of 18 interviewees is not representative of all First Nations involved in value-added forestry in BC, theoretical saturation of results began to occur quite early on in the interview process (Guest et al., 2006). The interview schedule employed here was a modified qualitative expert elicitation design, suitable for revealing a diversity of views including professional and personal opinions of First Nations experts and leaders (Nikolakis and Nelson, 2015). The goal of the study was to develop an understanding of the best practices and the characteristics and perceptions of success and/or failure with regard to FNCSEs. The interviews were predominantly carried out by phone due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with only 3 face to face interviews conducted before lockdown began. Interviews were recorded with consent (n=16), with 2 relying on extensive note taking only. Analysis was carried out in overlapping phases throughout the interviewing period, so as to improve subsequent interviews. Once complete the interviews were transcribed before undergoing a manual coding process which involved an initial review of the transcripts in order 75 to become re-familiarized with each discussion, followed by a second pass of the transcripts in order to begin to identify recurring themes, develop cross-case analyses, build rankings and narratives, and develop theory (Bhattacherjee, 2012; Rubin and Rubin, 2012a). During the first two reviews of the transcripts coding was organized into primary themes and sub-themes, and once a significant codebook was developed and analyzed, a third review of the transcripts was done to ensure that nothing was missed in the coding and analysis process. 3.5 Findings: The Conflicting Logics of FNCSEs In this section we examine FNSCEs through the lens of institutional logics in order to reveal the ambiguities and latent internal conflicts that these entities face in realizing manifold missions. We identify four overarching ‘equity’ logics underpinning the activities of FNCSEs that emerged from our interviews: individual well-being; community building; social appropriateness; and increased forestry involvement. Countering these are the emergent ’efficiency’ logics of: workforce productivity; cost savings; de-politicization; and opportunity costs. 3.5.1 Individual Well-Being Vs. Workforce Productivity For First Nations looking to have their members employed in the forestry sector, sawmilling often appears to be a more accessible strategy than other forestry related jobs. This is particularly so as primary forestry work often remains inaccessible where capacity and trained specializations are comparatively rare. That job creation was found to be of primary importance to many respondents was expected given that First Nations economic development efforts are often couched in terms of the creation of ‘labour markets’ (Friedel and Taylor, 2011). What was unique across interviewee responses was the characterization of the goal of FNCSEs as more 76 than simply building the labour market. Instead, jobs in FNCSES were more typically regarded as a means toward self-empowerment and hope for individuals: “Well, I mean economic development is the goal, but it's to get them active and working and giving them hope is the biggest reason because without hope when you think about the suicide rate on these reserves that's obviously lacking right, hope.” (Interviewee 16). It is well understood today that the historical trauma and cultural dislocation associated with the settler-colonial project continues to perpetuate mental health issues within First Nations communities (Alfred, 2009). That economic strategies in relation to job creation often shift toward a focus on individual well-being as opposed to ideas about workforce productivity is not surprising; it is quite simply an imperative. Addressing individual needs has become a critical component of the success of First Nations enterprises, and FNCSEs appear to offer not just jobs, but a way to fulfill other aspects of well-being that are relative to those individual needs: “So then I had to go back to the individual, what type of values what type of goals and so at one point, especially with this one woman, the only woman in the business, and she was in the office with me and we'd sit down, like what are the goals that you want? And so how am I working with each person to get to really support them as people and kind of shifting the business around that? Instead of going in with this idea of like, this is how a sawmill business operates. Now it's like we're going to make this very people driven. We want these people involved, how do we keep them involved and interested.” (Interviewee 17) 77 Here we see institutional logics at play, where the interviewee refers to the idea of how a sawmill business is supposed to operate, and then behaviour which contradicts this presupposition. Thus, FNCSEs appear to face behavioural trade-offs in relation to conflicting institutional logics, resulting in a common perception that the social mission around individual capacity building is something distinct from or even counteractive to productive efficiencies: “For the understood mandate of developing capacity, creating employment, and locally moving up the value chain in the industry the mill was a success on that front. There should have been greater attention paid to the mill inefficiencies however. From a business perspective then, it didn’t necessarily succeed.” (Interviewee 11) This response demonstrates a prevailing logic which drives First Nations economic development thinking – that efficiencies brought to the productive process will improve the business case. Through a logic of workforce productivity, production is understood as the process of efficiently through-putting materials toward a tangible output or commodity to be sold for profit. This logic was apparent in the response of another interviewee who understood productivity as critical to the financial viability of the enterprise: “it's just gotten to where productivity is the last thing that means anything right? So like if it's me I've got a real concern if I was expected to manage it or whatever. Making the group that's there, change that group around if you're going to take over the trained up employees that you do have. Now can I turn that productivity around? Because, to my 78 estimation, the productivity levels that are mentioned in this mill are nowhere near the productivity levels that I've talked to different people that have owned the same mill.” (Interviewee 4) Through such a logic, labour is treated as an inanimate and impersonal factor of production in the pursuit of profits, where the enterprise does not give value to work itself, but only to the output of work and the associated wage (Ross and Usher, 1986). Although this logic was present, what the interviews predominantly revealed was a recognition that it wasn’t working within the context of FNCSEs. The expectation that workers and management practices within FNCSEs would reach a standard of productivity and efficiency that has been set within a productivist development paradigm was simply unrealistic: “I mean, you have people coming in saying you guys could be producing so much and you could be making so much money but realistically, until you have the proper industrial size sawmill, I mean, it's not going to happen. Yeah. So I mean, I think I’d be happy that you're able to provide employment for a few people and you know, maybe even make a little bit on it would be nice, but it doesn’t happen....” (Interviewee 9) Challenges in productivity mean that for the most part, FNCSEs appear to provide little in terms of own-source revenue for First Nations, and many with whom we spoke struggled to even see how they could break-even financially. Only one of the 18 interviewees could definitively say that they operate at a profit, and this mill was on the larger side of the FNCSE spectrum (20 employees). Most interviewees in fact felt that profits were beyond the reach of FNCSEs, and 79 this alone was reason enough to more explicitly direct FNCSEs toward advancing more of a social entrepreneurial mission of equity and social value creation: “I think that it's a little bit misdirected or something or misunderstood this idea now of profit, making it profitable...It's still barely possible to think that they're going to be profitable in the traditional sense of the word, I'm starting to feel it's just unrealistic. It needs to be regarded as more of a tool as part of something bigger.” (Interviewee 3) To capture what this something bigger is or could be means, according to one interviewee, to “broaden our scope of measurement and subsidize it, for lack of another word, but recognize that it's not profitable within the paradigms of what, you know, a profit driven business is in Canada.” (Interviewee 1). In fact, we found that subsidization of FNSCEs was a reality for many, often in the form of training dollars through various government grants, or simply just in the form of First Nations bands carrying the deficit of the mill in order to keep people employed. And although it is often a strategy anathema to those involved in First Nations economic development initiatives, subsidization can take many forms and may play an important role in navigating conflicting logics. 80 3.5.2 Community Building Vs. Cost-Savings “I think more broadly there’s the pursuit of self-sufficiency and self-determination - that is we have to look at what can we do with resources and we need to build our communities both metaphorically and physically.” (Interviewee 3) The manufacturing of territorial forest resources for use in local construction projects was another important goal emerging from the interviews. With the rise of community forests and increased territorial control of forestry by First Nations, including direct involvement in primary forestry operations, the establishment of FNCSEs potentially offer opportunities for increasing value along the entire timber supply chain, and for creating not only products that can be used locally, but also social value as a part of the process: “The reason we had entered into the idea was because we also have a community forest woodlot so we had the opportunity to cut our own trees down. And we felt that if those trees were brought into the community that we would be able to mill them up and use that lumber for community projects within the village. There's a need for it.” (Interviewee 9). Housing is now recognized as one of the most pressing needs facing First Nations communities, with current estimates of housing shortages being anywhere between 35,000 to 85,000 units across Canada (Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, 2015). For more than a century First Nations housing and building processes have been controlled by the Federal 81 government of Canada, largely to the detriment of housing quality and quantity and the socio-economic and mental health that adequate homes provide (Monk, 2013; Olsen, 2016). This entrenched system also typically relies on the importing of low-cost housing goods and construction services into First Nations communities. For remote communities in particular, eliminating the costs and dependencies of importing housing materials makes intuitive sense as a self-sufficiency strategy. However, seemingly more important was the independence and cultural-institutional self-determination that is the result of increased control over the local economy. “We decided to do the sawmill. We ordered one from Williams lake in BC. We also had another sawmill sitting here and slowly we're going to get into everything all the other parts and mill the wood out. But we did see that having our own supply and rather than ordering all the boards and everything from out of basically a thousand kilometers away or more…You're wasting all that money on freight. So we decided we needed to start cutting that off. When we started going down the road and we’re looking at the climate change our winter roads are starting to shorten out. So we're having a feeling if we have a supply and we get everything from around our community then we'll be more independent.” (Interviewee 8) FNCSEs, offer First Nations communities a way to break away from a paternalistic relationship with the Federal government and instead build their own communities in self-determined ways. Yet, to do so inevitably requires FNCSEs to address the conflicting logics that they face in their implementation. For example, for most FNCSEs (with the exception of very remote ones such as 82 Interviewee 8 above) it is typically difficult to compete from a production perspective, with large commodity mills producing dimensional lumber for housing framing at a very low cost. Manufacturing for local housing needs thus only appears to make financial sense within the context of certain niche products related to exterior applications such as siding, sheds, decking and beams, which several FNCSEs were pursuing. Yet, local product manufacturing and utilization for all aspects of housing remained a high priority if not a primary motivation for several interviewees. In this sense, the local use of forest products in community projects was not always a financial decision related to cost savings but rather a matter of satisfying less tangible community goals: “It's not for earning profit. But it's got a lot of value. It's got a lot of social kind of benefits, I guess to say. I mean we built four new duplexes in the community this year. And I guess it makes [us] proud that all of the Cedar work that was done on the houses, the post and beams and facia boards and everything was milled in our community. So it gives us that more social morale I guess you could say. Pride in our homes.” (Interviewee 2) Here we see a logic of social value creation in the form of social morale and pride, and this is presented in contrast to a logic of efficiency or value control in the form of profits. The social value accrued to the community by building their own homes utilizing locally milled products as opposed to cheaper imported industrial products appears to be worth the sacrifices in efficiencies. This applies not only to the process of milling locally and the benefits that come 83 with it, but to the physical and visual outcomes that remain in the community long after the process concludes: “And then we got like a little order to do the bench at the school and that was cool. So they were building the new gymnasium at the school in the community. And they requested certain cuts and you can go now to the school and you see the bench outside of the school. It's kind of this long thing and that's nice and it was definitely a point of pride to walk by and be like the crew made that, you know.” (Interviewee 17) 3.5.3 Social Appropriateness Vs. De-Politicization Also evident throughout the interviews were the logics influencing the structures of governance of FNCSEs. The governance structures of FNCSEs are predominantly band-owned businesses or First Nations EDCs, though the distinction is not often clear-cut and there does tend to exist a blurriness between them. The conflicting logics of FNCSE governance can primarily be attributed to dominant institutional prescriptions which prioritize the de-politicization of community and economic processes in First Nation communities as a contingent factor of economic success (Eggertsson, 2013). The influence of such prescriptions on First Nations is demonstrated as follows: “Most of the time its band owned. Occasionally it's been an entrepreneur, but vast majority are banned or economic development corporation owned. I think it's probably better if it was entrepreneur owned. I think it has much more likelihood of succeeding. Part of the challenges I've had and we still have is politics. And when it's 84 band owned or economic corporation owned, even though the economic corporations are supposed to be arm's length from politics, none of them are arm's length from politics...So that's one of the big frustrations with all of this is the level of politics.” (Interviewee 18) De-politicization is expressed as critical to the success of the FNCSE, where disruptions caused by political meddling is seen as creating inefficiencies which impact productivity and therefore financial viability. This logic emerged throughout several of the interviews and appears to have become widespread across First Nations communities in British Columbia. Another interviewee for example explained: “Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't recommend any sort of enterprise go directly through the band. It's my observation that those are inefficient and get mixed up with politics and just don't work well.” (Interviewee 15) However, also at play is an alternative institutional logic which views the efficiency imperative of de-politicized governance structures as in fact inimical to the type of workplaces and governance structures considered socially appropriate to some First Nations people. In many cases there appear to be benefits of being band-owned rather than EDC run, despite the fact that this might jeopardize productivity and viability: “I guess there's no real pressure. If there's nothing to do, to not be able to run that sort of thing…There's always multiple things that can be done. If they're not milling, they could be doing something else. They could be building the timber frame or whatever... This here, you know, maybe we only want to work five hours a day and 85 stuff like that. Makes it a lot easier. There's no big pressure, you know, if there's a funeral and stuff like that and shuts down when the community shuts down.” (Interviewee 14) Indeed, from the perspective of community and individual well-being, there was evidence that the socially embedded nature of band-owned FNCSEs, characterized by a certain social capital as a result of close knit networks and families, were not necessarily inimical to success, but rather in fact perceived as socially valuable. For example, one interviewee spoke to the flexibility that being a band-owned sawmill offered to the community in terms of both local materials and jobs: “You know, we had talked about possibly switching out the mill, like taking it right out of the band and putting it into our corporation and have them run it. But then it kind of takes away the uses that a lot of people are (used to). You know, they're just used to being able to go up there with a box and get a box of kindling and stuff like that, and we hand it over to a corporation, that's all going to change...And if you're handing it over to be a profitable business, they're going to want somebody that you know shows up for work at 730 in the morning and goes home at 430.” (Interviewee 9) Here band ownership is understood as contributing to social value creation, even if the benefits that accrue from such a socially appropriate structure appear to be at odds with financial 86 viability. These conflicting logics of governance become even more pronounced with regard to the powers of redistribution over the surplus of FNCSEs: “it was losing money but the band offices are running it and I couldn't believe them because we're cutting a lot of wood and they donated all that cedar siding for the high school. So we went way in the hole there which was their fault, not the sawmill’s fault. Which I don't think was right. But they wanted to put I guess their part into the new school and that was using the sawmill. Yeah so the money never went back into the sawmill’s bank.” (Interviewee 12) In this instance, the band exercised its powers and in doing so engaged a certain logic of equity and social value creation to ensure support of a community development project. In leveraging political power and getting in the way of what would otherwise be a market-mechanism, the band appeared to sacrifice some level of efficiency, which the interviewee viewed as detrimental to the FNCSE. From the perspective of contributions to community well-being however, there is the possibility that such trade-offs, despite the costs, produce a net positive benefit in social value by having the local high school built with siding from local forest products manufactured on a local mill, by local people. That is, thinking of the product less as a commodity and more as the output of a socially beneficial productive process of community building. 3.5.4 Increased Forestry Involvement Vs. Opportunity Costs For some FNCSEs that were established post-2003 when mill appurtenancy was a requirement, the rationale was simply to enable primary industrial forestry activities: 87 “Yeah, so originally I think the sawmill was formed in order to get involved in the forestry industry…I believe it was built in order to acquire a woodlot license and a forestry company involved in forestry in the [name omitted] land base area.” (Interviewee 2) Along with acquiring woodlot licenses, more recently First Nations communities have become increasingly involved in community forests, and other primary forestry activities such as small Forest Licenses to Cut (FLTCs). These avenues, coupled with FNCSEs, are seen not only as a way to simply become involved in forestry, but for many as a way to assert environmental governance and cultural-ecological values by ensuring more sustainable forestry management practices and cut controls, albeit not without challenges (Booth, 1998; Furness et al., 2015; Lawler and Bullock, 2017). Our findings indicate that FNCSEs can offer some opportunities for First Nations to increase control and self-determination over forestry related activities within their territories, allowing them to shift away from inequitable relations with the forest industry that so limit the emergence of an Indigenous forestry paradigm: “Sounds cliché but it was an entity that we owned rather than working for someone else rather than selling all of our resources and just being grateful and beholden to the Canfors or Galloways of the world who were, yeah, buying our resources and seeing that they were making more from them than we were by making a finished product. So that piece, and it's laid a foundation within the community, it seems to me to want to be more self-determining and more entrepreneurial.” (Interviewee 6) 88 The model of resource development referred to here is one that has become common place within First Nation territories, where communities take a ‘low-risk approach’ of selling their harvest quota by the stump to large forestry companies thereby obtaining secure own-source revenues (Nikolakis and Nelson, 2015). In doing so the communities become ‘beholden’ to these enterprises – a classic example of the now famous ‘staples trap’ of rural development (Watkins, 1963). Through simple financial metrics and the goal of short-run benefits it is very difficult for First Nations to counter the opportunity costs of this model. But this also creates a dilemma for First Nations who face the allure of consistent and immediate revenues at the expense of the social or value-added benefits that come from utilizing their own fibre through FNCSEs. Another interviewee expressed frustration with this model, while also indicating an opportunity for FNCSEs: “At least one First Nation that I know of finally wrote up an agreement, where they were allowed to have access to 10% of the annual cut that these guys were doing for them. Now, this is the First Nation’s fiber supply, but they were only allowed to have access to 10% of it. There's something wrong with that. Yeah, there's something really wrong with that. And that model is all over British Columbia… Now, the reality is First Nations could not cut all of the logs that are coming out, but they need to have better agreements that they can take out what they want and what they need to sustain their own operations in their own communities. First Nations need to have the ability to lock down agreements and fiber agreements and lock it down and build 89 into it flexibility for them to do what they want to do not be dictated to by government or industry.” (Interviewee 18) Hence, there appears to be a strategic advantage in the establishment of FNCSEs as they enable a rationalization of the ‘right’ to utilize fibre for community building. Indeed, for First Nations who were not involved in primary forestry operations, the establishment of FNCSEs often served as a valuable tool for engagement with industry and asserting rights over timber within their territory: “And so then from there, we negotiated… $40,000 worth of log supply…We decided, hey, like it's your land. You should ask for the best logs you should get the best logs. You know we didn't like this idea of using oversized fir which that mill doesn't want anyway. What kind of sacrifice or contribution is that? I get it, you can put together an argument. But we said no, no, no, this is your land that they’re harvesting, and you should derive the benefits. So you get whatever logs you want that you can do whatever you want with. We would put in whatever requests for what we needed.” (Interviewee 17) From the perspective of an Indigenous forestry paradigm, which places Indigenous institutions as central to forest management, FNCSEs appear to offer some advantages in terms of increasing involvement and asserting control over territorial forestry. The value of FNCSEs for several of the interviewees was that it offered an appropriate avenue for involvement in forestry related activities within First Nations territories, either directly or indirectly, thereby diminishing the 90 opportunity costs of raw log exports. Although some perceived this increased involvement as potentially contributing to increased financial value, there appeared to be a more latent logic of social value creation at work. This logic understands involvement in forestry and control over territorial forestry activities as an inherent ‘right’ and as a fundamental component of First Nation self-determination. 3.6 Discussion: Can FNCSEs Reconcile Conflicting Institutional Logics? Despite a growing body of literature on the ways in which hybrid organizations and social enterprises address conflicting institutional logics at a practical level, reconciling conflicting logics at an ideological level remains a challenge within the context of Indigenous forestry social enterprises. Our findings demonstrate that as a result of conflicting institutional logics FNCSEs inevitably face a form of ambiguity that often inhibit them from fulfilling their diverse missions, ultimately raising questions as to whether such logics can be reconciled at all within the current forestry and economic development paradigm. This further begs the critical question, and one upon which an Indigenous forestry paradigm hinges more generally: Can FNCSEs fulfill their social mission objectives as well as stay afloat financially as viable entities? From the sole perspective of financial viability, it is clear that FNCSEs face significant challenges. Six of the FNCSEs with whom we spoke were, at the time of writing shut down, and most others were operating at a financial deficit. Interviewees cited the reasons for this as including poor business planning and management, a lack of appropriate training, inappropriate equipment or technical capacity, and difficulty in finding committed staff. However, a further probing of interviewees’ perceptions revealed that success was not contingent solely on financial 91 viability, and in fact many of the interviewees were able to say that they believe the FNCSE was a success in relation to mission objectives in spite of it not being viable, and even if now shut-down. Yet, perceptions of success not necessarily contingent upon financial viability presents a dilemma for FNSCEs that want to see the sustainability of these efforts continue as long-term contributors to the local economy as opposed to just being project-based social experiments with a clear end point. Young (2012) reminds us that the stability of social enterprises is based on their ability to survive in the long run while also maintaining a balance between social value and market success. He says that a focus on counterbalancing divergent forces of governance and sources of finance are critical to social enterprise stability. Economic value in the form of financial resources is considered critical to the sustainability of social enterprises and to the achievement of socially oriented missions (Cunha and Benneworth, 2014; Dacin et al., 2011). This does not necessarily mean that profit making and its associated attributes of workforce productivity and efficiency must be an imperative, but rather that some return is considered necessary in order to allow the other social goals to be realized (Peredo and Chrisman, 2006). Two operational mechanisms to address conflicting logics that were found by Doherty et al. (2014) as predominant in the literature on social enterprises were to use the social mission as a force for strategic direction, or to find the right balance of utilizing commercial revenue to advance social value creation. This latter strategy was pursued by several FNCSEs in our study, who were focused on the advantages that they had over larger and more automatized operations by providing customized, niche products for local and regional markets. In theory, this could mean FNCSEs focus on exports, but with primarily social objectives whose surplus is principally reinvested in the social goals of 92 the enterprise or community (Graham and Healy, 2008). However, if the primary logics driving the enterprise are social value creation, then such a strategy, which can easily result in mission drift toward commercial logics, can be a failing endeavor. What is important in such a strategy to avoid mission drift is to ensure foremost the strengthening of local economies toward self-reliance by directing local production toward local needs as a priority, by utilizing where needed measures of subsidization to make up for financial shortfalls, and by maintaining strong measures of accountability between those leading the FNCSEs and community members (Hotte et al., 2018). Another way in which SEs manage conflicting logics is by harnessing the positive and negative aspects of hybridity in order to secure financial support (Doherty et al., 2014). Our findings demonstrate that financial shortcomings of FNCSEs are often being compensated by way of subsidization in various forms. Subsidies for social enterprises can be designed in various ways, including training or wage support, access to low-cost capital, protective markets and tariffs, and the diverse types of in-kind support that local residents and external partners can provide (Loxley and Lamb, 2005). A specific form of subsidy that was inadvertently indicated by several of the interviewees can come in the form of timber from a community forestry operation or from other forestry operators in the territory which can then potentially make up for the increased costs associated with manufacturing construction materials locally. Although some interviewees expressed concern for subsidization, it is important to point out that explicit social enterprises pursue revenues as a strategy from both market and non-market sources, and either way there must be a strong value proposition to extract those funds (Newth 93 and Woods, 2014). If the benefits of subsidizing FNCSEs are not immediately obvious, full cost-benefit approaches could potentially be utilized to illustrate that what appear to be commercially unviable projects may be socially viable if the market does not capture the true costs and benefits to the community of the project in question. This would essentially amount to an inversion of the accounting strategies of commercial industries which only appear viable because they do not capture externalities or account for the subsidies which sustain them (Graham and Healy, 2008; Loxley, 2007). Jon Altman for example reminds us of the spillover benefits to the broader economy of Indigenous community development projects which are subsidized by the state in Australia (Altman, 2005). Others in Canada have attempted to quantify the social benefits of investments in Indigenous Coastal Guardian Watchmen programs, thereby developing a more complete business case for state supports (Trousdale and Andrews, 2016). These along with other nascent methods of capturing the social return on investments in enterprises and community development projects (Arvidson et al., 2013) hold great potential to support the reconciling of conflicting logics that so limit First Nations options for economic futures. The interviews also demonstrated that although political involvement can be considered detrimental to efficiency, with the right balance it can serve as a critical backstop against mission drift and ensure that social goals are meaningfully pursued, including for example through increased control over territorial forestry and by way of redistributive powers over the products of the mill. The separation between politics and economic development within First Nations communities is not something confined to FNCSEs but rather is a theme discussed at length in the literature on Indigenous economic development and forestry (Grant and Taylor, 2007; Trosper et al., 2008). Critics argue that the logics prescribing de-politicization are the result of 94 (neo)liberal, neoclassical understandings of economic development and institutional efficiency, and ignore the deeply imbedded social solidarities in the governance of economic relations in First Nations communities (Ruana Kuokkanen, 2011; Simeone, 2007). In other words, there is a case to be made in the context of FNCSEs which serve to facilitate interactions between market, state, and society in order to address local needs, that a certain ‘re-politicization of development’ is in fact needed (Graham and Healy, 2008). As we have shown, FNCSEs have become one of the vehicles by which First Nations communities have sought to institute social relations not to the imperatives of economic market-based logics, but rather to those of existing social solidarities. Whether it be for housing, sustainable forestry practices, or other social goals, the interviews reveal that contrary to dominant narratives, band-run FNCSEs can actually play an important role in advancing a logic of equity and social value creation. Our findings indicate that FNCSEs that enact themselves within de-politicized governance structures such as EDCs often do so in order to satisfy the efficiency logics of institutional referents that have become dominant within First Nations communities, but often only in symbolic ways. The tendency to resort to logics of equity over the long term is indicative of what some refer to as a ‘decoupling’ of institutional logics, wherein there exists a symbolic endorsement of practices prescribed by one institutional logic (ie. workforce productivity) while implementing other practices more closely aligned with organizational goals, or in the case of FNCSEs, social realities (Pache and Santos, 2013). Institutional logics are manifest at both the ideological level, shaping goals of organizations, and at the functional level shaping the means and courses of action (Pache and Santos, 2010). Institutional conflicts over means are relatively easy to resolve in comparison to those conflicts 95 which arise over goals. Thus, within the context of FNCSEs we are forced to question whether FNCSEs will ever be able to reconcile conflicting institutional logics so long as they exist within a dominant extractivist paradigm which imposes certain goals - often through latent taken-for-granted processes - upon these entities. That is, perhaps it is the case that FNCSEs will never be able to fully reconcile competing logics within the confines of engagement within the institutional framework of settler-colonialism, including its businesses, financial institutions, and governments. This indicates a greater need for broad-based Indigenous institutional building such that organizations such as FNCSEs have access to institutional referents whose demands are amenable, indeed derived from Indigenous values and principles. One nascent example of this which offers promise is Raven Indigenous Capital Partners based in British Columbia, which offers a ‘Community-Driven Outcomes Contract’ focused on supporting Indigenous SEs in achieving locally derived outcomes as opposed to those of stakeholders outside of the community (Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, 2020). 3.7 Conclusion Despite the efforts of First Nations across British Columbia and Canada to oversee a paradigm shift in forestry and economic development within their territories, for the most part this change has yet to come to fruition. Dominant productivist logics continue to result in institutional conflict within First Nations communities, where the efficiency imperatives of orthodox economic development prescriptions come to heads with alternative values of social equity. As we have shown within the context of FNCSEs, this conflict sets up First Nations social enterprises for inevitable failure as they are unable to reconcile these logics, leading to the 96 establishment of entities that are ambiguous in their constitution and uncertain in their path forward. In considering how latent institutional forces might be a dynamic at play in the ability or not of FNCSEs to address conflicting logics, we respond to Lawrence’s call for more explicit engagements with power in institutional research (Lawrence, 2008). We have shown how FNCSEs, in displaying conflicting institutional logics, also appear to challenge ideas about the complete economic colonization of First Nation led enterprises. Indeed, many of the logics which emerged in our study appeared to have been drawn from not one settler-colonial institutional framework, but also from a more socially appropriate and legitimate Indigenous-led institutional framework (Pache and Santos, 2013). This, we believe, offers evidence of the possibility for the realization of an Indigenous forestry paradigm that brings to the fore this counter-institutional practices, only through which can the conflicting logics which complicate the implementation and evaluation of FNCSEs be resolved. For a new paradigm of Indigenous forestry to emerge, greater attention needs to be paid to the opportunities offered beyond industrial resource extraction and strictly market-based capitalism. This means scholars and practitioners alike must draw from theories of rural development including post-productivism (Mather et al., 2006), diverse economies (Roelvink et al., 2015), and the next economy (Robinson and Ghostkeeper, 1987), all of which posit a nurturing of more diverse formal and informal economic activities and attitudes, a de-emphasis on competitive market based industrialism, and a focus on cooperation and care between people and ecosystems. Application of such theory requires further research in defining and measuring the social value 97 contributions of FNCSEs, such that full-value propositions can be more appreciated by First Nations leaders as well as those offering financial support for such initiatives. Ultimately, this new paradigm will only emerge with increased First Nations jurisdiction and control over their territories and the creation of appropriate First Nations governance institutions that can regulate capitalist industrial development, ensuring the continued building of First Nations communities in appropriate ways. 98 Chapter 4: (Re)Building the Community Economy: Social Innovation and Housing Provision in First Nations Communities 4.1 Introduction A colonial legacy has left many reserves places of abject poverty with little opportunities for education or employment, and a neo-colonial/liberal present serves primarily to exacerbate such conditions (Palmater, 2011; Peters and Robillard, 2009). Despite billions of dollars in Federal government programs and spending, and increased participation of First Nations in major economic development initiatives over the last several decades, the well-being of First Nations communities remains elusive. First Nations are statistically disadvantaged in comparison to the general population on almost every socio-economic indicator, and 92 of the bottom 100 communities in the community well-being index in Canada are First Nations (Booth and Skelton, 2011; Cooke et al., 2004). Efforts to integrate First Nations into dominant economic development frameworks have alienated First Nations people from their homelands, resulting in a sense of cultural bereavement and ‘spiritual homelessness’, only worsening individual and community health conditions (Christensen, 2013; Wilson, 2003). Housing, because of its link to the economic, social, and cultural well-being of a community is perhaps one of the most obvious indicators of this exigency. Indeed, First Nations in Canada live amongst vast resources and yet are burdened by some of the worst housing in the country including aluminum and not wood framed housing, and permeated by mold among other problems. Given this contradiction, housing also could be one of the key sites for systems change and social innovation within First Nations communities. 99 In this paper we explore the case of housing within First Nations communities, with the objective of understanding the possibilities for enhancing the creation of local value (in its varied forms) in reference to housing and related activities. Specifically, we examine the possibility for First Nations communities to control and process territorial resources locally, transform them into building materials through value-added enterprises, and use these alongside the necessary skill and labour to construct housing for First Nations members. Our approach understands housing as a basic need rather than as a market demand, and theorizes housing-related productive and redistributive processes as sites of decision and ethical praxis around which a community economy might be realized (Gibson-Graham, 2006a). It also means moving beyond sectoral based approaches to housing and economic development, instead approaching First Nations housing provision comprehensively and as part of the process of addressing individual and community well-being through social innovation. We ask, what frameworks of socially-embedded ethical decision making can enable communities to begin to think of productive forestry processes as responsive to the satisfaction of basic material needs? What innovations are needed within First Nations communities in order to reimagine relations and negotiations of interdependence and mutual reliance between end-users and producers? Answering these questions provides a lens that includes diverse economic practices, a challenge to prevailing discourse on Indigenous economic development and housing, and [we hope] the imagining of alternatives outside conventional colonial-capitalist frameworks. Alternative economic spaces are often considered marginal (Healy, 2008), but – we hope – to begin considering what many communities know well: that alternative mechanisms of survival 100 and well-being need to be developed to address the seemingly impenetrable edifice of global capitalism (Leyshon and Lee, 2003). 4.2 The Diverse Community Economy and Social Innovation Theoretically, the ‘community’ or ‘diverse’ economy is what Gibson-Graham calls the joining of the formal economy - wage labour and capitalist enterprise - with all the economic others that sustain material survival and well-being (Gibson-Graham, 2005). It represents the sites of everyday activities and familiar institutions, where everyone, living and non-living, employed and unemployed, is a part of the economy through a negotiated interdependence which includes contributions often in different, non-market ways (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). This “weak” theory stems in part from the works of feminist economists who have revealed the household as a major locus of economic production – a production that cannot be called marginal given the value of output and numbers of people involved (Gibson-Graham, 2006b). Similarly, social capital scholars have pointed to the networks of bonding and bridging relationships and communal interdependencies that make up the socio-economic practices rendered non-existent within the confines of capitalist economies and their normal tools of measurement (Gibson-Graham, 2005). By bringing to the forefront instances of such ‘other’ productive activities and diverse forms of transactions it becomes clear that many communities (First Nations or not) are actually predominantly sustained by ‘surplus labour’ -- where individuals gift, share and engage in the reciprocal exchange of goods and services well beyond those recognized in the marketplace (Gibson-Graham, 2005). 101 Revealing the diverse economies of First Nations communities is a prerequisite to imagining and enacting alternative economic futures. This necessarily requires deeper analyses into not only what is being produced, but also an understanding of who owns the means of production, whether an economic surplus is generated, how the surplus is appropriated, and how it is distributed (Morgan, 1987). There exists ample evidence of a diverse community economy amongst First Nations groups today, often in the form of non-market productive activities. Such economic activities entail the local production of goods and services such as hunting, fishing and other forms of harvesting, which are said also to support the transmission of skills and knowledge as well as cultural values (Natcher, 2009). They have been a way for First Nations peoples to feed, clothe and house themselves for millennia, with goods and services being distributed through socio-cultural institutions of kinship, trading and reciprocity, rather than dictated by purchasing power (Ross and Usher, 1986). Reciprocity is particularly key as a social norm that has persisted in some communities in the form of food sharing but also in the sharing of equipment, and in the sharing of homes (Natcher, 2009; Peters and Robillard, 2009). That economies of this kind have persisted contemporaneously in the face of colonial and capitalist economic institutions, is perhaps indicative of the desire of many First Nations people to continue to create livelihoods which provide for that which is needed locally, as opposed to formal employment which facilitates the appropriation by others of labour for the acquisition of surplus and its control (Miller, 2014). An example of one such initiative that we highlight in this paper is Dasiqox – Nexwagwez?an, an Indigenous-led expression of governance and management, emerging as a Tribal Park, or Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) in Canada (We Rise Together, 2018). Dasiqox 102 represents a proactive response by Yunesit’in and Xeni Gwet’in First Nations – two communities of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation - to an externally imposed resource economy that has continually threatened to undermine their local livelihoods and well-being (Kunkel, 2017). The vision, concept, and plans for Dasiqox articulate a more locally authentic, integrated approach to defining local economic activities within a social-ecological and cultural system. While the diverse economies framework reveals all of the economic others sustained through social relations, there remains ambiguity in terms of the potential structures that might recognize and enable such activities. Insights can perhaps be found within the field of social innovation which focuses on the creative reconfiguration of social relations in order to achieve common goals and meet basic needs (Maccallum et al., 2009). Moulaert defines social innovation as "the satisfaction of alienated human needs through the transformation of social relations: transformations which 'improve' the governance systems that guide and regulate the allocation of goods and services meant to satisfy those needs, and which establish new governance structures and organizations"(Moulaert, 2008: 12). In many ways, social innovation for the economy is about reintroducing social justice into production and allocation systems, whilst ensuring that the governance of such systems emerges from the grassroots and includes various stakeholders in participatory ways, including non-traditional actors (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2006; Moulaert and Ailenei, 2005). Social innovation is realized within what has been referred to as the social economy, or the ‘third sector’, which combines elements of the public and private sectors, formal and informal organizational elements, and both market and non-market processes (Moulaert and Ailenei, 103 2005). Activities of the social economy are concerned primarily with the achievement of social well-being, which is accomplished by coalescing around alternative institutions and mechanisms of support in response to the distributive failures of the market and the state (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2006; Graham and Healy, 2008). As such, the social economy provides a quasi-formal institutional framework within which the principles of reciprocity are able to advance beyond the confines of familial or neighborhood support systems (Williams et al., 2003). This is important because although the informal networks which constitute the community or subsistence economy within First Nations communities serve as a type of guideline for productive and allocative decision making amongst individuals and families, these are limited in their scale because they are often based on close kinship and neighboring ties (Dana, 2015). First Nations groups continue to grow and indeed seek to build economies of scale at the aggregate Nation level where multiple communities within the Nation aim to engage in cooperative development processes. Hence, the utility of a formal institutional framework is that it allows for the extension of social networks through otherwise ‘weak links’, where strong ties between individuals or even communities might be absent (Doherty et al., 1999). Here we advance a theory of Indigenous social innovation which refers to the community economy and which requires moving beyond what Colleen O’Neill argues are “theoretical paradigms that posit subsistence ways of life against proletarian experiences.” Or, move beyond: “the traditional versus the modern [which] render historically invisible economic systems that do not fit within those dualistic parameters.”(O’Neill, 2004: 12) In doing so we seek to broaden understandings of what it means to be innovative, and even feasible, in order to rethink economic 104 development and its discourse, and to advance understandings of socially appropriate institutional designs. Innovative behaviour is not necessarily 'optimal' behavior, and best practices are a normative concept (Moulaert et al., 2005). Although the Schumpeterian version of innovation is one of creative destruction generating economic growth, innovation in its general form simply means breaking away from established norms in order to create new opportunities by pulling together previously unconnected resources for a new economic purpose (Granovetter, 2005; Mcneill, 2013). Thus, early understandings of ‘entrepreneurship’ were considered to be the ability to breach previously separated spheres of exchange, for example by introducing currency into labour-product exchange economies (Granovetter, 2005). Within the context of First Nations social innovation for housing, this might then involve removing market-based transactions (e.g., housing linked to a surplus economy) and re-connecting previously separated spheres of exchange (e.g., labour for materials in housing construction activities). Within such a conception, optimization does not necessarily occur when transaction costs are eliminated and profits maximized, but rather when production is locally owned, surpluses stay within the community, and production output is distributed through locally negotiated rules of exchange (Loxley and Lamb, 2005). 4.3 Methods This paper is guided foremost by a long-standing research partnership between the lead author, the Yuneŝit’in Government, the Tŝilhqot’in National Government (TNG), and Ecotrust Canada (a not-for-profit organization based in British Columbia). The primary purpose of this ongoing 105 relationship is to support Yuneŝit’in First Nation (and TNG) in creating an integrated, systems-based approach to housing and community development that is self-determined, self-reliant and consistent with the cultural, economic and ecological goals of the Tŝilhqot’in people. As such, this work seeks to produce actionable findings intended to improve the situation for community members. And, consistent with Indigenous research methods, we strive to make this work relevant, reciprocal, respectful and responsible (Peltier, 2018). In doing so, this work also recognizes the continuous struggle of First Nations people more broadly, and seeks to advance alternative ways of knowing and being through an Indigenous, post-colonial research paradigm (Chilisa, 2011). We use a comparative case study approach (Yin, 1994), which draws upon our experiences as practitioners working with Yuneŝit’in, TNG and other First Nations communities across British Columbia, and which utilizes multiple-methods and available research materials to develop our analysis. First, we utilize the results of interviews conducted as a part of a previous study on First Nations Community Sawmill Enterprises (FNSCEs) (n=18), drawing upon responses specifically related to housing and economic processes. To preserve anonymity these interviewees are identified numerically (Interviewees 1-18). In addition to these interviews, we carried out an additional nine interviews with Yuneŝit’in and Tŝilhqot’in National Government staff and leadership. These respondents, with whom we were connected via the Yuneŝit’in Government, were purposively selected (Rubin and Rubin, 2012b) as experienced and knowledgeable people in relation to questions of housing and economic development within Tŝilhqot’in territory. They are identified alphabetically throughout the paper for the purposes of anonymity (Interviewees A-I). The interview script was semi-structured, in-depth and open-ended in nature and sought to 106 capture these experts’ detailed descriptions and their new and emerging thinking about housing, community, local economies and well-being (Tracy, 2020). Given Covid-19, all interviews were done by phone and with consent were recorded alongside extensive note-taking before being transcribed. We utilized a manual coding process that relied on some pre-determined themes that were developed based on previous experience working with Yuneŝit’in on housing-related research questions, and which evolved as the interviews continued and as the coding process was underway (Basit, 2003; Bhattacherjee, 2012). 4.4 The Endemic State of Housing Under Colonialism As the Indigenous population continues to grow faster than the general population in Canada, the demand for housing on reserve far exceeds the ability of Indigenous Nations to build new homes (Aboriginal Housing in Canada : Building on Promising Practices, 2006). Current estimates of house shortages are said to be between 35,000 to 85,000 units across Canada, and the Assembly of First Nations predicts a backlog of 130,000 houses between 2010 and 2031 (Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, 2015). This shortage has led to severe overcrowding in homes, and studies indicate strong correlations between overcrowding and fatal health conditions, including tuberculosis (Clark et al., 2002). This lack of housing alongside very little economic opportunity is also contributing to the increased out migration of young Indigenous people from reserves, often resulting in homelessness in urban centres (Anderson and Collins, 2014). A 2005 survey, for example, found that First Nations people represented approximately one quarter of the homeless in the city of Vancouver, compared to about 2% of the overall population (Palmer et al., 2007), and it is estimated that one in five Indigenous people who live off-reserve in Canada are homeless (CBCNews, 2016). 107 In 2009 estimates suggested that a capital investment of between $2.8 to 3 billion was needed to bring Indigenous housing to a suitable standard in Canada, with over two thirds of that going to new housing construction (Clatworthy, 2009). However, the complex nature of the Indigenous housing situation goes much beyond funding alone. Of the houses that are being built, they are often of poor quality and plagued by structural problems, with 50% of housing on reserve falling below the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) qualitative and quantitative standards (Larcombe et al., 2011), and the projected habitable life span of new houses in remote Indigenous communities ranging between 5-8 years (Henry, 2010). Mould in Indigenous housing is becoming a critical problem attributed to poor building materials, a lack of drainage and air flow, overcrowding, and housing designs inappropriate for the climate (Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, 2015). Such poor housing conditions are becoming increasingly associated with mental and physical health problems in Indigenous communities, including the ongoing crisis of youth suicides on-reserve (McCartney, 2016). Most analyses of the current situation are correct to point out that the 'standard model' of residential construction is failing Indigenous communities (Henry, 2010). Yet, despite major policy shifts over the last 75 years since the Federal government began intervening in Indigenous housing on a wider scale, little appears to have changed. Silvia Olsen, in her extensive history of government on-reserve housing programs in Canada, contends that the impacts of the on-reserve housing programs of the Federal government are on par with those of residential schools (Olsen, 2016). Others claim that the historic and ongoing on-reserve housing policy of the Federal government continues to advance the colonial project of assimilating Indigenous people into 108 Western-style homes while encouraging administrative self-sufficiency (Monk, 2013). Such truncated forms of self-determination fail to allow for truly endogenous housing systems to emerge in ways that reflect Indigenous values and institutions, and that foster self-reliance and cultural-ecological and economic resilience. 4.5 Housing as Community Economy: ‘Forest to Frame’ The current approach to housing provision in Indigenous communities has been described as a “supply-driven” one, meaning external contractors import skills and materials, and depart leaving a product or output (i.e., a house), but little in terms of beneficial outcomes to the community (Orr, 2005). This approach is what has developed after centuries of colonialism and the dismantling of self-sufficient housing systems in Indigenous communities and territories. Housing options as they stand have also engendered a sense of economic dependency on the Federal government - namely Indigenous Services Canada and the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation – neither of which are capable of providing the necessary resources to house a growing Indigenous population. This model also reinforces the creation of developmental and administrative silos between housing departments and other community processes such as economic development, land use planning and natural resource management, rendering it at odds with long-held principles of inter-connectivity (Castleden et al., 2009). Lastly, it is an approach that has forced Indigenous communities into a reliance on low-cost, industrially extracted forest products, and on housing designs inappropriate to climates and larger cultural priorities and practices (McCartney, 2016). 109 Efforts to transition toward less government dependent and more self-determined housing systems in Indigenous communities appears to have taken a hard market turn, with growing calls for the creation of private property mechanisms on-reserve fueled by the rationale that such institutions will attract financing, create housing markets and stimulate economic development (Flanagan and Alcantara, 2002; Schmidt, 2018). Such efforts have been characterized as a further dismantling of Indigenous economic, social, and cultural institutions through efforts to integrate Indigenous self-governance arrangements with settler notions of economic development, creating Indigenous subjects as property-owning, entrepreneurial citizens, often to the detriment of more important social and cultural priorities (Dempsey et al., 2011; Ruana Kuokkanen, 2011). Equally problematic is the growing reliance on revenues from industrial resource extraction projects within Indigenous territories as a source of funding for housing and other social projects. This type of ‘progressive extractivism’ (Veltmeyer and Bowles, 2014) has been exposed as a fragile model of development and self-determination, with the most recent downturn in the economy laying bare the cyclical nature of resource rents and the danger of housing funds drying up when those rents inevitably fall or disappear altogether (Bakx, 2020). For the research partner in this study, Yuneŝit’in First Nation, self-reliance and self-determination have and continue to be the driving forces behind all of its pursuits and activities, and housing is no exception. Underlying this vision of self-reliance is a fundamental understanding that housing is part of a complex whole. In this vision, housing solutions go hand in hand with other processes occurring within the community, within the Nation, and within the everyday lives and experiences of the Yuneŝit’in and Tŝilhqot’in people. This approach to ‘home-building’ has been manifest primarily through what Yuneŝit’in refer to as the ‘Forest to 110 Frame’ program (FTF), which seeks to connect territorial forestry activities to local value-added processing, which in turn supplies local housing needs while stimulating local economic development. In other words, through its FTF program the community has been attempting to re-establish the provisioning of housing as a critical part of building the community economy, (re)connecting community (and the Nation) to their homelands, and resolving the exigent basic need for housing within their community. As Chief Russell Myers-Ross puts it: “I think even just for myself, even before we had title, that vision of wanting to have that direct connection to our land, and if we have a crisis in housing and we want to deal with housing, and we want to take the wood from our own homeland, be able to produce it and build houses, that was sort of the basic sentiment. It's like, why would we want to offer a foreign company claim to what resources they can out of our territory, take them all to Williams Lake, you know, sell them all. And we get very little in revenue or capacity or the ability to solve our issues?” The FTF approach seeks to move communities away from a model of housing provision beholden to the dictates of the crown and the market which pressure the import of inappropriate cultural designs, skilled labour, and industrially extracted timber. As it stands, that extracted timber is ironically returned to the community as imported products unaffordable through piecemeal Federal government funding. Conversely, FTF promotes a continual reinforcement of the convergence of local resources and local labour with local needs, and the building of economic linkages within Yuneŝit’in, and beyond with other Tŝilhqot’in communities. Although the nascent nature of the FTF approach has not permitted the full exploration of the diverse ways 111 in which it may be enacted, strategies of social innovation in development practice which resemble the FTF approach include: (1) the mobilization of local people; (2) linking economic strategies and social policies; (3) training adapted to the needs and capabilities of the local population; (4) developing production activities with potential new jobs for local people (Moulaert, 2000: 97). The hope is that this alternative has the potential to minimize economic leakage from the community around housing projects, build local capacity, while continually developing transferable skills amongst community members: “You know, I think the forestry sector was taking hits before this. But our own little micro economy, we can cut down trees, we can process those trees into lumber, and we can process that lumber into other value added products... As far as I know, we're the only community that has a carpentry program that has 3 journeymen and 2 apprentices that just finished their second year, and another four labourers that are interested in pursuing a trade as well. But, you know, we can build a home, we should be building.” (Interviewee B) Although Yuneŝit’in coined the term Forest to Frame and has directed significant time and resources toward the program, the concept of creating an internal housing supply chain and economy is something that has been discussed, imagined and attempted by various First Nations across British Columbia and Canada over the last century. The rationale stems primarily from the fact that a large portion of costs related to housing on-reserve comes from the importation and transportation of materials (Henry, 2010), and because housing related training, labour and income are often lost opportunities for economic development in First Nations communities 112 (MacTavish et al., 2012). Yet, despite the fact that most First Nations communities in BC are located in commercially productive forest areas and that crown-granted access to timber by First Nations has increased over the past two decades (Nikolakis and Nelson, 2015; Wyatt, 2008b), the successful integration of local forestry and housing economies remains elusive. The complexity of this approach is best explained by one interviewee working with the Tŝilhqot’in National Government: “I think they would like to be more self-reliant as far as housing goes simply because they've had such a bad experience with INAC [Indian and Northern Affairs Canada] housing...I think that they kind of scratch their heads and they go: ‘look around us, we have tons of building materials that are around us, why aren't we building our own homes?’ And then you know, as I know, it becomes an issue. Okay, well, how are you going to get it done? Who's gonna cut the logs? Who's gonna build the house? How you gonna pay for that? That's what it usually comes down to.” (Interviewee C) Indeed the FTF approach raises complex questions and barriers, and there will inevitably be contextual considerations that bring to the fore community-specific challenges. However, in order to build social innovations in support of the FTF approach, we must first recognize the diverse activities that already contribute to the process, and the challenges that remain. 4.6 Spaces of Ethical Economic Interaction and Negotiation In this section we identify the various efforts of self-determined housing provision by First Nations as diverse economic practices that are not necessarily driven by formal markets or by 113 institutional logics of efficiency, but rather by social organizational principles of solidarity and reciprocity (Moulaert and Ailenei, 2005). What is evident is a growing number of First Nations communities seeking to resolve local housing issues through the creative reformulation of relations of production, allocation and redistribution which can best be understood as social innovations. These allow community values and imagined economic futures to become transformed into new practices and institutions designed to meet specific basic needs (Amin et al., 2003). We posit that the building of a needs-based housing community economy takes place within four critical and nested spaces of economic interaction and negotiation: (de) commoditization; needs and surplus evaluation; quality and design consideration; transactions and rules of (in) commensurability. 4.6.1 (De) Commoditization While there are numerous studies that examine the socio-economic and ecological characteristics of non-timber forest products, often through the lens of subsistence (Emery and Pierce, 2005), very little research has been carried out which looks at timber as a de-commodified or partially commodified product within forest economies. Commodity production has been described as a type of instrumental exchange, where producers and consumers engage with one another for self-interested instrumental purposes, and without any intrinsic concern for one another’s well-being (Ratner, 2009). Hence commodity production results, according to Ratner, in a certain precariousness and tenuousness of the basic needs of life, where financial wealth dictates one’s ability to provide for oneself or the collective whole. Industrial forestry within First Nations territory is a case in point, where export oriented industrial forestry practices aimed primarily for mass-scale commodity production can result in an insecurity of basic housing needs: 114 “I remember I have a good story about when I first started almost 10 years ago, but maybe it was after like a year or two in speaking to a counselor I think at the time for Yunesit’ín. And he was really upset because he was saying, you know, it was meant to be a mountain pine beetle cut, like they were meant to go take the deadwood. And he was complaining because they're taking really nice spruce, green spruce out of a pretty sensitive place. And that those are house logs, those would build houses what they're taking right now. And that was, you know, there wasn't really the systems or the organized capacity to stop that. So it happened.” (Interviewee E) Yuneŝit’in has been practicing a moderate model of forestry for some time now in order to fulfill their vision of a sustainable relationship with their homelands. All forestry activity currently being carried out by the Nation is done using small equipment to salvage logs under small Forest Licenses to Cut (FLTC). Small scale salvage work for Yuneŝit’in members has proved to be successful and it means relying on “old school” methodology with five members employed. Yet the challenge of balancing these activities with a community-needs focused economy is expressed by Chief Russell Myers-Ross as follows: “it's still going to be hard trying, in this global economic context to eke out a survival, especially if you want to diversify away from just relying on a heavy forestry-based economy. And I think sometimes it's impossible because I haven't seen that many examples of groups and communities that have been able to do it. So that part is unknown, but you kind of want this vision that continues to persist that if my ancestors 115 can do it, we can do it. And I think even going back to the vision, I mean, the vision for myself is having a community having a stronger connection to their land. If you don't want forestry and you don't want those sorts of things, you're really defending more of that indigenous lifestyle of trying to preserve your territory so that you can continue to hunt and fish and be able to draw food from your territory.” Understanding this response through the lens of the diverse economy reminds us that a large portion of the production and transactions that sustain community economies is or can be non-commodified. Although the useful transformation of objects in nature by humans can be called products they are not necessarily commodities (Barron, 2015). In making decisions about integrating supply chains in support of the community economy, those governing productive and distributive processes need to make a series of ethical judgements and negotiations that go beyond market metrics of profitability. Indeed, one of the key questions related to diverse economies, is whether such activities should only result in use value or if they can also produce exchange values (Emery and Pierce, 2005). In the context of the FTF, the approach is clear: It is equally relevant to ask whether productive forestry activities result in use values alongside exchange values, but the former is often regarded as more important than the latter. Perhaps the answer lies in reformulating territorial timber extraction as a type of livelihood activity of the community economy in support of local housing, thereby allowing those resources to be conferred primarily as use values. Re-emplacing housing-based forestry as a livelihood activity may serve as a strategy for chipping away at the dictates of markets and instead enacting the types of community economies 116 that they envision. A livelihoods-based forestry economy is certainly not without relatively recent precedent for First Nations in British Columbia. Although many First Nations were engaging in wage labour and commodity production in the growing timber trade by the mid-19th century, this was always done alongside and as a part of subsistence activities. For example, up until the 1970s Gitxaala First Nations peoples would deliver logs to the mill to be sawn for housing lumber, often on a 50/50 basis (Menzies and Butler, 2008). In fact in the early industrial period of forestry in British Columbia the cutting of timber in isolated stands would typically not be carried out by First Nations unless it was used also in the building of local homes, and could therefore be considered a savings of community cash (Hawthorn et al., 1958). There also exists evidence of Tŝilhqot’in resource use in the Nemiah Valley dating back as far as 1590, including timber which they used to build their own homes by felling trees using obsidian (Kunkel, 2015). More recently Nuxalk First Nation has been exploring the range of activities that they can carry out within their community forest as a part of managing for cultural, economic and environmental values (Bull et al., 2014a). Other First Nations aiming to satisfy local housing and construction needs through territorial forestry processes include the Heiltsuk Nation, Malahat Nation, Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations, and anecdotally many more. For Yuneŝit’in and neighboring community Xeni Gwet’in, Nexwagweẑʔan also known as the Dasiqox Tribal Park, is an area of asserted Indigenous governance to be managed for eco-system protection, cultural revitalization, and an economy for sustainable livelihoods (Bhattacharyya et al., 2017). Nexwagwez?an translates roughly to “[it is] there for us”. Even in its name, Dasiqox – Nexwagwez?an expresses a relationship between people and place, in which nenqay (a concept that does not translate to a single English word, but includes lands, waters, animals, plants, and 117 resources) is there for the Tŝilhqot’in people – to use, live within, care for, and sustain. The three “pillars” of the Dasiqox initiative (eco-system protection, cultural revitalization, and an economy for sustainable livelihoods) serve as a triple ‘bottom line’ in economic terms, reflecting an Indigenous approach to developing a regional economy, in which economic activities are not defined primarily by monetization and commodification, but by use, and a type of reciprocal sustainability. In this way, resource use in the local economy becomes less of a consumptive model, and more a cyclical system in which people and nenqay ensure each other’s well-being in the long term. Although forest management models within Dasiqox are still under consideration, a priority has been placed on locally-controlled, small-scale value-added forestry practices. What this might mean in practice is a housing subsistence or micro-economy, where felling and processing are carried out in response to current and projected community housing needs. Broadly, it could be argued that the ongoing pursuit of First Nations across British Columbia and Canada to enact a type of ‘aboriginal forestry’ based on Indigenous institutions and priorities might best be reached within a housing-livelihoods based forestry model. One interviewee explains how such a strategy might be applied to forestry practices for the Yuneŝit’in and the Tŝilhqot’in Nation as a whole: “But you know, the way forestry has been done over the last 30 years. Yeah, you can't continue the way it was. So it's a question of well then how? And maybe housing is a good way to kind of steer it into because you know, it's like, how do I put it, it might mean like that it's still economical to cut things in a way that respect the Tŝilhqot’in values because they'd be used for a house, it wouldn't be just a two by four that has to be made under a certain price, otherwise, the company won't make that two by four, because 118 they'll go somewhere else. Yeah. So if it's the Tŝilhqot’in doing it themselves, they might not care that they lose a little on the margins for making whatever they need for the house, taking pride in the fact that it's coming from their own forest and done in a sustainable way. So I feel like there is that opportunity there and the housing piece is really it is the center, it is the prime opportunity to kind of deliver something like that.” (Interviewee E) As indicated by this response, instituting such a process would inevitably result in financial versus social value trade-offs that can only be reconciled through a certain level of ethical decision making. Even if they continue to engage with the market, productive forestry enterprises might be doing so as a form of counter-institutionalizing, where they are seeking to limit the complete colonization by market forces, while also taking advantage of them. The idea of partial commodification for example, recognizes that rather than the fact that something was paid for with money, what actually confers commodity status on a good are the norms that govern its production, exchange and enjoyment (Curchin, 2016). Within the context of the FTF approach then, the partial commodification of territorial forest products can be understood as a social innovation supporting local housing needs and sustaining community economies while rebuilding human-nature relationships (Barron, 2015; Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). Although there exist numerous examples of First Nations attempting to connect forestry to housing within their territories, their ability to do so has been severely limited by colonial law, resulting in a legal struggle for Aboriginal rights which have triggered important discussions as to the nature of subsistence activities and whether or not such activities should be able to create 119 both use and exchange values. Early colonial legislation like The Crown Lands Protection Act of 1839 prohibited First Nations from harvesting timber beyond the reserve within their traditional territories (INAC, 2013). It was not until 1996 when the decision in Van der Peet articulated a ‘test’ for Aboriginal rights, defining them as those practices, customs, and traditions which were integral to the culture of an Aboriginal people prior to European contact (Natcher, 2001). First Nations have achieved some successes in applying the Van der Peet test to affect the involvement in both fisheries and forestry. In the case of fisheries, various decisions have significantly impacted the management of fisheries by the Canadian government, including particularly R. v. Gladstone [1996] which established a commercial fishing interest as an Aboriginal right of the Heiltsuk people (Harris and Millerd, 2010). In the case of forestry, in the 2006 R. v. Sappier and R. v. Gray cases, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the Aboriginal right to harvest wood for domestic uses on Crown Land that falls within the Indigenous community's traditional territory, including for the building of homes (Mills, 2004). Some First Nations are finding creative ways to assert their Aboriginal right to harvest wood for domestic uses, and developing institutional innovations which take advantage and perhaps even test the limitations of the right. For example one interviewee explained the following: “No, we have our own land claims let's call it, we can harvest our wood, up to a certain amount. But we're not clear cutting. They all don't just grow in one place. We have to find them. So people go out and then they find them as they're going and then last year we spent about $100,000 paying people to bring in logs and stuff like that.” (Interviewee 8) 120 In this case we see a form of organized and partially commodified activity where community members are paid to engage in housing needs-based forestry practices. Another interviewee explained: “And technically they're entitled to 50 cubic meters per person per year of free use wood… So what has been happening is they've been very good over at [name omitted] about it, as long as it had a band Council resolution or letter from the band council saying they've okayed any free use wood that they've needed. So then there's two price structures: free use wood if they've been given the okay for it, what we've been charging them is the cost to log it and get it to town. Or the other companies the same thing like they'll say when we're logging our thing here, we'll get x for free use wood right? Or we will give you x.” (Interviewee 4) Here we see a community asserting its Aboriginal right to free use in coordination with major logging companies in the territory, essentially negotiating the de-commoditization of timber and in doing so engaging its use value over and above its exchange value. 4.6.2 Needs and Surpluses Evaluation The capitalist mode of production is distinguished from other forms of economic organization primarily in terms of its lack of social embeddedness (Jessop, 1999). Although capitalism has extended its reach into the social and economic lives of First Nations people, there persists a strong social economy which supports cultural priorities, while enabling the distribution of 121 labour and goods to provide for many of the basic needs of individuals within a modern context (Natcher, 2009). Once made visible and coherent, this diverse economy provides a foundation upon which individual and community needs can be articulated and surplus possibilities discovered and integrated into economic strategies (Gibson-Graham, 2005). This is not to say that First Nations community economic strategies should not include wage labour and other means of generating economic capital. In fact most social innovations which take place within the social economy do so through a number of organizational forms which exist alongside but separate from capitalism (Blake, 2010). However, in a strong community economy, many of the items that may need to otherwise be obtained through monetary transactions can potentially be provided through community cohesion, reciprocity, collaboration and caring. This, according to Graham and Healy, avoids a “circuitous route” towards well-being via the market, and instead “produces well-being directly” (Graham and Healy, 2008). In many ways the FTF approach seeks to more directly produce well-being in the form of appropriate and high quality housing materials for First Nations people, as well as the various individual and community benefits that occur through the FTF process which can include the creation of employment and associated skills training, increased connections of communities and individuals to homelands, culturally appropriate forestry practices, and other intangibles. The application of this approach has however proved challenging for many of the same reasons that we discussed elsewhere with First Nations community sawmill enterprises – namely conflicting institutional logics which put notions of productivity and financial viability up against social goals. Hence, in order to remain ‘viable’ as an entity, FNCSEs continue to maintain economic linking strategies with wider market forces. In practice this has meant for Yuneŝit’in a focus 122 primarily on exports of their value-added forest products, but with the hope that any surplus can be principally reinvested in the business or in the community thereby limiting economic leakage. This essentially amounts to the circuitous route to well-being described above – a model which has consistently failed to improve the living conditions of many First Nations. Structuring a community sawmill in support of the FTF approach inevitably requires an institutional logic of equity over and above that of productive, market-driven efficiency. Generally but certainly not universal, self-sufficient communities do not produce much more than that which is needed, although there is typically some degree of surplus production as a risk management strategy (Groot and Lentjes, 2013). Developing this logic inevitably requires negotiations about production levels of a community sawmill to primarily support housing needs. When communities begin to break down the requirements for local housing provision, what often becomes apparent is the possibility for a limited level of production that runs counter to the dominant industrial development model of manufacturing that has become pervasive in rural areas. What such an analysis often reveals is that the dictates of housing needs in many small First Nations communities are negligible in comparison to the forest resources available, thereby creating possibilities for a very low-impact type of forestry to emerge. As a rudimentary example, the latest estimates by Yuneŝit’in Government staff is an immediate need for at least 15 new homes in the community.2 Were Yuneŝit’in to build 15 average two bedroom homes of approximately 1,200 ft², this would amount to a need of between 37,500 2 Personal communication, anonymous, April 2020 123 board feet of lumber for stick frame home designs, and up to 400,000 board feet of lumber for solid wood frame construction designs.3 The latter maximum requirement would amount to a need for the entire community of just under 1000 m³ of timber to be processed through a community sawmill, which falls well within accepted definitions of small forestry operations.4 The R. v. Sappier and R. v. Gray decisions put no limit on the amount of cultural use timber that communities can access for domestic purposes, and these sources could therefore likely be sufficient for local housing needs in a small community like Yuneŝit’in, as long as there is no commercial dimension involved (Makin, 2006; Mills, 2004). In practice what such an approach to housing provision might look like is a mill that operates part-time as a service to the community, allowing for other diverse economic activities and only fulfilling orders as needed. One interviewee explained this idea in detail: “I also think there's the totally worthwhile analysis to do a part time mill and it may fit way better within Indigenous cultures because they don't necessarily need to be there every day. Who says nine to five, 40 hour weeks are correct anyway, I mean, I think they kick our ass on that one in a lot of ways so, you know, for example, you could have a set of five people working at the mill and when not working at the mill, they could do 3 These estimates are based on common calculations of lumber requirements for housing construction projects, and have been verified by sawmilling and housing construction experts with whom I spoke as a part of this study. There are a variety of factors that could shift the calculations, particularly as concerns housing design and material choices selected by the community and discussed further below. 4 Generally accepted criteria for small forestry operations (including sawmills) are operations with fewer than 100 employees and consuming no more than 20,000 m³ of timber annually.(Nelson et al., 2020) Some examples of what are considered ‘small’ sawmill operations in Canada range in log consumption of between 700 – 14,000 m³ per year and employing 4-5 full-time staff (Houdek and Baumeister, 2007). 124 something else. So the mill could operate on an as needed basis to fill the needs of housing, but not on a full time basis. You know, needing to do X amount of board feet a day, 200 days a year... I'd love to work on a business plan that said, Okay, these guys are going to go fishing for this part of it. They're going to go collect medicinal plants for these two months and they're going to take two months off for the winter and there's no cost associated. Now having said that, that would work if you’re just needing for housing. But if you want to be a retailer for local people and or ship stuff beyond your community that's not going to work because no one is answering the phone and filling orders. So I'd say that's a structured business very, very clearly that way. And I can see issues with that where you can have resulting products that housing don’t want? What do you do with those you have to sell them and so on but it’s certainly an interesting concept to explore.” (Interviewee 1) Essentially, community sawmills operating on a needs-only basis with no intention of surplus distribution for export allows for a certain flexibility that may also have spillover benefits to other aspects of the community economy. By focusing on housing needs over surplus production, there is less pressure for communities to engage in extractive-industrial forestry practices, which in the case of Yuneŝit’in and many other First Nations may be a practical strategy for rebuilding people’s connections to homelands, countering some of the ‘invisible’ impacts of industrial forestry (Turner et al., 2008), and creating the types of ecologically resilient forest economies that they envision. 125 Yet, the housing needs of small communities like Yuneŝit’in cannot create the necessary demand to sustain a full-time sawmill (and thereby limiting the opportunities for full-time employment for those who want it), but there remains the potential to engage in economic bridging strategies where unneeded supply can contribute to other neighboring community’s housing needs. This is a strategy, in keeping with the vision and management approach for Dasiqox-Nexwagwez?an, that Yuneŝit’in is currently exploring with the Tŝilhqot’in National Government, where production levels could be expanded and an economy of scale be achieved by also fulfilling the housing material needs of the five other Tŝilhqot’in communities. 4.6.3 Quality and Design Considerations One of the critical issues facing First Nations communities today is not only the insufficient number of homes available to house growing populations, but also the quality of homes being built, and the inappropriateness of existing homes to local cultural and climatic conditions (MacTavish et al., 2012; McCartney, 2016). The primary reason for this is that the historical and ongoing Federal policy of on-reserve housing provision is guided by a system of decision making which focuses on what can be excluded and reduced rather than what is needed or desired by First Nations people (Olsen, 2016). As one interviewee put it: “I know that where we're moving towards is to be more independent and self-sustaining because I think as the vision of being a self-governing nation, we have to look at things in the way of how can we sustain ourselves outside of government programs, and really because if you look at the funding that comes from places like INAC and CMHC, it's very limited in terms of the amounts that you get, limited in terms of the types of funding that's 126 available. Sometimes it can be for repairs, sometimes it can be for new builds. The last time that there was a call from CMHC to build something was in 2018. And they had a stipulation that they wanted it to be a multi-unit complex. So something like that, you know, might work fine in more densely populated areas. But in a place like Yuneŝit’in that wasn't something that they wanted, and you know, and that goes the same for most of the communities” (Interviewee H) Federal housing investments, in other words, are predominantly focused on quantity over quality and premised on whatever the popular policy is at the time. This has typically resulted in the continued construction of low-cost homes which quickly end up becoming costlier in repairs than the initial investment. In fact, some First Nations indicate a situation where homes become dilapidated and unlivable far sooner than the completion of the mortgage amortization period on that home.5 Given connections between housing and other community processes, it is easy to understand how poor quality housing can have reverberating effects. One interviewee explains as follows: “Add to that the fact that there's overcrowding, and, so there's probably way more wear and tear on already shitty building construction. You know, just the quality isn't always there, maybe in some cases, but it often isn't there. That's a pretty vicious cycle. You know, people don't want to invest in it at that point. And it's hard to convince people to pay rent. And then there's a backlash if the band council takes action to enforce people to 5 Personal communication, Anonymous, September 2018 127 pay rent. But if they don't pay rent, then there's no money, internal revenue to take care of the housing, because what you get from the feds doesn't cover it doesn't even build new houses. In fact, bands have to borrow. So it's just a vicious and broken system” (Interviewee E). Here we see how the institutional impositions of the settler-colonial state have wreaked havoc on First Nations housing systems. First Nations are pushed into developing bureaucratic or even business-like administrative housing services for their members under the premise that this will improve their financial situation. Yet, that same system only funds the most minimal of housing standards, resulting in rapid disrepair and rising cost burden. Hence, the FTF approach is meant to replace the deficiencies of state housing provision by providing not only more housing, but also qualitatively better housing than the status quo. One interviewee, for example, explained the goal of Yuneŝit’in’s FTF program as not only providing housing materials, but higher quality materials than what would otherwise would be attained within the stringent cost-limits of government funding: “my vision was to get a better quality product into the houses for the same price that I can get cheap stuff from ordering downtown, and contractors coming in installing inferior product into our homes. Yeah. Take an example of hardwood flooring. We do hardwood flooring. And we can install that, our people can install it, they can set it down five years down the road now look brand new again.” (Interviewee 14). 128 Another interviewee talked about the feasibility of a local housing supply chain, while also asserting that there would be a sacrifice in standard, but not necessarily quality and alternative benefits: “Well, I think it's completely feasible especially in this community's situation where they had timbers that were easily accessible on reserve, as well as timber adjacent to the reserve that they can harvest on. No assumed crown land...There's like lots of side benefits like employment skills, and empowerment. But really when you're just like looking at taking the wood milling it and building homes, like simple homes, they wouldn't be to the same standard as a subdivision home, but just a simple quality home that's watertight and beautiful. And I think it's totally doable.” (Interviewee 15) Housing design considerations include not only aesthetic characteristics and layout, but also material use and construction. These latter two considerations particularly have direct bearing on the feasibility of a local, housing-focused sawmill enterprise, and as discussed above the amount of timber required. Of primary concern is whether to approach housing and building construction utilizing conventional stick framing or other types of solid wood construction. Conventional stick-framing is the predominant choice of most builders today, including for most First Nations housing projects, primarily because of the abundance of simple designs, affordable materials and overall short-term cost effectiveness (ie. more houses can be built quickly on a limited project budget).6 An alternative that is gaining traction is solid wood, timber frame construction which 6 Personal communication, anonymous housing construction expert, June 2019 129 offer a variety of structural, functional and aesthetic benefits while also requiring a larger initial investment (O’Connell and Smith, Paul, 1999). Comparing stick frame and solid wood construction designs can be difficult, given the variability in design options. It is estimated that building a solid wood home will cost approximately 25% more than a conventional stick frame home, but that it will likely last much longer and not require expensive repairs in the early term of paying off the cost.7 Another issue with conventional stick frame design as it pertains to the FTF approach is that using community wood in many cases is not possible given building code requirements for lumber grading. Even if the community were able to have the lumber from its mill graded, the scale of operation of any sawmill operation in comparison to industrially produced lumber results in a major cost disadvantage. This makes purchasing 2x4s from a local hardware store much more economical for housing construction. As one interviewee put it: “You know, the idea of sawing wood or making log homes on your own or supplying your own materials it's great in, in principle, but if you can buy and ship two by sixes and two by fours cheaper to the community, you just have to be willing to pay that extra cost if you want to do it on your own. If there is some cost savings, maybe. But generally, I think it would be more expensive to saw materials for housing in (name omitted) than it would be to buy in Williams Lake, that may change just because of the shortage of wood 7 Personal communication, anonymous housing construction expert, March 2019 130 expected but logs, maybe not. You know, you could peel a log, perhaps cheaper. But log homes are expensive, too.” (Interviewee C). Another interviewee similarly explained: “It would all be predicated on the capacity of the mill, but really it doesn’t make economic sense because you can always buy milled lumber from larger providers for cheaper. Even if you are using your own logs for the mill it wouldn’t be feasible from a supply chain perspective because right now they are selling logs for around $100/cubic metre so it would be much cheaper for the Nation to just buy milled lumber rather than purchase logs at that price and try to mill their own lumber for housing... It could only possibly make sense if the mill could break even financially while also providing training and jobs, but this is difficult to achieve.” (Interviewee 10). What these responses demonstrate is that considerations of housing design and quality have direct bearing on the possibilities for an FTF approach, and therefore are critical sites of ethical and practical decision-making where various values and benefits that may contribute to the community economy are weighed against one another. What appears to always come to the fore is the need to place greater emphasis and weight on social-ecological value creation in order to make the challenges of FTF worthwhile. In the context of the Tŝilhqot’in worldview, social-ecological value creation suggests the possibility of a local economy that supports the use and management of forest products in ways that strengthen reciprocal relationships between local people and ecosystems. In the case of housing design and materials, doing so can also amount to 131 long-term financial value creation, thereby contributing to the reconciling of the ubiquitous efficiency-equity trade off. 4.6.4 Transactions and Rules of (In) Commensurability Economic theory, argues Bourdieu, has reduced the universe of exchanges to that of mercantile, self-interested, and profit-maximizing actions, therefore rendering all other forms of exchange as noneconomic and disinterested (Bourdieu, 2001). Under capitalism, money has become the primary source of social bonding, disintegrating the social fabric of communities and advancing individualism by contributing to the autonomy of people as they become less reliant on the family unit (and community) for support (Aglietta, 1998). Although the institutions of family, kin, and community have long been traditional sources of economic production, they are now seemingly so removed from economic life that they are considered ‘social’ rather than economic institutions (Ross and Usher, 1986). With this dis-embedding of the economy from social relations, First Nations communities are among the many who in the face of globalized capital must address a lack of compensation for their diverse economic activities, instead incentivizing individuals toward a reliance on paid labour (Bowles et al., 1998). Indeed, most prescriptions for economic development within First Nations communities continue to ignore the fundamental social norms, values and economic activities that often sustain such communities today, if only because such systems appear to contradict if not counteract the atomizing incentives and theories of capitalist growth and market-based transactions. Gibson-Graham articulate in their diverse economy framework that formal market transactions are only one subset of a plethora of transactions that sustain a community economy (2005). 132 While formal market transactions are underlined by rules of exchange and calculations of commensurability, other economic transactions within the household and the community often rely on cultural rules and norms that are perhaps less calculating, and therefore less immutable, allowing for socially negotiated ‘prices’ which respond to metrics beyond those of mere profit maximization (Gibson-Graham, 2006a). By enacting the FTF approach as a type of social innovation supporting the community economy (needs) rather than a profit-driven productive process responding solely to consumers (demands), communities aim to move beyond the atomizing incentives of market economics as concerns housing. This can create the space to imagine possibilities for transactions which facilitate relationships between people and resources in new non-market ways. Within an FTF approach, and strictly from a supply chain perspective, there are two critical transactions which must be negotiated: the forest to the processing facility (intermediate inputs), and the processing facility to the home (final outputs). In typical market economies the producers, distributers and consumers which take part in these transactions have their own interests predominantly in mind, and so they rely on the market to act as an impartial arbiter. Neoclassical economics tells us that anything less than the price system created by market-based transactions will result in a lack of economic rationality and the inability to make adequate economic calculations (in terms of supply and demand) that market pricing provides (Cockshott, 2008). Yet the boom and bust nature of many capitalist markets indicate that such systems are far from rational, and the marginalizing (if not oppressing) nature of market economics toward those with less purchasing power means that such systems are certainly not ethical. In many First Nations communities, where there often exists somewhat of a greater blurriness between 133 producers, distributers and consumers (and indeed a certain solidarity between them) these transactions can become coordinates of ethical decision making and social innovation. One interviewee expressed the complexity of navigating these transactions as a part of an FTF approach: “Like the housing department would buy wood from them but they're complaining about the quality of the wood. And then the sawmill, you know housing is difficult with them. We were just like why are they even separate? They really should be integrated as part of the same thing. I don't know that whether they will or not, because it's kind of hard because the way things are structured, like one is an enterprise as part of a development corp, and the other is an extension of the band… So whoever else in the nation is doing the budgets for housing for example, they've got to have a house come in at a certain budget under their mandate. And their mandate isn't specifically to you know, to have a social mandate to keep the mill going. Even if that means down running lumber at three times the price they can buy it at the store for, so there's those competing interests within the nation, but certain things that make sense.” (Interviewee 3) These conflicting mandates, as the interviewee put it, can perhaps only be overcome through social innovations which serve to further break down the barriers between producers, consumers and distributers, allowing for new types of commensurability that do not necessarily respond to the market dictates of economic calculation. Through a diverse economic lens, it becomes clear that some communities focused on supporting internal housing needs are finding innovative ways of negotiating rules of commensurability which recognize the multiple values that the FTF 134 approach can bring to the community economy. For example, one interviewee explained the final output transaction as follows: “Yeah, so what we normally sell to outside the village is usually half price to members. And then what we use in the community, you know, so like the housing department if they need lumber for sheds or stuff like that, it's kind of like an internal transfer from housing to the mill.” (Interviewee 9). Another interviewee described how the intermediary input transaction takes place: “Yeah, we gotta pay obviously our loggers because they're the ones that fell and skidded laid out the logs and stuff like that. So there's a cost associated with them. It's not the same as buying one log from the local (commercial) sawmill - now a hundred dollars a cubic meter. We might get it at $40 - $50” (Interviewee 14) Here the transaction can be understood as a site of ethical decision making, where it is deemed as appropriate to cover the costs of the loggers while also ensuring equity in transactions resulting in lower than market prices for the manufacturing entity. Of course, there continues to exist a neoclassical trade-off assumption that more equity as a result of socially embedded transactions must mean less efficiency (Hayter, 2004). For example, classical economists theorize that sellers offer friends and relatives lower prices than they could get from strangers as a result of obligations that they feel in these relationships, and that 135 consequently in such settings these may lead to significantly higher operating costs (Granovetter, 1992, 2005). Various interviewees were subject to this logic and made sure to stick to the more readily recognizable capitalist rules of commensurability in order to avoid what was perceived (and indeed has been engrained in practice and discourse) as a pitfall. For example Interviewee 2 said: “I pay basically market value is what I've paid. Generally speaking. It’s just trying to keep the business not to do favors. If I discount it we're just basically taking profits from one business and giving it to the other. So market value is what I've always paid.” Through such a logic, costs continue to be understood solely through financial metrics, and what appear to be incommensurable are the social, cultural and ecological benefits that can counter efficiency reductions as a result of more equitable transactions. The nature of the FTF approach seeks to transition communities away from an export-based economy subject to exogenous and cyclical economic forces, to more of an exchange-based community economy, where local production is focused foremost on meeting local needs (Colley, 2013; Loxley and Lamb, 2005). Yet such an approach often requires a willingness to pay more for locally produced products than those sourced from outside of the community. This is because the social enterprises forming a part of the FTF process being small and local tend to have a loss of economies of scale resulting in higher than average production costs (as discussed above in reference to the production of dimensional lumber). This was a dominant theme that emerged from the interviews, with many describing how the economics of the FTF approach 136 often don’t make sense from a monetary value perspective. However, perhaps FTF enterprises need to take into account not only economy of scale cost disadvantages, but also lower transport costs from local sourcing and distribution, sheltered or captive markets (fixed contracts), and subsidization by the state (which can make sense if the social benefits or fiscal returns outweigh the costs of the subsidy) (Loxley, 2007). Further, costs can also be reduced when the eventual occupants of homes volunteer their time to construction. Studies show that when home owners implicate themselves fully in the construction of housing units, labour costs can be reduced by up to 50% (sweat equity) (Henry, 2010). By recognizing the non-monetary and often times intangible values to the community economy that is inherent in the FTF approach, a willingness to pay more for products than would otherwise be obtainable from larger capitalist producers becomes more plausible. For example, one interviewee said the following in relation to the FTF approach: “If you’re getting wood for free, sure then it's probably okay. And if you're using it saying yeah, sure it costs more to make these two by sixes but it means we can have four more people trained for four months longer, I guess then that's the justification for it, and a reasonable one, to train people up.” (Interviewee 3). It is this idea that is fundamental to the FTF approach, and which points toward the need for a more expansive set of indicators to appropriately measure the costs and benefits accruing to the community economy. Speaking about Yuneŝit’in’s FTF program, another interviewee said: 137 “So we can make a product to utilize into some home construction where people were more hands on, they could see the community members working. That's why we bought the mill. And it's been a great support, it's done what we asked from that sort of thing. So a lot of pride within the community… And they probably had the bigger pride factor because you actually see radiate out of them when they made these big eight by eight timbers that they were going to utilize in a home build one day in which they did.” (Interviewee 14) If the full potential of the FTF approach as a social innovation in support of a housing community economy is to be realized it must be evaluated less in comparison to the potential outputs of competitive market enterprises, and more through its own established metrics as a vehicle for collective self-help. Doing so means articulating different rules of commensurability than those solely dictated by the price systems of capitalist institutions. 4.7 Conclusion It is said that sites of socio-economic experimentation which challenge the hegemony of capitalism are irrelevant to the world at large because they will not emerge under ‘normal’ conditions (Graham and Healy, 2008). Yet, in British Columbia where some 198 distinct First Nations face structurally and symptomatically similar socio-economic and housing circumstances as a result of both colonial and capitalist forces alike, seemingly unique and isolated examples of social innovations offer strong potential for replicability and expansion. As First Nations continue to leverage emerging rights and title to advance territorial self-governance, strengthen self-reliance, and take control over services critical to the fulfillment of 138 basic needs, it is paramount that new ways of enacting housing and community economies are shared and supported. In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent that new ways of advancing culturally appropriate modes of First Nations development require more explicit challenges and deconstructive approaches to the structural forms of power, whether it be colonialism or capitalism, which have served to subjectify and oppress First Nations individuals and communities. As Kuokkanen argues, if the global market economy played a significant role in the loss of political and economic autonomy of Indigenous societies, then rebuilding such societies on the same economic model is likely not sustainable or meaningful, and rather a reversion to traditional institutions of governance and economy is needed (Ruana Kuokkanen, 2011). The ‘normal’ conditions in many British Columbian First Nation communities were established (relatively recently in historic timeframes) under colonial political and economic policies based on extractive resource use that is neither ecologically sustainable for the resource base, nor socially desirable in the twenty-first century. Colonial capitalist economies of scale have led to an ironically inefficient situation, in which many First Nations communities whose territories were “forest-rich” are themselves “frame-poor” despite the wholesale logging of their lands. This situation, in which communities with abundant wood resources experience critical housing shortages while truckloads of raw logs leave their territories daily, represents gross inefficiency in real terms. The integration of initiatives such as the FTF approach with the Dasiqox Tribal Park represent the foundations for new economic models created by Indigenous communities that seek to integrate ecologically and socially sustainable practices into contemporary and future livelihoods economies. 139 It remains an ongoing project for First Nations communities to establish appropriate cultural-economic institutions within a modern context. If the FTF approach is about re-socializing economic relations that seemed to have succumbed to the dis-embedding efficiency effects of market-capitalism and colonialism, governance then needs to be thought of as enabling and coordinating the productive, allocative and distributive equity that is inherent in the social economy of First Nations communities. Indeed, although greatly weakened by the values of colonialism and capitalism and the impacts of industrial modes of production, the ethic of ‘mutual aid’ survives within many First Nations communities (Boothroyd and Davis, 1993), and the norms of trust, solidarity and reciprocity remain strong (Rauna Kuokkanen, 2011; Panelli and Tipa, 2007). Within the context of social innovation then, realizing new economic forms should include the governing processes and institutions that emanate from the bottom up and the top down, including both the informal socially embedded norms, and also the formal bureaucratic ones (Cleaver, 2002). In this sense, Dasiqox- Nexwagwez?an is an example of two communities working to protect the physical, institutional, and cultural space in which formal (e.g. jurisdictional protocols and governance agreements) and informal (e.g. community members spending time on the land, reinforcing language, culture, and ways of knowing) processes and institutions meet. It is within this institutional conjoining space where structured frameworks of negotiation and ethical decision making can unfold to better ensure the satisfaction of basic needs and the building of the community economy. Although the negotiation of modes of production, distribution and allocation have been described as a form of class politics (Gibson-Graham, 2003), it has not been our goal here to advance a 140 Marxist framework, nor is it likely appropriate to do so within the First Nations context (Bedford and Irving, 2001). Rather, we understand such politics to be representative of a First Nations life project of realizing self-determination over the fundamental institutions governing territorial economies, allowing for cultural community economies to flourish alongside or independent of capitalist pressures. In this paper we have thus attempted to reveal instances of diverse economic practices of First Nations housing provision which in their effectuation often appear to understand housing as a basic material need that is to be provided as a form of collective welfare of the community, rather than as a commodity to be produced and priced according to consumer demands. We have demonstrated how different First Nations communities are navigating (often in latent ways) complex sites of decision-making related to (de) commodification, needs and surpluses, quality and design, and rules of (in) commensurability. By identifying and articulating these sites of ethical negotiation, our aim has been to reveal the reality and possibility of First Nations community economies, and ultimately to support ongoing efforts within First Nations communities to establish counter-institutional frameworks to colonialism and capitalism. 141 Chapter 5: Deepening Counter Institutions: Property, Lands, Relations and the Economic Future of the Tŝilhqot’in 5.1 Introduction In 2014 the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a landmark decision recognizing Aboriginal title not only in theory, but in area and in reference to the Tŝilhqot’in Nation. In doing so the SCC defined these as “ownership rights similar to those associated with fee simple, including: the right to decide how the land will be used; the right of enjoyment and occupancy of the land; the right to possess the land; the right to the economic benefits of the land; and the right to pro-actively use and manage the land.” ("Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia" 2014, para. 73). The trial judge in the decision, as a result of the rich testimony of elders, accepted the fact that the "Tŝilhqot’in people were a rule ordered society" (Borrows, 2015b). In recognizing the pre-existence of Indigenous social and legal structures, the title declaration has opened up new possibilities for the restitution of land and the rebuilding of Indigenous institutions for not only the Tŝilhqot’in, but many First Nations across British Columbia (Borrows 2015c; "Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia" 2014). This confers great responsibility on the Tŝilhqot’in, who have now become the torch bearers of Aboriginal title, with the power, however uncertain, to enact an institutional framework that may serve as an example of what a truly post-colonial, multi-juridical Canada can be. That fundamental principles and values, which can be understood as socially appropriate institutions, lie at the heart of what it means to be Indigenous, speaks to the importance of the task at hand. To enact their own institutions of territorial self-governance, the Tŝilhqot’in face a long-inscribed settler-colonial structure and its governmental technologies. 142 These have sought to overturn Indigenous institutions in the name of efficiency, certainty and individual autonomy, and they continue to serve as one of the most potent methods of cultural erasure to date (Harris, 2004; Wolfe, 2006). Although the struggle of First Nations for land rights continue, the Tŝilhqot’in decision has shifted the question (and indeed struggle) over how reinstated title and rights over land can be exercised to fulfil the visions of First Nations for economic futures and well-being. Legal and related scholars agree that the implications of the Tŝilhqot’in decision will be lasting and far reaching in terms of the political-economic and even legislative trajectory of British Columbia and Canada (Coates and Gibson 2014; Coates and Newman 2014; Christie 2015; Bankes 2015). Few analyses however focus on the potential outcomes of the title decision for the Tŝilhqot’in people at the household level, particularly as concerns socio-economic development, well-being and the satisfaction of critical needs like housing. Efforts of the Tŝilhqot’in to address housing are widespread and tend to be viewed as an interconnected part of territorial stewardship, governance and a sustainable economic future. In fact, housing funding has been one of the primary and earliest points of discussion between the Tŝilhqot’in and the Crown as a part of self-governance negotiations emanating from the title decision. While funding is undoubtedly vital to housing outcomes, perhaps more critical still is the institutional framework that the Tŝilhqot’in establish upon Aboriginal title and newly emerging jurisdictions linked to that title. Housing and indeed most outcomes are contingent on just that. The institutional framework consists of a political structure, a property rights structure, and a social structure (North, 2005), although in the context of Indigenous governance such structures are not so easily compartmentalized. In this paper I strategically focus on property as a concept which presents perhaps the greatest dilemma 143 facing the Tŝilhqot’in as they seek to re-establish an institutional framework that enables full control over their lands and jurisdiction, while maintaining their values and visions for the future. The title ruling has conferred decision making power on Aboriginal title holders, but at face value this means only a degree of control and not necessarily legislative governing authority (Christie, 2015). This, Christie (2015, 754) concludes, means that for Nations like the Tŝilhqot’in to enjoy jurisdictional authority requires that they work “outside or alongside the limits of Canadian jurisprudence”. Necessarily then, the Tŝilhqot’in have been pursuing a transformative strategy towards self-governance (Nikolakis, 2019), both in collaboration with the crown (via the Nenqay Deni Accord and more recently the Gwets'en Nilt'i Pathway Agreement), and independently via the assertion of Tŝilhqot’in Laws (dechen ts’edilhtan) and territorial stewardship within ancestral (nen) lands including the asserted Dasiqox Tribal Park. Hence, in 2015 the Tŝilhqot’in enacted the Nemiah Declaration, and since 2019 they have enacted and asserted at least four other Tŝilhqot’in laws (“Tsilhqot'in National Government” 2020). The Nenqay Deni Accord is a reconciliation framework agreement which responds to the title declaration and addresses priority areas for the Tŝilhqot’in Nation. Central to this agreement is the creation of Category ‘A’ lands which refer to areas within Tŝilhqot’in territory that are agreed by the Province of British Columbia and the Tŝilhqot’in Nation to be under the ownership, control and management of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation, excluding the declared title area and Indian Reserves (IR). Within Category ‘A’ lands, the Tŝilhqot’in Nation has the right to proactively manage, enact laws, and decide the uses of the lands and resources ("TSILHQOT’IN NATION and BC Government" 2016). At this writing, the legal status of Category ‘A’ lands remains uncertain and are to be determined by the parties through further negotiation. Equally 144 uncertain is the legal status of title and IR lands moving forward, as well as other areas of the territory in which the Tŝilhqot’in have been asserting their laws as caretakers, as in the Dasiqox Tribal Park. Chief Russell Myers-Ross of the Yuneŝit’in Government – one of the six communities comprising the Tŝilhqot’in Nation - has described the Dasiqox Tribal Park as an area where they are taking a sui generis approach that reflects Tŝilhqot’in law. It is similar to title lands, rather than something to be simply put into an existing legal framework or tenure designation such as treaty lands or class A parks (Myers-Ross, webinar, June 6, 2020). The recognition of Aboriginal title essentially confers upon the Tŝilhqot’in people the same benefits of owners of fee simple property under common law, but at the same time the sui generis and collective nature of Aboriginal title makes it something very much unrecognizable under common law (Graben and Morey, 2020). Although the courts have essentially liberalized Aboriginal title by making it analogous to fee simple private property, the Tŝilhqot’in may find that this characterization restricts their ability to collectively make decisions and allocate use according to their own laws. This indicates that title lands, as well as other lands being negotiated by the Tŝilhqot’in including ‘Category A’ lands create ‘property gaps’ which represent legal uncertainty within both common law and Indigenous law (Egan and Place, 2013). While these gaps offer opportunities for the kinds of institutional innovations required for the Tŝilhqot’in to fulfill their goals for socio-economic development and housing, they also highlight an enduring dilemma faced by First Nations attempting to enact their own laws and institutions for territorial self-governance. Just as Blomley (2015, 169) recognizes the modern treaty process in British Columbia as “not only an allocational struggle over who gets property, but also an ontological contest over what property is”, so too will be the struggle of the Tŝilhqot’in as they 145 work to define what Aboriginal title is in practice, and how it shall be governed. Doing so requires an articulation of Aboriginal land relations based on inherent Indigenous law, yet the challenge remains for the Tŝilhqot’in, as all First Nations seeking to (re)build their own institutions, to do so in a way that does not acquiesce -- epistemologically and ontologically -- to settler-colonial concepts of property. Instead, any post-colonial institutional development will likely benefit from careful consideration of the array of social relations and values that resemble property within Tŝilhqot’in law and articulation of these principles in ways that are perhaps cognizable to the common-law without being subsumed by it (Bryan, 2000; Hanna, 2015). For example, Bryan (2000) argues that although institutions in relation to proprietary entitlement exist in diverse way across First Nations communities, ownership as understood within western common law never actually exists or occurs, making any translation problematic. Hence, to refer to Aboriginal title and emerging governance institutions as property is to allow the settler-colonial worldview to be imposed upon the Tŝilhqot’in (Nadasdy, 2002). In what follows, I draw from my experience supporting the Yuneŝit’in Government and the Tŝilhqot’in National Government (TNG) over the last four years, and from the knowledge imparted upon me by leaders within those entities. I have also benefited from my knowledge of First Nations housing, economic futures, and land management given my role as a community development practitioner and researcher in collaboration with a not-for-profit organization supporting First Nations in British Columbia. Material reference below includes nine semi-structured and lengthy interviews with Yuneŝit’in and TNG staff and leaders, as well as observations from my participation in several TNG led housing and economic development events. Other contextual details are drawn from numerous informal interviews, meetings, 146 conversations and observations over these years. The views expressed in this paper are my own and not necessarily representative of those within Yuneŝit’in and TNG. I argue that the Tŝilhqot’in, empowered by Aboriginal title, have an unprecedented opportunity to shift the pattern of First Nations institutional development by creating what I refer to as ‘land relation rules’ within emerging jurisdictions and which also respond foremost to Tŝilhqot’in legal principles and values.8 Rather than acquiescing to dominant settler-colonial notions of certainty, efficiency and the economic benefits that these characteristics of liberal property systems purport to provide, the Tŝilhqot’in and other First Nations can find stability, legitimacy, and socio-economic/ecological benefits within the fundamental principles of their own traditions, laws and values, which ultimately regard land as relations. 5.2 The Continued Making of Native Space It is generally accepted that property, in its many diverse forms, is an integral aspect of what it means to be human and is one of the fundamental institutions, whether informally or formally governing social and therefore economic relations (Nadasdy, 2002). As such, property has always been and continues to be the primary site of intervention of the settler-colonial project. The arrival and settlement of Europeans in Canada marked the beginning of a process of dispossession and development of the lands and resources upon which First Nations have relied for millennia. In British Columbia, formal treaties never materialized in the same way that they 8 ‘Lands’ in this context refers to Tsilhqot’in ‘nenqay’ which includes lands, waters, plants, animals and everything as inter-connected 147 did across the rest of Canada and the United States, and First Nations were pushed by colonial authorities and settlers into some 1,500 small reserves accounting for slightly more than one third of one percent of the land of the province (Harris, 2004). The rationale for the dispossession of the land of First Nations was based on the classical political-economic philosophy of John Locke and others, that without ‘wage labour’ to work the land, it was land which lay in waste, and that those who engage in such wage labour have the rightful claim to that land as property (Lendsay and Wuttunee, 1999). The Lockean perspective sees property as a natural right based upon the appropriation and use by individuals, with the strongest types of claims being those that are tangible and beneficial (for example fencing, plowing, harvesting crops) (Raymond, 2003). That First Nations had their own well-functioning yet less sedentary structures of social and economic organization was not enough for colonial authorities – the land was a terra nullius that needed to be exploited for its full economic potential, justified by a ‘doctrine of discovery’ (Borrows, 2015c; Pratt, 2004). The assumption of underlying Crown title to all lands which accompanied the assertion of British Crown sovereignty over what is now called British Columbia in 1846 further dispossessed First Nations from their territories, extinguishing Indigenous sovereignty and rendering First Nation’s territorial interests as having little legal significance or validity until near the end of the 20 th century (Asch, 2002; Macklem, 2016). Colonial powers considered First Nations peoples socially, economically, and politically inferior because, among other reasons, they failed to enact private property land management regimes (Dempsey et al., 2011; Lendsay and Wuttunee, 1999). By pushing First Nations into small reserve spaces, colonial authorities were attempting at once to open up more territory for European settlers, while at the same encouraging a more 148 ‘efficient’ use of land and the ‘domestication’ of First Nations persons. The colonial project of private property and the dismantling of First Nations territory began with location tickets, which were assigned lots within reserve spaces, designated for those First Nations people who took a path toward enfranchisement (Monk, 2013). Colonial powers saw individual ownership of land as a necessary process of civilization of First Nations people, and this was closely connected with ideas of fixed housing and a 'proper family life' (Alcantara, 2003). Adele Perry (2003) asserts that the Indigenous home was a particular focus of this effort to assimilate the Indigenous person as an economic subject, because traditional, collective homes were considered inimical to the proper development of individual property rights and associated wage work. This making of ‘native spaces’ deprived First Nations of the land and resources needed to sustain their livelihoods and traditional social structures, by criminalizing behaviours such as leaving the reserve and using resources from their territories, while allowing for the establishment of settler-colonial institutions of law, property and state (Harris, 2002). Hence, the making of native spaces was not only about lands and property, but also about interrupting all relationships that Indigenous peoples had with their territory. Settler-colonial property rights were strictly enforced as a fundamental tenet of Western civilization, and as these property rights expanded, First Nations peoples were increasingly restricted from practicing the ‘moditional economy’ which was a traditional way of living well and one which had for a time adapted to the onset of extractive development in British Columbia (Lutz, 2009). The Indian Act of 1876, which was a consolidation of previous regulations pertaining to First Nations, created the band system of First Nations administration in an attempt to destroy existing institutions, hereditary governance, and community economic structures while 149 imposing settler institutional values (Yabsley, 1991). The colonial tactic of dividing First Nations into small bands still persists today in First Nations-crown relations, and creates major challenges for those communities to function effectively as self-governments (Napoleon, 2005). The Indian Act enabled the Federal government to intervene in a wide variety of internal band issues such as the management of Indian lands, resources and moneys, and housing, all in an effort to promote assimilation and "civilization." At the same time, the Indian Act further entrenched into law the restriction on First Nations people to the right of preemption – a process of ‘property claiming’ that was rapidly underway within their territories (Yabsley, 1991). Thus, much of the fee-simple tenure that exists today in British Columbia was created out of a process from which First Nations were effectively banned. As a result, while First Nations continue to gain advantage in the battle over land restitution and territorial jurisdiction, they face the challenge of overcoming what has become a ‘reserve mentality’, where members and leadership alike in many cases remain subdued and self-constrained in terms of territorial ambitions. As one interviewee explains: “And you know I don't think we've like mentally shifted completely yet. I think we still think of the reserves being reserves and we don't even think a foot off of the reserve quite yet, or how to expand land, so those questions are still uncertain to us.” (Interviewee A) Such a condition is perhaps symptomatic of a widespread neoliberal ‘governmentality’ which serves to self-discipline First Nations leaders and members into truncated territorial or other ambitions, where the reserve space is seen as providing legal and economic ‘certainty’ for the economic well-being of the community (Blackburn, 2005; Brown, 2014; Hale, 2005). 150 Reinforcing of this is the onslaught of liberal private property rights prescriptions which continue to be advanced as the solution to the ‘problem’ of housing and economic disparity within First Nations reserves. First Nations land and natural resources, it is argued, will never realize its full economic potential as long as it is held as collective property subject to political and collective management (Flanagan and Alcantara 2002; Raybould 2006). Fundamental to this claim is the idea that First Nations poverty is the result of market failure on reserve due to high transaction costs which deter private investment and therefore stifles increased productivity (Flanagan, Alcantara, and Le Dressay 2010). This explicit institutional logic of efficiency can only be resolved, it is argued, through strengthened individual property rights which encourage business development and lead to the improvement of housing by allowing for individual ownership and the burdening and encumbering of assets (Steiger, 2006). Currently, Articles 28 and 89 of the Indian Act prohibit lending institutions from seizing Indian assets and property in the event of a default. This means that First Nations individuals have very difficult times obtaining mortgages and financing – a legislative flaw which is attributed as the primary reason for housing shortages and the deterioration of homes on reserve (Alcantara, 2005). Various legislative remedies have been developed to encourage ownership and investment on reserve over the last several decades, including the use of Certificates of Possession, land management powers for First Nations governments under the First Nations Land Management Act (FNLMA), leases, and band or government backed mortgages. More recently the individual property ‘ownership’ approach has taken hold particularly within policy circles linked to the Federal government, and through emergent First Nations institutions such as the First Nations Tax Commission. Through their proposed First Nations Property Ownership Act (FNPOA), 151 Flanagan et al, alongside Manny Jules continue to push an initiative that they assert will solve the socio-economic and housing issues on-reserve by enabling the creation of fee-simple private property (Flanagan, Alcantara, and Le Dressay 2010). Western settler law is reliant on notions of clarity, legibility, and predictability - which is what has become increasingly expected not only of Indian Act and other federally legislated First Nations, but also First Nations negotiating and holding treaty lands. Both the Tsawwassen and the Nisga'a, for example, now hold much of their land under ‘fee simple plus’, defining ownership in terms of the Canadian legal system rather than their own laws (Fortier et al., 2013). The expectation within modern treaties is that a First Nation will collectively hold land in the fee simple plus form and then allocate property interests to band members as it sees fit in the form of fee-simple, with strict limits on alienability (Blomley, 2014). Fee simple plus means that underlying title to the land remains with the First Nation and that any land escheated to the crown will be transferred back at no cost to the First Nation. The Nisga’a have taken a step further under their Landholding Transition Act by allowing land to be alienated to non-Nisga'a persons as a form of fee-simple freehold that would be recognizable and indeed constructed under the common-law (Graben, 2014; Stephenson, 2010). According to their proponents, such fee-simple plus approaches either through final agreements or Federal legislation offer a solution unique to the First Nations situation in Canada. These are said to resolve the deficiencies of other failed land titling programs by maintaining reversionary title to First Nations, by allowing for land to be held first collectively and then individually in fee simple on a voluntary basis, and by including a Torrens-style land registry controlled by First 152 Nations (Flanagan, Alcantara, and Le Dressay 2010). However, despite the land reversionary clauses built into treaties as well as the FNPOA legislation being promoted, fee simple remains a contentious notion for many because it is derived from the Anglo-Saxon feudal property system in which the landholder technically is considered a tenant of the ultimate holder of underlying title: the Crown (Egan, 2013). In other words, despite the certainty that treaties and other laws purport to provide to First Nations, there remains debate as to where allodial or ‘real title’ title actually rests, and uneasiness with the very meaning of the property forms which structure them. 5.3 Interrogating Private Property The advancement of private property institutions is one of the hallmarks of not only settler-colonialism, but also modern neoliberalism (Hale, 2005; MacDonald, 2011). Schmidt argues that the First Nations Property Ownership Act legislation being advanced, which attempts to relay what are essentially municipal powers upon First Nations governments over reserve lands, simply repackages dispossession as the restoration of Indigenous territory and amounts to little more than the transformation of First Nations land into a form of property that is compliant with liberal legal-economic institutions (Schmidt, 2018). Others have made similar arguments regarding the treaty process (Blomley, 2014; Egan, 2013). By strengthening First Nations jurisdiction within [quasi-municipal] bounded spaces, liberal property based approaches stifle First Nations territorial ambitions. They also enable a continuance of the colonial project of assimilation through the creation of institutions which facilitate individual market-based solutions to economic development and housing. 153 The argument for fee simple tenure reform on-reserve is that it would make lands available for collateralization, development, and alienation on the real estate market, therefore leading to wealth maximization (Carpenter and Riley, 2019). Alcantara argues for example that individual title to land is important to the economic well-being of a person, and that security of title gives an individual the ability to build a home or start a business (Alcantara, 2003). As such, Dempsey et al. (2011, 4) consider liberal property rights a “neoliberal technology of inclusion”, which aims to address issues of 'equality' by enabling First Nations to have the same access to credit and property rights as other Canadians thereby stimulating housing and other markets within First Nation communities. By allowing for individual home ownership liberal property rights discipline home owners into acquiescing to the dominant political-economic system and the ‘status quo’ by binding them to financial institutions via mortgages and loans (Forrest and Hirayama, 2015). Moreover, governmental policy goals of Indigenous homeownership that are evident across the CANZUS countries are largely based on the assumption of a causal relationship between home ownership, economic development and reduced disadvantaged, with little solid evidence (Crabtree, 2014). It has been shown for example that individual titling of land amongst already marginalized and impoverished communities does not stimulate economic development, especially considering that the type of lending by banks which is considered to be the driving force of such development is typically more concerned with steady income streams rather than the availability of assets as collateral (Assies, 2009). This indicates that individual titling policies will only be effective in supporting First Nations people in securing mortgages and loans if they are accompanied by comprehensive economic development strategies which enable the increased levels of income required for lending. As one interviewee explains: 154 “Really its coming down to there’s very few people who can afford to have that interest in their own home. I just had my second individual in four years come to me and say, hey, I've been pre-approved for a mortgage…You know, I have employees of the band. I mean, those are the ones who I know, I know what their income is, and we've talked to some of those families about sort of forced savings to help them, you know, get some money in the bank before they pursue owning their own home.” (Interviewee B). Hence, the creation of a robust market economy can only go so far in creating the opportunities to obtain the material conditions for human flourishing, which undoubtedly includes access to land for housing, a legally-recognized entitlement of residence, and the ability to care for that home. This limitation is particularly pronounced when a market economy is built upon distributions of resources (ie ‘native spaces’) that are themselves the result of past injustices (Alexander and Peñalver, 2009). For the Tŝilhqot’in then, as with other First Nations, instituting market-based property systems within the confines of the reserve space or even beyond is problematic. This leads Egan and Place (2013) to conclude that fee simple may prove economically beneficial for urban reserves, but for remote and rural reserves a more useful approach to economic development would be extended Indigenous jurisdiction over ancestral territories and the revenues that accompany it. After all, property itself does not produce value, the value always comes from elsewhere, and the securing of a mortgage does not translate into the paying of residential rents (Pasternak, 2015). Tenure reform does not necessarily result in the creation of land markets because of gaps related to low land values, inadequate access to existing markets, and low income of potential borrowers (Baxter and Trebilcock, 2009). Quite simply, market-based ownership and individual property tenure make little practical sense in remote First 155 Nations communities where the prospects for economic investment and housing markets are weak, and housing construction and maintenance costs are high (Wensing and Taylor, 2012). The economic development fallacy of private property regimes perhaps belabours the issue for First Nations. Although Flanagan et al., in their oft cited book unabashedly claim within the same paragraph that property reform on reserve is needed in order to both create ‘Indian’ millionaires and improve housing (Flanagan, Alcantara, and Le Dressay 2010), analyses of First Nations motivations and values is completely absent. Quite simply, for many Indigenous peoples home ownership is more about intergenerational asset building for future generations and housing security, rather than short-term financial gain (Memmott et al., 2009). Property economists, including institutional economists, begin with the assumption that land is an inanimate resource with the normative goal of wealth maximization and economic growth (Carpenter and Riley, 2019). Individual ownership, it is argued, tends to put property to its highest economic use because it lowers transaction costs and creates the incentives for individuals to make decisions which minimize loss. Through this logic, enclosing things as private property creates value by inducing labour and fostering conservation, whereas a lack of private property results in no self-interest in protecting a resource and therefore inefficient economic activity (Mansfield, 2009). Such theory however, fails to distinguish between communal lands which are subject to community governance institutions and owned by the community, and Western understandings of land held 'in common' which are owned by nobody (Bobroff, 2001). Once these differences are clarified, the idea that somehow greater value will be gained through individual decision making rather than through group consensus is not backed by evidence. That is, private property arguments for economic efficiency ignore the importance of 156 connections to ancestral land of First Nations peoples, human-land relational ontologies, and the fact that collective ownership of land may offer important social, political and ecological benefits of collective responsibility that override incentives based on economic growth (Altman, 2004; Egan and Place, 2013). As one interviewee explains: “So I think they were entirely dependent on their territory, and that they did treat it to a certain degree as property. But I think that to stop there would kind of be an injustice because it was more. It's a relationship with their territory. And it's all the resources including like the animals and the fish and the other creatures. And that goes right back to their like creation stories that talk about their responsibilities to everything around them and to take care of it. So, you know, I think, to say it is analogous to property with a whole bunch of responsibilities to it.” (Interviewee E) Post-legal realism tells us that property is about the relationships between people, not about the relationships between people and things (Alexander and Peñalver, 2009). The Tŝilhqot’in worldview that this interviewee describes however, highlights the fact that land itself is an animate and vital part of that relationship. By reducing land to an economic asset, liberal private property can serve to restrict First Nations people from fulfilling their relationships with land. One interviewee describes this issue as follows: “I think it's hard because I think of title as being an area that you can be sustainable in. And so I think if you have a conscience, you can do that and it's knowing and understood among your community, I think that's the important part. But title - when I think of our 157 lands I wouldn't like the limitation that you'd have on someone that wants to go to their old trapping sites, and their old hunting sites and building a cabin. And I don't see many restrictions on that. But then that you cluster everyone in a small area, and then you sort of have to start making, like factoring in all these different scenarios. So for myself, I don't think private property, I don't like the idea, to be honest, I'd rather just give the guarantee you have this house for 25 years and you can, you know, finish off your mortgage and then you renew it after that, something like that. But giving off like 99 year leases or private property into infinity I think it's kind of a silly notion. So, yeah, Okay, fair enough, you gotta constantly consider like what your carrying capacity is and all the different factors that might play in later on down the line. So it's a little more indigenous philosophy I think just like the concept of constant flux is sort of one that you don't want to pretend that something exists forever.” (Interviewee A). Tŝilhqot’in land relations then are meant to facilitate land-based activities, and are subject to change based on a variety of factors and appear to counter liberal property characteristics of exclusivity, alienability and permanence. Rather than collective, shared uses of land, liberal property offers territorialization and boundary creation which results in more pronounced forms of individualization and therefore exclusivity (Blomley, 2017b). The creation of rigid boundaries and territories through the Land Claims process and the modern treaty process for example oversimplifies the ways in which different First Nations historically shared territories, and in fact has created disputes between First Nations peoples who used to share space cooperatively (Altamirano-Jimenez, 2013). And as the interviewee above explains, it was the making of the reserve spaces which has compelled the adoption by First Nations of the rules which accompany 158 liberal private property. Indeed, government housing programs such as section 95 housing led to the creation of subdivisions that traded off the placement of housing on the usable landscape (rivers, beaches, forests, and familial land holdings) for clustered cost savings and other perceived benefits of bounded communities (Olsen, 2016). Efforts to create property systems which mirror fee simple within these spaces have sought to transform property from a set of relations to an alienable, exchangeable commodity compatible with the market logics of capitalism (Blomley, 2014). One interviewee describes the aversion of the Tŝilhqot’in to fee-simple private property systems, and the threat that they are perceived to pose to the collective nature of Tŝilhqot’in title: “Because, as part of title, if you look at the Tŝilhqot’in decision, you know, that decision it actually specifies communal land. Meaning that it can't be bought sold or you know destroyed. At an individual level, it has to be a community wide decision about something. Fee simple, it'd be like, then we may as well just become a municipality. And, you know, go under treaty and do it in that sense. I mean, because if you're putting it into a fee simple way of thinking, then that means that you've decided that you can give up your land.” (Interviewee H) Here Tŝilhqot’in title is understood as something vastly more than the sum of its parts: It is subject to collective decision making and something that cannot simply be used by individuals absolutely, nor can it be alienated like fee simple property. Such a sentiment is echoed by property theorists who take exception to the ‘ownership’ model of property in general. ‘Ownership,’ argues Blomley (2013), seeks to create strict boundaries, exclude others, and 159 allows for near absolute control by individuals, and is problematic not only because is it offered as the sole choice, but because it is somewhat of a fiction. Private property is not absolute, but rather is a specific social institution that involves multiple relationships (Schmidt, 2018). And, because property rights are inherently relational, there is a strong responsibility to others in property ownership that has been neglected in neoclassical property theory (Alexander, 2009). Progressive theories of property then find a place within Indigenous understandings of territory as a way of ordering kin relations and relationships of sharing (Thom, 2009). Attempts to enclose or privatize those spaces can be fundamentally at odds with Indigenous legal principles. 5.4 Formalizing Land Relation Rules Whether formally or informally understood and enforced, property systems serve to clarify the allocation of rights and duties of people within a community with respect to the resources needed to survive and flourish (Alexander and Peñalver, 2009). Land tenure specifically, determines the type of interests that can be held in land, who can hold those interests, how they can be transferred, and the duties and responsibilities that come along with that interest (Baxter and Trebilcock, 2009; Hykin, 2016). As such, there appears to be utility in the creation of land relation rules9 for the Tŝilhqot’in as they seek to strengthen jurisdiction over their territory. My conversations with those within the Tŝilhqot’in National Government revealed an urgency from 9 In its original form, ‘tenure’ was the mode of holding or occupying land from the sovereign lord and was central to the feudal property system (Hepburn, 2005). For First Nations then seeking to extricate themselves from the common-law and any of its antecedents, tenure might not be the most appropriate word. As a temporary replacement to account for relational modes of land holding that are likely best described through Indigenous legal principles and languages, I use the term ‘land relation rules’. 160 the perspective of land stewardship and land use planning for the clarification of land relation rules within Tŝilhqot’in territory: “So it's complicated because I don't think we've ever had that conversation with people. I think we had somebody go around looking for areas of how to define where people's ownership is and trying to map out all of this and try to develop, start planning and developing a land use plan. So we've made motions to do that, but we haven't really sat everyone down to go what are the common rules around this and what laws are we going to derive around this?” (Interviewee A) As the interviewee explains, rules around land relations are needed in order for the Tŝilhqot’in to advance land use planning which forms a critical part of territorial self-governance. For the Tŝilhqot’in, who’s sacred values of stewardship and interconnectivity with the land serves as a guiding principle for governance, increasing land management capacity through planning and rule articulation can be understood not necessarily as a means to stimulate property markets, but rather as a way to deliver sustainable development through environmental protection, economic success, and institutional stability (Wallace, 2010). As Blomley (2017a) reminds us, planning effects land rights by empowering or restricting land owners (or users) to do certain things, and property therefore holds close practical and theoretical relations to land use planning. Through the process of land use planning and articulation of rules, the Tŝilhqot’in have the opportunity to counter-institutionalize land relations against traditional neoclassical theories of property which privilege exchange value to the detriment of use value, and which fail to protect personal and cultural values associated with land (Dyal-Chand, 2011). To counter-institutionalize land 161 relations would mean to create rules which derive from Tŝilhqot’in law and which make secure the values and principles that uphold the reciprocal relationship that the Tŝilhqot’in people have with the land and with each other. Property economists and land titling programs following the Hernando De Soto (2000) school of thought have sought to commoditize and make marketable land relations through formalization initiatives. However, others argue that when approached from a rights-based perspective, formalization of tenure can be about securitization rather than marketability. Assies (2009), for example, argues that land tenure reform should be focused around improving tenure security and transferability within [First Nations] communities not to create economic certainty, but rather as a way to respond to the diverse development objectives of the community. This, according to Baxter and Trebilcock (2009), requires that the articulation of land relation rules takes informal institutions as a starting point and which involves the creation of an effective dispute resolution mechanism. Another way of describing this is that rule articulation and land use planning serves as a 'translation' of customary rights in support of the modern socio-economic, ecological and cultural goals of First Nations. Building upon the customary serves as a backstop against loss of land (Tehan, 2010), and there is evidence that the land relation rules most likely to succeed are those that bring with them traditional governance structures and that leverage Indigenous social capital (Wensing and Taylor, 2012). The utilization of customary rights for obtaining housing funding and mortgages, as well as for leasing and utilizing as collateral for obtaining small bank loans is not without precedent. First Nations across Canada have been able to leverage customary rights for a variety of economic 162 purposes, despite the fact that such rights are not recognized by the Canadian government or the courts (Flanagan, Alcantara, and Le Dressay 2010). However, customary rights property systems are not without challenges, and they have become a source of concern for many First Nations people who seek increased certainty as concerns land relations rules. One interviewee described the Tŝilhqot’in customary process as follows: “Well, let's say for example, going back to housing, if we’re going to build a house, in a certain area, we got to make sure everybody in the community is okay with it. Like, let's say, we could have a member come in and say, that's my land. You know, sometimes we run into that sometimes we don't… We'll sit at the table and do some research…We have an idea whose land this is and then just work out an agreement and then after that everything goes.” (Interviewee D). This demonstrates the nature of customary land rights as being contingent upon consensus, and so also speaks to the complexity of these traditional arrangements as concerns decision making. Many First Nations across Canada have resisted abandoning their customary rights systems because they see it as an integral part of their cultural-economic and decision making structure (Flanagan, Alcantara, and Le Dressay 2010). In many ways, customary property rights systems serve as a bulwark against colonially imposed systems of individual titling under the Indian Act, such as certificates of possession. Another interviewee explained this dilemma of wanting to hold on to the customary while also clarifying rules: 163 “I'm trying to respect the customary. Yeah, I mean, it's never been defined and even the boundaries not everyone would agree on like which rock it goes to or which stake it goes to. So there's still like a level of unknown I guess in where even their memory of the history is sometimes skewed so someone might remember something and someone might remember something else and they might have been both true at a certain time, but there is no good method of transactions. Or even for oral history, it's like everyone has to remember and everyone has to tell the truth. And so you have to have a lot of factors that happen to make sure that everyone remembers a certain time or agreement and the level of respect and honesty to kind of make sure that is an understood agreement” (Interviewee A) A challenge with customary land tenure is that without consensus, conflict resolution typically rests with Chief and Council which some posit is the basis for political influence resulting in insecurity of tenure (Alcantara, 2007). One interviewee explained this fear, while explaining how the certificate of possession system under the Indian Act serves to remedy this: “You know, if somebody has a certificate of possession then that's how they really have prevented things from happening on their land at a Chiefs level, so, you know, historically there have been issues where say a family has been living on a piece of land and built like out in Xeni because there, it's quite different in terms of how it's set up then it is in Yuneŝit’in. They're really quite spread out, in Xeni. A lot of them have their own little ranch kind of set up where they run cattle. And then say somebody passes away, and then maybe the chief and council think so and so passed away, so we should go move 164 somebody else into that house. But even if there's somebody already living there, sometimes that COP has been the only thing that saved them. Yeah, really for them to be able to hold that up and say, you know, we've got a certificate of possession for this house or for this land for this piece of land. So you can't arbitrarily just come in and decide that you're gonna take it over.” (Interviewee H) This response in a way vindicates the claim of individual property rights enthusiasts that dominant customary rights systems on reserve generally create insecurity of tenure, and that it does not allow the holder to have an interest in the land (Flanagan and Alcantara 2002). Without remedies such as certificates of possession, or more recently fee simple, the argument goes that the ability of First Nations members to participate in the broader economy will be stifled. Indeed, certificates of possession under the Indian Act have enabled extensive market integration in several First Nations communities. Nations such as West Bank First Nation near Kelowna are touted by some as the exemplary COP-induced economic success, with COP leases to non-members creating West Bank member COP holder millionaires, and providing a tax base for the Nation (Flanagan 2019). However, some have questioned if such circumstances really benefit the Nation as a whole as opposed to a few individuals,10 and there have been no qualitative studies to my knowledge investigating the ways in which the individual property rights system within West Bank has impacted non-COP holders, those resistant to settler-colonial institutions, and more broadly the state of cultural-ecological well-being of the Nation. Although the interviewee above 10 Personal communication, anonymous, February 8, 2020 165 indicated support for a COP type of system, others whom I interviewed expressed a disdain for COPs which they perceived as creating conflict and disunity within the community: “We look at that as a communal property. Yeah, I think it's still in a work in progress yet on defining property amongst our nation. But to me, we look at it as communal, the Indian Act has definitely helped divide and conquer amongst First Nations, especially, let's just use reserve lands because there's Certificate of possession holders, people, they call them CP holders. So in a sense, they kind of own property on reserved land and that I don't like. And that just divides communities. We have that on reserve lands, actually, and I don't like it. I don't think there should have been CP holders, on reserves, but there is so...” (Interviewee F) By understanding the emergence of liberal property rights within First Nations territory less as a necessary or evolutionary institutional outcome and more as a part of the settler-colonial process of dispossession and assimilation, new perspectives on previously dismissed customary systems can be found. Customary systems of land relations have been forced to function within the prohibitive confines of the Indian Act rather than evolve as independent First Nations institutions. For the Tŝilhqot’in and other First Nations, customary rights systems can potentially offer a useful starting point for land use planning, rule articulation, law making and conflict resolution. Through the Nenqay Deni Accord and the strengthened jurisdiction of the TNG beyond the Indian Act, the Tŝilhqot’in have an opportunity to leverage their unified strength to create new rules around land relations which respect and build upon traditional values. While land administration tools including rule systems, registration systems, cadastral surveying and 166 coordinated mapping were designed to commoditize land, they have now been repurposed to be 'tenure neutral’ (Wallace, 2010), and through a process of counter-institutionalizing can serve diverse social, environmental and economic purposes. The Tŝilhqot’in are engaged in such a process through the creation, amongst other related initiatives, of a Tŝilhqot’in Nation Housing Authority. Historically the Tŝilhqot’in governed through norms and kinship ties, and over time their legal tradition has adapted to changing circumstances requiring a centralization of decision making to Chief and Councils, and of late to the Tŝilhqot’in National Government (Napoleon, 2015). The TNG describes itself foremost as an association of autonomous member bands, which indicates the importance placed by the Nation on individual community decision-making. However, the title decision has resulted in an unprecedented degree of unity and has necessarily delegated some powers to the TNG as a result of Nation to Nation negotiations occurring with the Provincial and the Federal crown. Cooperation between the six Tŝilhqot’in communities through the TNG is becoming increasingly important as a means to improve the feasibility and success of various socio-economic and governance initiatives, including land relation rules and housing activities. During my attendance at several TNG-led events I observed the importance placed by the Tŝilhqot’in on scale specifically in relation to housing and the institutional framework that guides housing processes. I learned that the Chiefs have made housing a priority including through the establishment of the TNG Housing Authority. Although the roles, responsibilities and powers of a TNG Housing Authority remain to be clarified, there is indication that it will include the creation of a Nation-level housing policy which responds to Tŝilhqot’in land laws. 167 The perceived benefits of such an authority according to Tŝilhqot’in members include the collective control and distribution of housing funds; greater control over the economy; unity across the nation; a single policy that aligns with Tŝilhqot’in law and which creates efficiencies and equalities in terms of housing across the Nation; and, the creation of housing [read: land relation] laws at the Nation level (TNG Housing Forum observations, Aug 27-29, 2019). That the Tŝilhqot’in recognize the importance of working together in relation to housing and institutional development bodes well for any attempt to articulate land relation rules that build upon customary structures and traditional values. This is because property institutions also benefit from 'network effects', with the value of a legal regime increasing with the number of people and assets subject to it (Bellt and Parchomovskytt, 2013). And, it has been demonstrated that the process of institutional change as concerns property rights regimes is greatly assisted by homogenous interests, shared information, and cooperation (Rosser, 2005), all of which are supported through TNG level collaboration. 5.5 (Re) Creating Indigenous Property It is clear that a certain type of formalization of land relation rules are needed to accommodate Aboriginal title now that it has been recognized and affirmed, and that such forms must allow for a certain level of stability such that they support the socio-economic and cultural-ecological goals of the Tŝilhqot’in. In particular, although there is a reticence to define title lands (or any land controlled by the Tŝilhqot’in) as property, there is a sentiment amongst members and leaders in the communities that people should indeed ‘own’ their homes. But articulating ownership in ways that do not betray Tŝilhqot’in values remains the challenge: 168 “And when I mention that, one of the goals should be that relationships between community members, and leadership and community members is I think a really important value at the very center of whatever legal structures are built, is that the system isn't just cold you know, and I think you know I'm pretty confident that the Tŝilhqot’in they do carry those values of in terms of wanting to help those in need and caring about elders and young people and wanting systems that are compassionate so I'm not overly worried but it becomes a real question about what models exist and then whether those models meet the values of the Tŝilhqot’in.” (Interviewee E). For the Tŝilhqot’in perhaps what is needed is an articulation of ownership not necessarily in reference to common-law private property models which already exist, but rather through an exploration of how the enactment of Indigenous laws, traditions and values can perform property in different ways (Blomley, 2013). Once expanded beyond orthodox notions of bounded spaces of independent ownership, property can in fact accommodate multiple logics (Mansfield, 2009). This indicates that Indigenous legal principles have much to offer to property theory and to the elaboration of new land relations rules across Tŝilhqot’in and other First Nations territories. Property rights include two fundamental components: the right to exclude others by granting or withholding permission, and the enforcement of this right by the state (Graben, 2014). Indigenous societies had complex and diverse property systems before colonial influence, many of which included inheritance mechanisms, trespass rules and sanctions, recovery of property rules, and exchange (Bobroff, 2001). Such systems included various forms of permanent or semi-169 permanent private rights in communally held land, which in some cases allowed for the accumulation of wealth (Blomley, 2014). Many of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest maintained property systems structured around a framework of stewardship and ‘contingent proprietorship’ which ensured an efficient use of land and resources (Trosper, 2009). Private property tenures however, in contrast to many traditional Indigenous property systems offer no such mechanisms for transferring land to more efficient users. This is problematic for First Nations who may not place a monetary exchange value to their land, but who do place high importance on the use of that land. This was a concern of one Tŝilhqot’in interviewee who shared their thoughts on ownership structures: “What is the purpose of having that land if they're not going to utilize what it's for? So there's no defined rules around that. I mean, really, it's like some people, they consider themselves having land, but they don't have any means or any desire to do haying for their animals or anything, they let somebody else do it. They'll take a bit of a cut or whatever, for somebody doing the hay for them, but it's a bizarre notion that somebody should have hay land and they might not have horses or cattle or anything to sort of utilize it.” (Interviewee A). Although traditional Tŝilhqot’in laws have undergone articulation exercises, little work has been carried out in terms of their practical application to the modern situation of the Tŝilhqot’in as concerns individual housing and economic development. Such efforts undoubtedly require comprehensive community engagement so as not to amount to a form of cultural-legal tokenism. For example, although the Nisga'a have stated that their traditional system of land ownership 170 forms the basis of land governance, Graben points out that there is little in the public record regarding Nisga'a traditions on property and there is little clarity on how such traditional laws would interact with statutory Nisga’a laws, which have now been constructed under the common law (2014). Nascent work by scholars of Indigenous legal orders offer promise. Hanna (2015) for example, attempts to articulate and make cognizable to the common law several well-known Tŝilhqot’in stories. In doing so Hanna demonstrates how the story of D’tan can be interpreted as a Tŝilhqot’in law which requires that the present holder of land protect it from being wasted away before the next holder can enjoy it. This interpretation is consistent with Chief Justice Lamers ruling in SCC about allowable land uses on title lands, and also can perhaps serve as a guiding legal principle in the establishment of individual-use land relation rules on title lands and within the broader emerging Tŝilhqot’in jurisdictional area. Napoleon (2015) similarly examines the records of elder interviews included in the Tŝilhqot’in Legal Traditions Report to articulate Tŝilhqot’in law as concerns questions of consultation and consent. In doing so she demonstrates how obligations to protect and help one's family and community and to share resources and knowledge are among the key legal obligations that bind the Tŝilhqot’in people. This legal obligation then might form the basis of a renewed land relation rule for the Tŝilhqot’in built upon sharing and reciprocity. In many contexts in fact Indigenous land laws which have been well articulated include the notion that ownership is subject to the principles of balance, reciprocity, respect, redistribution and sharing (Borrows, 2015a; Bryan, 2000; Egan, 2013). There is little doubt that settler-colonial conceptions of property and the values and social obligations that accompany them continue to influence the ways in which First Nations peoples now relate to the land and to one another (Nadasdy, 2002). It is worth recalling my experience at 171 a TNG housing forum workshop that was focused on the ‘true costs’ of housing, where the guest speaker who happened to be a consultant for the First Nations Market Housing Fund, was insistent that First Nations will never solve their housing issues if they continue to not evict their members who are delinquent on rent. Other governments, they claimed, do not provide housing subsidies and they do not have to shift budgets around to accommodate delinquent renters. In other jurisdictions people MUST pay rent to live in a home, the speaker insisted (TNG Housing Forum, Aug 27-29, 2019). This hallmark of Western common-law - which understands landlord-tenant relationships strictly as market transactions reliant on a certain level of disinterest between the two parties - was touted as an exemplary principle that needed to be adopted by First Nations. The inability of any First Nations communities to evict their members and citizens was portrayed as a weakness or a flaw that holds First Nations back from improving their housing situations, and ultimately their economies. While understanding the true-costs of housing is important, equally important is that such costs are weighed against the benefits of a culture of care, solidarity, and reciprocity. Hence, the decision by First Nations not to evict people from their homes can be understood as a choice to perform property in new ways. Rather than as an institutional failure, opting to not evict people can be an institutional strength representative of a certain social embeddedness, accountability and ethics that is lacking in societies governed by the strict rules of private property and landlord-tenancy rules of the common-law. Indeed, Ezra Rosser argues that the close kinship ties between Navajo peoples lessen the effects of reservation poverty, ensuring that the haves always help the have nots, and that this mutual assistance is the most important tribal institution related to land (2005). 172 The Tŝilhqot’in, like other First Nations are now embedded in the broader economy and are pursuing a path of ‘economic sustainability’ to achieve their goals (TNG Economic Development Forum, Jan 20-21, 2020). To do so inevitably requires access to financing and loans for business investment and housing, often from non-Indigenous providers. To engage such providers First Nations tend to succumb to a governmentality, characterized by the adoption of common-law institutions of private property that will allow for the certainty that such providers desire (Woolford, 2002). However, the default to common-law structures perhaps speaks more to the influence of the settler-colonial structure on First Nations governance than it does to the lack of ‘other’ options. Through renewed powers of territorial self-governance and jurisdiction resulting from the Tŝilhqot’in title decision, there is now the opportunity to look beyond the common-law and its liberal institutions. After all, the courts have made clear that Aboriginal title emerges from inherent Indigenous law, which in many ways makes Aboriginal title stronger and more definitive than fee simple (Pasternak, 2015). Although in certain cases it can be infringed as like any other form of property including fee-simple, it cannot be expropriated and it cannot be taxed (Coates and Gibson 2014). With the certainty of title on their side, the Tŝilhqot’in can now engage in the much needed process of law articulation. And, as Borrows tells us, Indigenous laws can hold the space for diverse arrangements that could amount to a form of private property interest that would provide the type of certainty required by financial providers, if only we enable those laws to perform (Borrows, 2015a). Today, The Puebla of Isleta tribe in New Mexico has a modern dispute resolution system for issues such as the inheritance of family homes, partitioning of lands, set-back restrictions on property, etc., all of which rely on traditional legal principles in decision making (Bobroff, 173 2001). Similarly the Navajo have extensive property rights systems which recognize historic and ongoing customary use and which mediate conflicts through Navajo courts and legal institutions that are driven by egalitarian relationships and solidarity (Bobroff, 2001; Yazzie, 1994). Some of the ways in which other Indigenous communities across North America have been innovating with regard to financing includes the Four Directions Development Corporation in the United States which has developed a means to foreclose on mortgages on Penobscot Tribal lands without alienating land to noncitizens by utilizing a group of trustees (tribal citizens and board members) to take title of the customer's real estate upon default (Carpenter and Riley, 2019). Such a model can include many variations where the collective takes responsibility for mortgage defaults, thereby ensuring land remains in the hands of the Nation (Stephenson, 2010). Another example includes a mutual housing association non-profit cooperative corporation model, where housing is financed through capital grants rather than mortgage debt, and where modest down payments and affordability standardized monthly charges are put into safe investments and returned to the residents with interest once they move out. This supports wealth creation while separating it from home ownership, and eliminates the need to take on debt and risk foreclosure (Stone, 2009). The efforts of several of the Tŝilhqot’in communities including Xeni Gwet’in and Yuneŝit’in demonstrate potential pathways toward institutional innovations which build on the collective values of Tŝilhqot’in law, where iterations of the above models might be practiced: “I mean the location of housing that's important to the members - the ability to put housing where they want. In the past INAC has always wanted them in residential 174 developments, tight residential developed neighborhoods and Xeni has resisted for a number of reasons. It just doesn't fit with the culture. So, having now the ability to put houses wherever they want is a good thing. The only problem is the cost of course. Typically, they put housing in clusters, family clusters, that seems to work best. And then those clusters are fed by energy networks, water networks septic fields with the water and the power seems to be little branches.” (Interviewee C) The idea of family clusters, it was explained to me by several Tŝilhqot’in leaders, is not only for infrastructural reasons as described above, but also to re-build kin-based support networks in relation to housing and livelihoods more broadly.11 The rationale is that as First Nations bands seek to lessen the dependence of members on government services, such collective support networks that are strongest with the extended family offer opportunities for new forms of solidarity subsistence economies, including potentially housing construction and finance, housing maintenance and repairs, and even everyday materials and sustenance provision. 5.6 Conclusion The legacy of settler-colonialism and its well rooted assimilative apparatus, now manifest most potently through neoliberal assumptions, has and continues to impose upon First Nations the priorities of individual property rights, competitive market-based development and economic growth (Dempsey et al., 2011; MacDonald, 2011). Isolated voices of resistance and calls for an institutional ‘other’ are inevitably drowned out by a dominant narrative which rationalizes First 11 personal communication, anonymous, Jan 21, 2020 175 Nations compliance with the common-law and market-capitalism as a requirement of socio-economic amelioration and well-being within First Nations communities. This narrative continues to pressure First Nations operating under the Indian Act, the First Nations Land Management Act, modern treaties, and other agreements being negotiated under the auspices of ‘reconciliation’. Yet, the settler-colonial project has never fully succeeded in the sense that land and Indigenous people’s relationship to land remains inalienable (Brown, 2014). Collective interests continue to be valued, if not prioritized by First Nations, exercised through the practicing of social economies based on norms of trust and reciprocity (Rauna Kuokkanen, 2011; Panelli and Tipa, 2007). In recognizing Tŝilhqot’in title, the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed the existence and relevance of a Tŝilhqot’in legal order which governs the relationship that Tŝilhqot’in people have with their lands, with each other, and with outsiders. The challenge now remains for the Tŝilhqot’in to articulate and enact these laws in order to fill the jurisdictional void that has been created by the title decision and its subsequent agreements. Doing so requires an active awareness of and resistance against the type of governmentality that allows settler-colonial institutions to take hold and guide First Nations governments and individuals toward pathways amenable to the needs of capital. This paper has attempted to contribute to that awareness and resistance by highlighting the hegemony of liberal property and the common law, by interrogating property’s assumptions and logics, and by demonstrating how the Tŝilhqot’in and First Nations people more broadly can perform property differently. In doing so, we have suggested that the formalization of customary structures, practices and land relation rules is needed not to unlock the ‘capital’ hidden within property, but rather to create the stability needed 176 for the advancement of diverse socio-economic, cultural and ecological goals. For the Tŝilhqot’in and other First Nations, extricating themselves from the institutional framework of settler-colonialism is not only integral to the process of decolonization, self-determination, and cultural survival, but also a strategic move as they seek to resolve issues of housing, socio-economic disparity, and overall individual and community well-being. As a conclusion we should be reminded that property is not a thing but a series of responsibilities and obligations to one another which structure the social-environmental contract. Even common law property systems once interrogated deeply, are understood to involve interdependence and obligations (Mansfield, 2009). Orthodox property theory has neglected this aspect of property, prioritizing instead the primacy of individual rights and wealth accumulation, manipulating the power of property to serve as a shield against humanity’s social welfare requirements. In building an institutional framework based on social embeddedness, care and reciprocity between people and land, the Tŝilhqot’in can not only fulfill the promise of Indigenous cultural-ecological resilience and resurgence, but can also perhaps demonstrate to an increasingly atomized settler-colonial society, new and valuable ways of performing property. 177 Chapter 6: Conclusion In early 2020, I was invited to attend an economic development forum led by the Tŝilhqot’in National Government (TNG) over a period of two days in William’s Lake. Most of the main staff from TNG were in attendance, as were the representatives from each of the six Tŝilhqot’in communities, including some Chiefs, band managers, councilors, and those involved in economic development projects and initiatives. I was not sure what to expect from the forum. I wondered if the projects, ideas and imagined economic futures of the Tŝilhqot’in people would reflect the type of sustainable economies to which they and so many other First Nations are often associated. I wondered if their persistent resistance to the Taseko Mine project was representative of the broader sentiment toward industrial resource extraction across the Nation. I wondered if my own preconceptions about what an Indigenous economic future might entail would be challenged, or affirmed. At the end of the forum, the answers to those ponderings remained unclear. The economic future being imagined by the Tŝilhqot’in is one of diversity, of ambiguity, of a lack of conformity to any one economic path that I, or other scholars or practitioners, might have tried to situate them within. It was as if everyone present was careful not to advance an ‘industrial’ agenda, just as much as they avoided words like ‘conservation’ or ‘sustainable’. This was not surprising considering the loaded meanings these terms have taken on. Yet, this avoidance was not the result of some sort of trepidation about saying the wrong thing. It was more, in my mind, a reflection of confidence, of a distinct economic future that everyone in the room envisioned but was not necessarily sure how to articulate. A new economic future that represented not an 178 obedience or reaction to colonial or capitalist pressures, but rather an economy of a (re)emerging Nation, made tangible through recognized title to their lands. And that was the reminder of Chief Russell Myers-Ross during the opening ceremony, noting that it was big industry and capitalism that attempted to destroy the Tŝilhqot’in , and that they should look to the future by drawing upon the traditional and the hybrid economy. He used the example of how Indigenous people used to spend a part of their time working in mills and a part of their time on the land. It was a point, I believe, that reinforced the idea that it isn’t necessarily the ‘type’ of economic activity being practiced that makes something Indigenous, but rather the values, principles and governing practices surrounding that activity. That is, it reiterated the central argument underlying this dissertation, that the economic futures of First Nations groups are contingent upon the institutions which structure them. 6.1 Findings and Implications It is a fair statement that all First Nations groups in British Columbia are now influenced in one way or another by settler-colonialism, capitalism and the institutional frameworks that sustains these structures and processes. Prescriptions for economic and institutional development within First Nations communities continue to prioritize economic growth, liberal property rights, and market-based approaches to material well-being. The failure to enact these institutions in complete conformity is posited by some as the main causal factor in the continued destitution of far too many First Nations people. Conversely, a complete embracing of such institutions, or any kind of engagement with them, is viewed by many as detrimental to the very meaning of what it means to be Indigenous and representative of a certain ‘co-optation’ (Lightfoot, 2020). Yet, 179 rather than fully succumbing to the institutional logics of settler-colonialism, or fully denying them, this dissertation has demonstrated how the values and norms sustained through Indigenous social economic practices and human-land relational ontologies is evidence of an institutional and economic ‘other’ that holds promise as a framework of governance for First Nations groups moving forward. Through the lens of ‘counter-institutionalizing’ I have highlighted the innovative and diverse ways in which First Nations are addressing often competing rationalities that have arisen through the pressures of settler-colonialism. Such counter-institutional practices, I have argued, can serve to mediate First Nation-Crown relations while also more profoundly transforming the structures and processes which dictate the nature of production, allocation, and distribution of resources within First Nations communities. At once there are First Nations groups who are engaging with the Crown and with capital in creative ways, leveraging their constitutional rights in order to strengthen their ability to self-govern their territories and enact their visions for economic futures. Through a focus on counter-institutionalizing, I have demonstrated how First Nations groups must take a cautious line so as to resist a certain acquiescence to the compelling logics of liberal property, capitalism and the common-law, and to avoid a loss of some of the foundational principles of their worldviews (Nadasdy, 2017). There are also First Nations groups who are more wary of state and corporate structured negotiations which they see as ‘precluding’ certain economic and institutional outcomes. Instead, such groups assert their own self-determined frameworks of well-being which are constituted irrespective of the Crown. Deeper counter-institutional practices of this kind face their own challenges, as they must function, remain intact, and indeed survive within an otherwise hegemonic setter-colonial structure that has penetrated deeply into the lives of 180 Indigenous peoples and that functions by ensuring compliance with capital through often subversive governmentalities (Woolford, 2002). My goal has been to critically investigate these differing approaches, while also locating within them instances and opportunities for First Nations groups to increasingly enact their self-determined visions for territorial self-governance and economic futures. That is, this work has sought to both take heed of the warning of scholars critical of the pitfalls of dominant institutional pathways of self-determination existing for First Nations (Alfred, 2009; Coulthard, 2014; Kuokkanen, 2019b), while also recognizing the value and hope of more pragmatic approaches underlying the institutional and economic strategies of many First Nations groups today (Iversen and Caine, 2017; Slowey, 2008). In doing so, I hope that this dissertation has taken up the task posed by Burrows and Tully to move beyond what have become polarizing concepts of reconciliation and resurgence, instead turning “critique into construction” (2018: 5). The main contribution of this dissertation has been the elaboration of a counter-institutionalizing framework which allows for an analysis of First Nations’ engagements within and outside of colonial and corporate institutions that is at once critical and generative. I have done so in an effort to respond to what I know are the on-the-ground realities of the many First Nations communities with whom I have worked, who are actively attempting to improve their situations, materially or otherwise, in ways that do not betray their values. I believe that this work sheds important light on the institutional and economic practices and opportunities that are otherwise neglected by predominant scholarly analyses which largely render either/or presuppositions about First Nations opportunities for self-determination within a settler-colonial institutional framework. That is, following Lightfoot I have sought to sought to push back against the 181 pessimism traps found in much of critical Indigenous theory (2020), by highlighting the pragmatic strategies and relationships of transformative reconciliation that are empowered by robust practices of resurgence (Borrows and Tully, 2018). While I acknowledge that the determinism of institutions is sometimes exaggerated by institutional scholars (Granovetter, 2017), one of the central assumptions of this dissertation has been that institutions have considerable impact on socio-economic and cultural-ecological outcomes within First Nations communities. Much of my thinking to this end has arisen from the vast body of institutional literature, including in particular new institutional economics (NIE), which understands institutions as the most critical causal factor of economic change and growth. However, the economic and transactional efficiency imperatives inherent in this body of thought have failed to leave space for understandings of how institutions can also, or perhaps conversely, facilitate the socialization of alternative values including those related to equity, reciprocity, solidarity and sustainability. The examples of counter-institutionalization that I have advanced within this dissertation have sought to open up that space of inquiry. I recognize that such an approach welcomes critiques from post-structural leaning scholars which whom I also rely heavily as a part of this work. For example, for Gibson-Graham there exists no social commonality or blueprint that lays out the rules and norms of ‘being communal’ and as such the development of livelihoods-based social economies appears to lack form or ‘structure’, and can be seen as intentionally and inherently un-institutionalized (Gibson-Graham, 2008). Instead, they argue for a greater recognition of the economic spaces or networks that can be constructed across multiple scales, in which relations of interdependence are democratically 182 negotiated by participating individuals and organizations (Gibson-Graham, 2006b). Similarly for some Indigenous scholars, what is critical for Indigenous self-determination are the individual efforts of Indigenous peoples to break away from colonial (and capitalist) dependencies to rebuild relations and re-connect with each other, with their homelands, cultures, and communities, often through every day acts of resistance (Alfred, 2009; Corntassel, 2012; Kuokkanen, 2019b). I believe that the counter-institutionalizing framework advanced within this dissertation accommodates these positions and allows for a co-constitutive understanding of structure and agency, where individual forms of resistance are accompanied by organized structures which support them (Büscher and Fletcher, 2019). In many ways, acts of counter-institutionalization are akin to acts and processes of self-determination. However, framing these through the lens of institutionalism helps to move beyond the abstractions and controversies associated with self-determination (i.e., reconciliation vs. resurgence), allowing for the emergence of more practical pathways toward strengthened territorial self-governance that will continue to be of benefit to First Nations. This has been of particular importance to me as I have sought to produce results that can translate into meaningful action and projects of governance for First Nations partners. Further, in considering how institutional forces are a dynamic at play in the ability or not of First Nations groups to address their self-determined goals for economic futures, the counter-institutional framework provides a much needed engagement with power in institutional research (Lawrence, 2008). Power is a variable that is often neglected by structural accounts of the economy. Institutional development scholars rarely discuss power, equity or other cultural-ecological well-being related outcomes, focusing instead on the rule of law, private property rights, pro-market reforms and transaction 183 cost efficiencies for the purpose of economic growth (Kashwan et al., 2019). The multiple case studies detailed within this dissertation offers a contribution to critical institutional theory which accommodates analyses and considerations of power (Cleaver, 2015). And, by framing this dissertation through the lens of counter-institutionalizing, I have offered a framework for understanding institutional and economic change within the context of First Nations challenges against hegemonic structures, where alternatives to power-laden ideas of ‘development’ have been revealed which enable new possibilities for organizing societies and economies (Escobar, 1992). In Chapter 2 I explored the question of whether or not the Crown referrals process in British Columbia is a space of institutionalized engagement that serves well the ability of First Nations groups to improve self-determination and territorial self-governance. My findings suggested that despite the many challenges and inherent injustices in the processes surrounding the duty to consult and accommodate, constitutionally empowered First Nations groups are finding ways to reshape institutional engagement processes, and in the best of cases developmental outcomes within their territories. Although critical scholars are correct to point out that rights-based ‘recognition’ modes of institutional engagement result in truncated forms of self-determination which undermine Indigenous values and principles (Coulthard, 2014; Nadasdy, 2017), this chapter suggests that such outcomes are not an inevitability. Rather, through empirical examples I demonstrate how First Nations are working within the confines of settler-colonial and corporate institutional frameworks in order to both incrementally as well as more fundamentally alter institutional engagements in support of their own values and development aspirations. That is, much as Lightfoot points out within international political fora, Indigenous peoples have utilized 184 well both the human rights framework and its accompanying discourses because of their demonstrated ability to affect change (Lightfoot, 2020). I have sought to explain First Nations use of the referrals system in a similar vein. This observation is crucial within the context of British Columbia, where outstanding land claims cover much of the provincial territory, and where the consultation and accommodation process remains a significant source of leverage and strength for First Nations. As First Nations groups continue to draw from this source of influence within their territories, this chapter has contributed to an understanding and awareness of the ways in which they can do so without fully acquiescing into governmentalities which restrict their economic options into the future. Chapter 3 addressed some of the internal institutional challenges that First Nations groups face as they seek to implement economic activities that can fulfill their individual and collective goals for well-being, both economic and extra-economic. Through an examination of First Nations community sawmill enterprises (FNCSEs), this chapter engages with some of the organizational implications for First Nations enterprises as they deal with the sectoral demands brought by a commercial ‘productivist’ paradigm of forestry. More specifically, through the context of forestry within the territories of First Nations groups, the chapter sought to render visible the ways in which dominant institutional prescriptions continue to shape the logics within First Nations enterprises. What emerged was a clear example of how First Nations enterprises face the dual mission of achieving financial sustainability and social value creation, making it a useful case study to understand how First Nations social enterprises bridge institutional fields and address conflicting institutional logics (Doherty et al., 2014). Hence, this chapter provided a much needed empirical contribution to social entrepreneurship research (Dacin et al., 2011; Short 185 et al., 2009). The key observation of this chapter was that despite various efforts and strategies, there is a strong indication that FNCSEs, and similar entities will never be able to fully reconcile competing logics within the confines of engagement within the institutional framework of settler-colonialism, including its businesses, financial institutions, and governments. The implication of this is that First Nations seeking economic and institutional self-determination must continue a process of Indigenous institutional building in the broadest sense, such that organizations such as FNCSEs have access to institutional referents whose demands conform more closely to the diverse goals of First Nations communities and individuals. In Chapter 4 I asked the questions: What frameworks of socially-embedded ethical decision making can enable communities to begin to think of productive forestry processes as responsive to the satisfaction of basic material needs? What innovations are needed within First Nations communities in order to reimagine relations and negotiations of interdependence and mutual reliance between end-users and producers? To answer these questions I examined the ‘forest to frame’ concept of Yunesit’in First Nation. At face value this concept is about First Nations communities resolving quality, quantity and local-value shortcomings in housing through the utilization of territorial forest resources as well as local skills, labour and knowledge. However, through the lens of the diverse economy (Gibson-Graham, 2008), what the chapter reveals is that such efforts and practices (in their many variants) actually represent deeper projects of counter-institutionalizing through social innovation, where First Nations communities are attempting to creatively reformulate relations of production and distribution in order to satisfy basic needs (Moulaert, 2008). I demonstrated how different First Nations communities are navigating (often in latent ways) complex sites of decision-making related to (de) commodification, needs and 186 surpluses, quality and design, and rules of (in) commensurability. Examining each of these sites of decision-making offer important insights into the strategies and dilemmas that exist as First Nations seek to resolve not only housing but also broader issues related to well-being. As such, a key contribution of this chapter is that it brings to the foreground not only theoretical but also practical connections between otherwise disparate activities and initiatives related to social-economic and cultural-ecological resilience. The hope is that the ideas explored within this chapter will continue to inform First Nations land use plans and broader goals for territorial self-governance. Finally, in chapter 5, I offered a theoretical analysis of what I suggest is the deepest form of counter-institutionalizing: The creation of Indigenous property. Specifically, I argue that the Tŝilhqot’in, empowered by Aboriginal title, have an unprecedented opportunity to create ‘land relation rules’ within emerging jurisdictions which respond foremost to Tŝilhqot’in legal principles and values. This chapter critically engages with dominant narratives which offer as the solution to resolving housing and economic disparity within First Nations communities the formation of institutional structures that are amenable to, and reflective of liberal private property. By pursuing such prescriptions, I argue, First Nations risk creating property institutions which view land as an inanimate economic asset, thereby restricting them from fulfilling their relationships with land and with each other. By suggesting a practical framework and pathway for the enactment of land relation rules for the Tŝilhqot’in, this chapter makes a critical institutional link to theories of Indigenous self-determination which view human-land relational ontologies (Alfred and Corntassel, 2013; Corntassel, 2012), and territorial integrity (Kuokkanen, 2019b), as imperative. Thus, the key contribution of this chapter is that it offers an alternative 187 institutional pathway for First Nations who require the stability of property, without its colonial-capitalist entailments. And, should the Tŝilhqot’in or any other First Nation group pursue this path, the implications will be unprecedented. It will mean the realization of a multi-juridical post-colonial Canadian state, and the diversity of economic futures which that entails. 6.2 Limitations "The challenge is not to produce better or more accurate reflections of what is going on in the world out there, but to be more attuned to the epistemological and ethical decisions involved in our choice of representations and the material effects of the discourses we produce."(Roelvink et al., 2015: 196) My aim in this dissertation has been to bring to light some of the institutional and economic ‘others’ that do exist within and outside of dominant settler-colonial and capitalist frameworks. I recognize however, that the multiple studies contributing to this work offer but a glimpse of the diverse institutional and economic realities and opportunities for First Nations in British Columbia and beyond. I am also cognizant of the apparent ‘aspirational nature’ of my representations, which to some may be perceived as inapplicable within other contexts, at broader scales, or in the ‘real world’. Early on in my academic career I made the choice to pursue a path of ethical praxis, and to break down the divide between idealism and feasibility that plagues the practical application of theory. Reinforcing my position were the ideas of academics like Gibson-Graham (2012) who reminded me of my role as an academic in constituting the 188 worlds that exist and that, through research and discourse, I have the power to bring new worlds into existence. I am also quite aware that many more critical scholars may reject some of the arguments that I have put forward here. My thesis does not fully support, for example, the argument that First Nations are only or primarily burdened with becoming ‘state like’ (Nadasdy, 2017). Moreover, my position challenges the compelling suggestion that the only economy evident in Indigenous communities is a kind of neoliberal multiculturalism that can support ‘projectism’ but not a sui-generis or hybrid economy (Hale, 2005). Such arguments, in my mind, are also incomplete to the extent that there is a plethora of examples that evidence the kinds of emerging economies and strategic institutional practices that First Nations groups are producing and enabling. And they are generating these despite the very deep and often intransigent role of the state or capitalism more broadly. And so I reiterate as a part of my conclusion that such critiques are valid only to the extent that they do not ignore the institutional and related phenomena that represent deep intentional thinking and experimentation going on within First Nations communities throughout British Columbia. In structuring my research primarily around the Indigenous research method of relationality (Kuokkanen, 2019b), my focus was primarily on creating and nurturing strong relationships which provided for in-depth contextual understandings. The limitation of this approach meant less representation in terms of the numbers of people with whom I was able to formally interview. This was particularly the case with both Yunesit’in First Nation and the Tŝilhqot’in. I 189 was aware at the onset of conducting my research that the Tŝilhqot’in people were very much over-researched, and there was and remains a general sentiment of ‘interview fatigue’ within the communities and amongst members. My reluctance to exacerbate this condition led me to focus on nurturing relationships with staff and leaders within the communities who were more eager to engage with me on a continual basis. Although my long term relationship with the communities as a whole have provided me with a strong contextual understanding, the limitations of my approach certainly meant that individual divergent views and opinions were lost. Further, it would be remiss of me to not point out that prior to concluding my study, the COVID-19 global pandemic struck, forcing the effective closure of First Nations communities. While I was able to continue with some interviews over phone and virtually, many of the individuals with whom I had hoped to engage were preoccupied with ensuring the safety of their communities, limiting my ability to reach them. It is important to reemphasize in this conclusion that much of my dissertation relies not only on interviews, but also on the triangulation of observations, informal conversations, meeting notes and reviews of community documents and reports carried out as a part of my work as a practitioner with First Nations partners. Although the number of interviews in some of the studies was relatively small, I believe that the exploratory nature of my work justified these numbers. In Chapter 5 for example, I came into the interview stage with a strong understanding of the institutional challenges that the Tŝilhqot’in faced in relation to property and ownership around housing. My conversations and meetings with the Yunesit’in government as a part of work I was doing through Ecotrust Canada in support of developing a housing strategy with Yunesit’in revealed an ambiguity in relation to ownership, and a desire for clear rules. This is 190 also what I heard through my participation in a Nation-level housing forum comprised of leaders and members from all six Tŝilhqot’in communities. Hence, that chapter became less about drawing concrete conclusions about what property means for the Tŝilhqot’in, but rather it became an exercise in providing an analysis of the legal-jurisdictional challenges the Tŝilhqot’in are facing, which I already understood going into the interviews, and then making some suggestions on an alternative pathway. In all of the other chapters, each of which relied on varying numbers of interviews and other anecdotal information, my aim was not to make statistical generalizations, but to make real through research and discourse, instances of economic and institutional others. This is what really makes this research performative, Indigenous action-based. 6.3 Future Research Directions The counter-institutional framework emerging from this work offers an important platform for the direction of future research concerned with the economic and institutional futures of First Nations groups. Broadly, there is a need for further place-based research which identifies indicators of individual and collective well-being. This in turn requires further work on understanding how these indicators can be applied to social-economic and cultural-ecological activities and entities which form the basis of community strategies for economic futures. Underlying such inquiries inevitably requires further elucidation of the ways in which dominant institutional logics, which influence cognitive evaluative frameworks, are shaping First Nations individuals, organizations and governance entities. 191 There also remain questions related to the articulation, enactment and assertion of Indigenous laws. How can these be meaningfully integrated into territorial decision making processes, particularly in areas of co-management or co-jurisdiction? How can Indigenous laws continue to be articulated and made cognizable to the common-law without being subsumed by it? Moreover, although Indigenous laws have undergone articulation exercises in various contexts, little work has been carried out in terms of their practical application to the modern situation of First Nations groups as concerns housing and economic development. There is a need, for example, for applied critical institutional research to consider how First Nations might reconcile the ‘stability’ inherent in their own laws and values (particularly as concerns land relations) with modern instruments such as mortgages and insurance. Although the logics inherent in these instruments might be found to be incompatible with modern articulations of Indigenous norms and laws, simply dismissing them as such without further investigation would be negligent. 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Are there any other ways that you imagine success, what would that look like? 5. How would you describe basic needs versus wants in your community? 6. How has title changed the way you think about economic development? What about housing? 7. Do you think about your Nation’s territory or title as property or is there a better way to think about it? In what way is it or is it not property? 8. Do you believe that community members should own their homes? a. How would you define ownership? b. How should homes be allocated or passed on, who should decide? 9. What factors have the most influence on people getting a house and maintaining a house? a. Does the community charge rent? If so, how much and what are the determinants for rent? b. What is the system for assessing applications for housing? E.g. is there a ‘scoring’ system? 10. What is the most important factor for improving housing in your community? 231 11. How would you describe the connection between your Nation’s lands and housing? How about between lands and economic development? 12. More broadly, do you see housing as a possible piece of culturally appropriate community economic development? Why or why not? 13. How do you see the various communities collaborating on issues relating to land? Housing? Economic development? Is this important? 14. How do you think revenues should be distributed at the Nation level, the community level? Household level, individual level? 232 Appendix B Interview script for sawmill experts 1. Why did the Nation decide to start operating a sawmill? 2. How is the sawmill enterprise structured or supported in these early stages? (ie. band-owned? Ec.dev. corporation?), is there an advantage to either? 3. What would you describe as the primary and secondary purpose of the sawmill enterprise? 4. Does the sawmill have a role as concerns providing revenue to the nation? To individual members? 5. Where does the mill gets its logs? How? Is the supply consistent or not? Why? 6. Does the sawmill provide any products for local housing or other construction needs? 7. If no, where do construction materials for local housing come from? 8. What are the primary markets for the sawmill? Where does most of your timber end up? 9. What role could the sawmill play as concerns local housing needs? Is this feasible? Should that happen? Why or why not? What would make you want to support such an initiative, or not support? 10. Would you say that the sawmill has succeeded so far? Why? What has enabled or hindered success? How does the Nation define success? 11. Is it easy to find/train employees? How are you able to retain employees? Does the Nation look to hire local only, other Indigenous communities? Settlers? 233 Appendix C List of Interview Participant Information (Chapters 3-4) Interviewee Position Gender Indigenous 1 Consultant Male No 2 Band Counsellor Male Yes 3 Consultant Male No 4 Forestry Manager Male No 5 Sawmill manager Male No 6 Ec. Dev Officer Male Yes 7 Ec. Dev Officer Female Yes 8 Band Counsellor Male Yes 9 Band Manager Female Yes 10 Ec. Dev Officer Male No 11 Asset Manager Male Yes 12 Sawmill Manager Male Yes 13 Sawmill Manager Male No 14 Band Counsellor Male Yes 15 Consultant Male No 16 Sawmill Manager Male Yes 17 Sawmill Manager Female No 18 Consultant Male No 234 List of Interview Participant Information (Chapter 5) Interviewee Position Gender Indigenous A Chief Male Yes B Band Manager Male No C Consultant Male No D Band Counsellor Female Yes E Land and Resources Manager Male No F Band Counsellor Male Yes G Consultant Male No H Housing Manager Male Yes J Band Counsellor Male Yes
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Resources, Environment and Sustainability
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Counter-institutionalization and the economic futures of First Nations in British Columbia
Text