It started with drinking water around 30 years ago. A solar-powered electric pump drew water from the arid earth. Then came a tourism business with eco-camping that showcased the rugged countryside and a family-run bush-food plantation of quandong, a desert peach. They have 1,000 quandong trees, and the entire operation – from irrigation to sorting – is solar powered.

“For our family personally, renewables have been about us reclaiming our rights and living on country and being economically independent,” says Croker, a member of the Luritja Nation.

This is not generally the case in Australia, where Aboriginal people make up 3.8% of the population and struggle to assert a whole host of rights. That’s visible through the energy choices available to them: diesel generators that power larger Aboriginal communities spew noxious fumes in the middle of their towns, while transmission lines from large-scale renewable-energy projects bypass them en route to powering wealthier cities. With Australia setting ambitious goals to make its power supply 82% renewable by 2030, Croker set out to create an organization that would help advocate for a just energy transition – one that did not leave Aboriginal people out, nor leave them with meager scraps.

His research brought him to Canada, where Indigenous communities are the largest asset holders of clean energy projects after utility companies and the Crown. There, he found Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE), a not-for-profit organization that has been building capacity and expertise around clean energy and how to make it a tool for Indigenous sovereignty since 2016. Croker was attracted to ICE’s approach, which “turned the power dynamic on its head, having initiatives and government policy to be First Nations–led, which is the opposite of what we have in Australia.”

There are more than 200 renewable-energy projects – hydro, wind, solar and bioenergy – that have Indigenous participation in Canada, according to a report released by ICE in 2022. That includes sole ownership, co-ownership and defined financial benefits. Since 2017, the number of medium and large Indigenous clean energy projects has jumped by almost 30%. Hydro accounts for the biggest share (56.5%), followed by wind (22.9%), solar (11.8%), bioenergy (7.1%) and hybrid projects (1.7%). Small, community-scale energy systems dot the country. In April, the Ulkatcho First Nation in British Columbia announced it will construct the largest off-grid solar farm in the country, a $30-million project that will generate up to 70% of the electricity the community needs and dramatically reduce its diesel use, and in the process sell its energy to BC Hydro.

All of this is the result of decades of work going back to the early 2000s, when communities began pushing into the energy space, negotiating co-ownership of projects on ancestral lands and winning legal battles rooted in treaty rights that established that projects should include financial benefits for Indigenous communities. In 2019, ICE was officially incorporated as an independent organization. It has run several iterations of its Catalysts program, an intensive capacity-building program that gives participants the tools to make clean energy projects a reality, connecting them with coaches and mentors that address everything from energy planning to conservation and business management.

In 2020, ICE launched its Global Hub, intending to take its body of knowledge abroad to help other Indigenous Peoples with similar challenges.

“The lessons learned from so-called Canada we can share with our Indigenous kin around the world,” says Global Hub manager Daphne Kay, who is from Cowessess First Nation, on Treaty 4 Territory in Saskatchewan. “It’s not a silver bullet, it’s not a one size fits all, and our nation-to-nation relationship is about learning from each other.”

Australia was ICE’s first foray. It acted as a sister organization for the First Nations Clean Energy Network that Croker co-launched with Karrina Nolan, a Yorta Yorta woman. The organizations co-designed a PowerMakers program that led 32 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through training that included community engagement, fair partnership agreements, ownership models and policy negotiation. Croker says Australia is behind Canada when it comes to inclusion. The First Nations Clean Energy Network has tallied 15 energy projects with Aboriginal participation. While specific differences make progress more difficult – Aboriginal Peoples in Australia do not have treaty rights, for example – learnings around how to advocate with policy-makers have been instrumental, Croker says. “They helped us mobilize and organize.”

ICE’s work has also stretched into the Global South, to Colombia, where a delegation visited two Indigenous groups this year: a Cofán community in the southern department of Nariño and a Muisca community in the department of Boyacá, near the capital of Bogotá.

“We’ve been talking about decolonizing power and what doing decolonial support for our kin means,” says Freddie Huppé Campbell, ICE’s director of energy and climate and a Michif woman from the Ktunaxa Kinbasket territory, in British Columbia, who visited Colombia with Kay upon the invitation of the two communities. Part of that is moving outside of the colonial spaces of government and aid organizations and into territories, visiting homes and meeting families. Aura Balanta, an Afro Colombian activist and artist who helped guide the ICE delegation with a group called Grassroots Movement of Movements, calls it an exercise in “ancestral diplomacy.” It included ceremonies, exchanging gifts and listening to one another.

“Developing those kinds of connections with kin is unheard of, and it shouldn’t be,” Campbell says. “It felt really powerful.”

Balanta says ICE is the first organization she has come across that is approaching the green transition in this way. She hopes ICE can help Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s government, which has stopped issuing new oil and gas contracts and is shifting the country to renewables with a lofty plan to create 20,000 “energy communities,” many on Indigenous territory.

While Petro’s government has changed the way the Colombian state considers the views of Indigenous Peoples, Balanta says important problems in the approach persist. “The communities are not seen as an actor that will lead its own processes, but as the recipient of charity,” says Balanta, who points to a government reparations program that has given families solar panels but, in the case of the Cofán community, no tools or instruction on how to make them work properly.

The transition should be about empowerment for Indigenous Peoples, Balanta says, noting they comprise 6.2% of the global population but safeguard 80% of the planet’s biodiversity. The learnings between Indigenous communities go both ways, Campbell and Kay stress.

“Even though for us clean energy is a bridge to asserting our sovereignty, to being leaders in this space, to building systems that work for us and are in a different way, in the [Global] South things look very different,” says Campbell, who observed a greater connection to the earth in the communities the ICE delegation visited, and less consumer-driven societies. As a result, some Indigenous people she and Kay spoke with don’t necessarily feel they need to participate in the energy transition.

“It wasn’t until we started talking about the realm of what’s possible, how you can benefit in multiple intersectional ways from energy projects, that it became of interest to [these communities],” Kay says.

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Twelve years ago, 16 B.C. First Nations came together to purchase an equity stake in the Pacific Trail Pipeline. The pipe was set to weave through ecologically sensitive rivers, lakes and valleys that the nations had stewarded for millennia prior to contact. The proposed project would have pumped one billion cubic feet per day of gas from the province’s interior of Summit Lake to the Pacific Ocean in the port of Kitimat, British Columbia.

When those 16 nations went to the bank for financing, they were told there was no point in trying. The interest rates would be at credit card rates, and the interest payments would outstrip any economic returns. Instead of equity ownership, the nations had to take a cash option from the pipeline deal, sacrificing a steady revenue source for the buyout.

Enbridge, the multinational energy giant, ended up purchasing the Pacific Trail Pipeline in late 2021 from its original owners, Chevron and Woodside. The purchase once again left First Nations watching as industry players profit off another major project that could run through their territories. It’s a familiar story: “Industry has been picking us apart,” Stan Houle, Chief of Whitefish Lake, says of legacy oil and gas companies in Alberta.

That failed purchase was the genesis of the First Nations Major Projects Coalition (FNMPC), Sharleen Gale and Niilo Edwards, the chair and the chief executive officer of the FNMPC, tell Corporate Knights. Many of those nations went on to push for access to financing capital to enter the resource economy that they had been excluded from since even before Confederation.

A decade later, the FNMPC has won a huge victory. The federal Indigenous loan guarantee program, announced in Budget 2024, opens up $5 billion in loan backstops for First Nation energy and natural resource projects, from pipelines and mines to solar parks and wind farms. The program, the brainchild of the FNMPC and other Indigenous leaders, ensures that interest rates remain as low as possible through Ottawa’s high credit rating, effectively giving Indigenous nations the borrowing power of a Western nation-state. Many First Nation leaders say the amount earmarked is nowhere near high enough but acknowledge that it’s a start.

There’s a lot at stake: over the next decade, Canada will see around 470 natural resource projects, both conventional and “clean economy”–related, developed at a cost of nearly $525 billion, according to the FNMPC. The energy sector alone will hover around 300 projects priced at $450 billion, by far the lion’s share of capital. For First Nations, it amounts to more than $40 billion in opportunities for Indigenous equity participation and stable revenue to develop their communities.

If money is power, then First Nations in the 21st century are slowly building power in Canada’s energy economy. But is there a hidden cost? The federal Indigenous loan guarantee program will be “sector agnostic,” meaning there are no green strings attached to possible projects, leaving First Nations pursuing clean energy mega-projects to compete with oil and gas development. The program stands in contrast to the Canada Infrastructure Bank’s Indigenous Equity Initiative, released last year, which opens up a billion dollars’ worth of loans for clean power, transit and other low-carbon projects with Indigenous participation.

For Edwards, the new loan guarantee is about the self-determination for FNMPC members to conduct business on their terms based on their own assessed risk tolerance for projects. “Whether it’s a solar farm or LNG pipeline, we’re there to support them,” he says.

But another threat looms over the investments supported by the loan guarantee: the climate crisis. How stable are investments in certain sectors as global warming boils the planet, drags out severe drought and sparks catastrophic wildfires?

In the face of the climate emergency and under pressure from environmentalists, Ottawa has committed itself to ending billions in fossil fuel subsidies – but one of the back doors it left open was Indigenous economic participation in the fossil fuel industry.

Now, up to $5 billion in federal, plus billions in provincial, guarantees are available for oil and gas development. It’s happening while the world is set to blast past 1.5°C of warming, triggering catastrophic tipping points. Those current climate projections prompted world leaders at the last UN climate summit, COP28 in Dubai, to agree to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner” to avoid the worst of climate change.

In pursuit of that equitable transition, some First Nations are looking to tap oil and gas development before it sunsets, hoping to finally convert natural resources into prosperity for their communities.

Bound for Bay Street

From the Bay Street underground tunnel in Toronto, it is a short walk through the Zellers section of the Hudson’s Bay store, past the Jamaican patty and noodle shops and shuttered fast-food stands, to reach the Sheraton conference centre.

A decade after the failed pipeline purchase, the FNMPC has set a meeting ground for First Nation leaders and Canada’s elite to network.

Leaders of industry and current and former ministers from the provinces and Parliament Hill flocked to the FNMPC’s conference in April to exchange cards, share meals and shake hands.

Bay Street, not Ottawa, may soon become the central focus for First Nations seeking to develop their lands and resources. In turn, industry can now seek equity partnerships to expedite projects and avoid the risk of First Nation opposition within lengthy court and media battles.

On day two of the conference, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland acknowledged how the loan guarantee can be an engine to hasten industrial development: “The world needs us to get more major projects built, to do them better and to do them faster,” she told the conference attendees. And it’s “Indigenous participation” that gives her confidence that Canada will achieve those aims, she explained to applause.

In the era of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the definition of the phrase “free, prior and informed consent” is still a battleground. The federal act that enshrined UNDRIP did not allow for veto power but instead more rigorous consultation. Equity partnerships may provide a solution for that struggle through a commitment to economic justice between the Crown, industry and Indigenous nations in future extraction of the land’s resources.

For the FNMPC, that equity should come as broadly as possible – including through the inclusion of Indigenous communities in the development of a greener grid that enables Canada to reach net-zero.

“Equity ownership in projects is the greatest example of consent,” says Perry Bellegarde, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations.

Bellegarde’s argument for Indigenous inclusion relies on the increased decision-making and monitoring that Indigenous-staked ownership can provide. Instead of a consultation at the environmental assessment stage, equity ownership allows for a voice throughout the life of a project to balance economic development and environmental stewardship, Bellegarde explains.

“With every opportunity comes greater responsibility to make better decisions to protect the land and waters for future generations,” he adds. “We have this great opportunity. But man, there’s a big load of responsibility now [to make] sure we don’t screw it up.”

Chasing the last oil boom

There was a time when prospective oil and gas barons flocked to Calgary – transforming Alberta’s Bible Belt legacy into a land of tar and honey. From the 1970s oil boom, more millionaires were made in Calgary than at any time before in Canadian history.

It was around that era, and in the decades after, that some First Nations began negotiating stronger revenue-sharing agreements. Maskwacis, for example, secured deep pockets in the 1970s and onwards by increasing revenue sharing from 10% to 40% for oil and 70% for gas revenues from on-reserve drilling, creating hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for future generations.

But not all First Nations struck black gold on the reserves that Ottawa confined them to.

A tailor and laundromat for Suncor was the extent of Whitefish Lake First Nation’s participation in the oil and gas industry. For more than 40 years, Whitefish Lake has owned a dry-cleaning and a fire-retardant-coverall-making company that employ around 200 band members, Chief Houle says. Meanwhile, Suncor raked in almost $23 billion in profits last year alone.

“It’s been pretty grim in Alberta,” Houle says about revenue-sharing prospects from the oil and gas industry. “We’ve been working for our money.”

Now, First Nations in the province are finally seeing profits from their lands flow into their communities. Whitefish Lake is a success story of Alberta’s loan guarantee program, which Ottawa modelled its program after. Whitefish Lake is now involved in four of the seven projects backstopped by Alberta’s loan guarantee program, all oil- and gas-related, including the new $1.5-billion Cascade gas plant.

Whitefish Lake is growing exponentially. Fifteen years ago, its hockey arena burned down, but now it’s being rebuilt as a community multiplex, containing offices, a community hall, a pharmacy and a barbershop, partly thanks to the increased revenue from the deals. The First Nation also purchased land near its reserve with the profits made from equity stakes – land that is three times the current size of the First Nation, which will house future band members as the community grows.

“When I heard the feds are going to do this, well, it’s about time,” Houle says, speaking to a desire for all First Nations to experience the economic development that Whitefish Lake has reached through Alberta’s program.

But this didn’t come easy. Whitefish and similar nations are finding economic justice because they started “doing their homework” by mapping their traditional lands used for hunting, fishing and harvesting. They also started saying no to projects, Houle explains. “When we started doing that, then started winning in courts, well, they realized we should be owners also,” he says.

With oil and profits in the province, Houle thinks Alberta nations should all be living the good life, not “living poor with poor housing, no water, no paved roads when they’re making trillions of dollars off the industry.” It’s why he’s advocating for an oil tax levy, somewhere between 50 cents and a dollar per barrel, for all First Nations in Alberta to syphon some millions of revenues from the ballooned profits of industry. Current oil prices hover over $80 a barrel.

However, time is ticking on the oil and gas era. It’s still unclear how fast the market will collapse as countries transition to renewables or other forms of energy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has projected that global oil demand will enter long-term decline before the end of the decade. Gas demand is set to peak in 2030 in all scenarios, the IEA has said, raising the thorny question of when new investments in oil and gas will become stranded assets.

That’s why Julia Levin, associate director of Environmental Defence, is wary of the federal government’s “sector-agnostic” loan guarantee. She has concerns that the industry may try to offload stranded-asset liabilities and costs onto First Nations as they seek to share the massive decommissioning costs for fossil projects. “Because of the likelihood of fossil fuel projects becoming stranded assets, fossil fuel companies are looking for a way to dump liabilities and costs onto nations,” she says.

It’s a concern that was raised by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) regarding the Trans Mountain expansion (TMX) pipeline, a contentious and beleaguered project that encountered fierce opposition from First Nations and environmental groups. The federal government purchased the pipeline from Kinder Morgan in 2018 at a cost of $4.4 billion. With oil now starting to flow, and project costs ballooning to $34 billion, the government has sought to offload the expensive piece of infrastructure. Western First Nations are hoping to purchase an equity stake to fund economic and cultural development, despite warnings from UBCIC that the pipeline risked becoming a stranded asset.

“We are concerned that the government is using TMX as another divide and conquer project and is not providing a full and accurate account of the financial future of the project,” UBCIC said in a 2022 open letter.

It’s still unclear how quickly Alberta will seek to transition its energy mix. Currently, around two-thirds of electricity is produced by “natural gas” (which is largely made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas). By 2035, projections put the electricity made by gas plants at around 40% to 50%, with the rest produced by renewables, says Jason Wang, senior electricity-grid analyst for the Pembina Institute.

Wang notes that the province’s new gas plants, which run more efficiently than the old fleet, still need to develop greenhouse gas abatement strategies, like carbon capture, to avoid cementing Canada’s dependency on emissions-intensive electricity and turning new gas plants into stranded assets. But carbon capture remains unproven and expensive – a $2.4-billion carbon capture project at an Alberta gas-fired plant was cancelled in May because of costs. These plants will need to develop plans to meet Alberta’s net-zero grid targets by 2050 given that new plants may run for decades to come.

“We want everything done right,” Houle says of oil and gas development. For one, he wants environmental monitoring conducted by First Nations themselves. It’s needed: Houle, who harvests on his family trapline, says First Nations don’t trust the province or industry, pointing to legacy spills like the Kearl oil sands spill that have gone unreported for months.

But Houle is not solely attached to developing oil and gas – he sees First Nation development of all kinds as a road to prosperity. “I hope the next loans come up with other projects too,” he explains.

Pitting green loans against black?

Matt Jamieson doesn’t know how Ottawa is going to rationalize balancing economic reconciliation and international climate targets “if the $5 billion gets sucked up by oil and gas.”

“How do they reconcile that with their net-zero plans, especially if there’s a finite pool guaranteed?” Jamieson asks of Ottawa and its loan guarantee program. He is the CEO of the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation, 100 kilometres southwest of Toronto in Southern Ontario. Six Nations is rapidly becoming a renewable-energy leader in Canada. Its Oneida Energy Storage Project, which is supported by an Ontario government loan guarantee program, will house 278 batteries, making it the largest in Canada and third largest in the world. Six Nations is also part equity owner in four solar and three wind projects, with a transmission line, all within its green portfolio.

But the Ontario program has created a “bargaining power” problem for First Nations. It backstops a nation only after money is put down to ink deals, Jamieson says. In the meantime, a community needs to find a bridge loan to begin development while it waits for the province to approve the loan. And it’s eating into their share: the Six Nations equity stake in the Oneida battery project began at 50%, but because of the flaws in the Ontario program, their stake dropped significantly when they tapped another equity partner to bridge the loan guarantee.

This is why only around 10 First Nations have used the program in 15 years, Jamieson says. “There’s hasn’t been any outreach since they launched the program,” he says of the province. The failed program may lead to the 133 First Nations in Ontario looking to Ottawa for their loan guarantees until Ontario’s program is reformed.

Equity ownership in projects is the greatest example of consent.

—Perry Bellegarde, former national chief, Assembly of First Nations

Competition for the federal loan guarantee program is sure to be fierce, not just among oil and gas projects but with the green technologies favoured by eastern First Nations. Power lines, battery-based energy storage and renewables are being built in both the south and north, while Northern Ontario is set to see a mining rush akin to Alberta’s oil boom half a century ago to power the coming highways full of electric vehicles.

“If there’s a finite pool of guaranteed [loans], it needs to be a bigger pledge, $200 billion at least, to prioritize the clean economy in some way,” Jamieson says.

Oil and gas and climate tensions, which are playing out as western and eastern First Nations push for economic development, risk leaving a rift between economic and ecological justice. They have left First Nations in a situation that climate activist Eriel Deranger, whose First Nation sits downstream from the oil sands, has called an “economic hostage situation” in recent reporting on Trans Mountain. The term explains how colonialism has left nations with their backs against the wall and penning deals to end the economic theft and repression of their lands and peoples.

But at what price?

Matteo Cimellaro is an Ottawa-based Cree/settler journalist with Canada’s National Observer, with which this piece is being jointly published.

The post Their land, their call: When economic reconciliation and climate justice conflict appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Attorneys familiar with Federal Indian law say it’s uncommon for U.S. courts to side so clearly with tribal nations and actually expel developers trespassing on their land. But observers also see the ruling as part of a broader trend: Gone are the days when developers could ignore Indigenous rights with impunity. Now, even if projects that threaten Native land and cultural resources ultimately proceed, they may come with years-long delays that tack on millions of dollars. As more companies look to build wind and solar farms or mine minerals for renewable energy, failing to recognize Indigenous sovereignty could make the clean energy transition a lot more expensive and much farther away.

“I think tribes are starting to see that they have more leverage than they thought, and that they’ve previously exercised, over all this infrastructure that’s on their land,” said Pilar Thomas, an attorney, member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona and former deputy director of the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. “They want to make sure that they’re getting their fair share.”

Rick Tallman, a program manager at Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty who has spent more than two decades working on financing and consulting for clean energy projects, calls the Osage Nation ruling a wake-up call.

“If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities,” he said.

According to Tallman, investors don’t like uncertainty. He said a lot of infrastructure funders are very conservative and won’t back a project unless they are confident it will succeed, which includes getting the buy-in of affected Indigenous Nations. There’s no upper limit to how much the project could cost if investors don’t get it right.

One analysis from researchers at First Peoples Worldwide at the University of Colorado at Boulder estimated that resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline drove the project cost upwards of $7.5 billion. That includes more than $4.3 billion in divestment from banks backing the project and nearly $1.4 billion in additional operating costs, not to mention millions spent to hire law enforcement.

Marion Werkheiser, founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, said the costs are so high that some renewable energy projects never even get off the ground, citing the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound that was opposed by members of the Wampanoag Tribe.

And it’s not just a U.S. trend; Indigenous peoples around the world are fighting to enforce their rights, especially the right to free, prior, and informed consent to projects on their land — a concept enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, the U.S. hasn’t codified that into law, and compliance globally is spotty.

“Renewable energies are actually not that good in respecting Indigenous rights,” said Genevieve Rose from the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “They have this feeling that because they bring up something good, something green, that they are automatically a good thing.”

If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities.

-Rick Tallman, a program manager with Colorado School of Mines

But her colleague David Berger said there’s more awareness and resistance from Indigenous peoples, and companies are being forced to factor in those costs. He pointed to Norway, where the state-owned company that developed an illegal wind farm has agreed to pay Indigenous Sámi people about $675,000 every year for the next 25 years for violating their rights. “What’s good is you have that legal structure so communities can push back,” Berger said.

Wesley Furlong, an Anchorage-based senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said more tribes are filing lawsuits in the U.S., partly because the legal landscape is changing. For example, the National Historic Preservation Act, a federal law managing the preservation of historic resources, has been around since 1966, but it was only in 1999 that the federal government codified regulations related to communicating with tribes about projects that affect them, and the rules weren’t fully in effect until 2004. Some tribes are just now learning about their rights.

Another reason for the increase in lawsuits is because some tribal nations have more resources to fund litigation. “Indian gaming has been a game-changer for tribes to be able to raise revenue and hire attorneys,” Furlong said.

That combination of more legal tools, more financial resources and more education about Native rights, Furlong said, has led to more tribes getting involved in energy developments on their traditional and ancestral territories, including lands with historic connections and are not owned by a tribe. And he only expects that to continue: Most of the U.S. reserves of lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel — metals key to the clean energy transition — are within 35 miles of Federal Indian Reservations, according to a study by the investment firm MSCI.

That’s something renewable energy developers need to be aware of, said Thomas. “I am a staunch believer that if you are within spitting distance of a tribe that you should be engaged in outreach to the tribe,” she said.

Not every project is going to get buy-in, she adds, but she encourages companies to have patience and continue to reach out to tribes even if they don’t respond. Furlong from the Native American Rights Fund said project proponents may erroneously assume that tribes will always be opposed, forgetting that tribal governments want what’s in the best interest of their citizens.

Bottom line, it’s much less costly for companies to invest in tribal consultations and get them right from the get-go, says Daniel Cardenas, the head of the National Tribal Energy Association and a member of the Pit River Tribe who has consulted with tribes and companies regarding fossil fuel projects. “The cost of engagement is almost nothing compared to the cost of what they’re going to have to pay [if they don’t do it right],” he said of developers.

Werkheiser has seen some progress, with some banks, insurance companies, and energy developers adopting Indigenous peoples policies to guide their investments and some companies undergoing voluntary certifications to show their projects are ethical and respectful of Indigenous rights. “Financial institutions are recognizing that this is a real business risk and they’re building it into the cost of capital for these companies,” she said.

But overall, change is slow, she said.

“For the most part, the renewable energy developers are repeating the mistakes that fossil fuels developers have made over the years,” she said. “They’re not engaging with tribes early as potential partners and information sources during their planning process, and they are basically deferring their own relationship with tribes to the federal government.”

That’s a mistake, said David Kane, a consultant who leads WindHorse Strategic Initiatives. Energy companies often mistakenly perceive tribal chairs as though they are the equivalent of small-town mayors, rather than recognizing them as heads of state.

I think tribes are starting to see that they have more leverage than they thought.

-Pilar Thomas, an attorney

Because of that, he says, companies often disrespect tribes from the beginning by sending lower-level representatives to liaise with them, and many companies may never even step foot on a reservation or go before tribal councils. Developers often complain that it takes a long time to build relationships with tribal members but Kane says it’s better to do so before projects get underway.

“There’s still a lot of mistrust of white men and with good reason,” he said. And the energy industry, including renewables, he said, is still predominantly white and male.

Another challenge is that sometimes companies assume what will work with one tribe will work with another, said Cardenas from the National Tribal Energy Association.

“There’s 574 tribes, and each one operates differently and independently,” he said. “So if you know one tribe, you just know one tribe.”

He thinks tribal nations should be seen as partners, even sponsoring partners, with shared equity in the developments. There’s growing interest: Over the past two decades, tribal nations have pursued hundreds of clean energy projects, with the Inflation Reduction Act recently increasing funding for such projects.

But in the meantime, costly litigation continues. Last week in the U.S., four tribal nations sued a developer to prevent a $10 billion wind energy transmission line from going into operation. And in Oklahoma, the Osage Nation is now seeking damages from Enel. A judge still needs to decide how much that will cost the company.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

The post There’s a big climate cost to failing to recognize Indigenous sovereignty appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Lewis’s kokum (grandmother) used to tell him that the water was once so pure their ancestors could simply fill their pots and make tea. Now, in the lagoon where he and his kokum would take walks, the water is so polluted “you’ll poison yourself if you take one sip,” he says. The Culture Camps are working to change that.

People start to take on a new responsibility to the land and “become stewards in their own way” once the camp is over, says Lewis, an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan with an iyiniw pimatisiwin kiskeyihtamowin – a doctorate in Indigenous Ways of Knowing.

Lewis employs 10 people full-time in a community of 1,600 people. Depending on the season, he can employ another 10 or more. Initiatives like kâniyâsihk preserve Indigenous culture, traditions and languages while boosting local Indigenous economies. Indigenous-owned businesses and projects also tend to protect the lands and waters that they operate on.

Growing the Indigenous-led conservation economy is one of the goals that Canada’s political leaders emphasized at the UN COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal in December. Canada, along with more than 190 countries, committed to protecting 30% of its lands and waters by 2030 (known as the 30×30 target).

“Canada’s biodiversity goals can only be met with the partnership of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people across the country,” said Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault in a statement.

On the opening day of COP15, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that $800 million will be invested over seven years to support four Indigenous-led conservation initiatives. After the projects are completed, up to one million square kilometres of land and water will be protected in northern B.C., Nunavut, Ontario and the Northwest Territories. The funding is meant to be a step forward with Indigenous Nations to “deliver a vision of conservation that has partnership and reconciliation at its core,” Trudeau said.

Indigenous communities are already leading the way. Globally, 80% of biodiversity is stewarded by Indigenous Peoples, according to the UN. In Canada, 90% of protection areas established in the last two decades have been the result of Indigenous leadership, according to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI).

First Nation, Inuit and Métis leaders in Canada are creating Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas as large as Costa Rica monitored by Indigenous Guardians, while smaller-scale projects and businesses (ranging from eco-lodges to sustainable fisheries and small-scale forestry) generate good-paying jobs that help unleash investment in regional economies, as the ILI notes.

It’s all part of the Indigenous-led conservation and stewardship economy that’s gaining momentum.

With these investments, Canada is offering a model for supporting Indigenous-led stewardship.

 

—Valérie Courtois, Indigenous Leadership Initiative

One of those people paving the way is Robert Brown, a Haida Fisheries Guardian. He says that Guardians go through weeks of training so they are able to collect data, patrol, and monitor waterways while actively working with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Guardians also monitor their own people to ensure that they are not overfishing or overharvesting.

“We need to keep our stock going for future generations, so that my granddaughter could one day go out and fish and harvest where I was,” Brown says. This is Brown’s eighth season being a Guardian, and during this time he has seen drastic changes in the environment that he patrols. “Our beaches have changed dramatically with the bigger tides, and then our fish stocks have dropped, as well as our clam beds,” he says.

Since 2018, there have been 170 Indigenous Guardian programs working to conserve and manage their lands across Canada. With the recent launch of the First Nations National Guardians Network (and $5.8 million in new funding from the feds), those conservation jobs are rapidly multiplying.

“This is the first [network] of its kind in the world,” said ILI director Valérie Courtois in a statement. “With these investments, Canada is offering a model for respecting and supporting the Indigenous-led stewardship – a model we hope spreads around the world.”

Indigenous ecotourism

Kylik Kisoun Taylor is Inuit from the Northwest Territories. He runs a tourism company on the outskirts of Yellowknife. Taylor thinks it is important for settlers and Indigenous Peoples alike to experience Indigenous ecotourism adventures, such as the ones he offers in which participants make their own igloos. “The people that book our trips are investing with my people as opposed to just examining them,” he says.

“We offer a way to immerse people into the cultural way of life in the Arctic.”

Ecotourism businesses are another pathway to upholding Indigenous cultures, traditions, spirituality and values while also boosting the local Indigenous economy and land conservation, says Keith Henry, president and CEO of the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada (ITAC).

“There are a number of businesses that are doing that now today that couldn’t [before]. It wasn’t very marketable, or as competitive, or as sustainable 10 to 15 years ago.”

Henry says the most profitable businesses that Indigenous communities own are multifaceted. They offer cultural centres, culinary experiences, storytelling, powwow performances, ceremonies, Elder teachings and on-the-land experiences.

And the industry is in high demand. ITAC represents around 1,900 Indigenous-owned businesses across Canada. Henry says that these businesses generated roughly $1.9 billion in revenue and employed 39,000 people in 2019 – ITAC’s best year yet. That is, until the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Tourism was the first hit, and it’s the last to recover,” Henry explains. Indigenous enterprises lost between 75% and 80% of their staff across the country, and they still have not returned to 2019 levels. But Henry is hopeful. “By 2030, we expect to [represent] at least 4.4 or more billion dollars in direct GDP.” He says there is a renewed interest in authentic Indigenous eco-tourism experiences and teachings after the recent findings of unmarked residential school gravesites. “That has really awoken, especially domestically in Canada, a renewed interest in the large majority of Canadians that realize that we have to correct past history.”

“One of the ways they can do that is to just try to be better partners going forward.”

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That’s one of the messages from some 30 First Nations leaders travelling to Ottawa March 21 to push the federal government for more power to borrow money to finance infrastructure projects.

The group comprises employees and members of the First Nations Finance Authority (FNFA), a non-profit, Indigenous-owned corporation that works with 151 individual nations to access capital markets to finance major projects that contribute to their economic development.

The authority has a loan portfolio of close to $2 billion and has financed some of the largest commercial transactions that First Nations have completed. Those include the acquisition by the Membertou First Nation and other East Coast Mi’kmaq communities of a 50% interest in Clearwater Seafood along with the fishing licences held by the corporation.

However, FNFA’s financial capacity is limited by federal regulations that prevent First Nations from borrowing against future revenue that is owed to them by the federal government.

The authority is asking Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to include a pilot project in her upcoming budget, due out March 28, that would allow it to leverage up to $200 million in future revenue for investments in infrastructure.

Such “monetization” is the same process used by provinces and municipalities to fund infrastructure and was endorsed by the House of Commons finance committee in a report last April.

FNFA estimates that $200 million in annual federal funding could finance a $3.6-billion debenture (a debt instrument not secured by collateral) monetized over a 20-year term.

First Nations face a growing infrastructure gap compared to the rest of Canada when it comes to housing, schools, energy systems and internet capacity, FNFA chief executive Ernie Daniels said in an interview prior to the Ottawa visit. “Every First Nations community wants a better quality of life for their people – every community,” Daniels says. “They’re going to build infrastructure where they can finance it themselves because they can’t wait [for] government.”

A member of the Salt River First Nation in the Northwest Territories and Alberta, Daniels is a certified public accountant and was appointed last year as a board member for the Bank of Canada.

First Nations infrastructure gap

An independent study from more than a decade ago found that First Nations endured a $30-billion infrastructure gap compared to the rest of Canada. That gap has since expanded tremendously despite a promise by the Liberal government to close it by 2030. The Assembly of First Nations now estimates it to be a staggering $349 billion.

Ottawa is currently allocating roughly $2 billion annually to fund infrastructure projects in Indigenous communities, but Daniels argues that, at that rate, the gap will continue to grow.

The FNFA has already leveraged the “own source” funds of its members – proceeds from First Nations’ businesses and benefits agreements – to provide interim financing for revenue-generating infrastructure projects. It also works with the communities to access capital markets for full project financing.

If it was able to leverage long-term, committed government transfers, the corporation could dramatically increase the scope of its borrowing and lending, helping to close the gap, Daniels says. The difference, he explains, is like a couple trying to save enough money to buy a house for cash, versus acquiring a mortgage from a bank on the strength of the buyers’ current income projected into the future.

Every First Nations community wants a better quality of life for their people – every community. They’re going to build infrastructure where they can finance it themselves because they can’t wait [for] government.

-Ernie Daniels, FNFA chief executive

An increasing number of the 600 First Nations across Canada are applying to be members of the FNFA. But the rigorous certification process can bog down as the federal government is slow in “scheduling” First Nations as candidates under the First Nations Fiscal Management Act, which established the FNFA in 2005. Following that scheduling, each community must comply with certification conditions set out by the First Nations Financial Management Board. These include whether a First Nation has both the financial and management capacity to participate in large capital projects.

As a result of the rigorous process, economic opportunities are sometimes missed.

The FNFA is currently working with 20 First Nations that are keen to take an equity stake in TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline in British Columbia. That project has generated considerable controversy as some First Nations leaders and non-Indigenous activists are trying to block its construction over environmental concerns. In an emailed comment, FNFA spokeswoman Naomi Mison said the authority is aware of the controversy surrounding Coastal GasLink. “We are speaking with many communities and will work with them to address any concerns that may arise,” she said.

The authority also helped finance Henvey Inlet First Nation’s partnership with Pattern Energy in the 300-megawatt Henvey Inlet wind project and associated transmission lines on the northeast share of Georgian Bay.

“To me there is [a] really good story here,” Daniels says. “First Nations are getting involved in these large projects that are generating cash. And every dollar that a First Nation generates from these economic development opportunities is going back into more infrastructure.

“Every loan tells a success story in a First Nation, and we hope those kinds of stories will encourage other First Nations to follow this path.”

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Creative disruption stands in contrast to creative destruction, a term coined by Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter argued that capitalism causes old ideas and technology to quickly become obsolete through the process of innovation. In the pursuit of profit, capitalism ruthlessly and relentlessly eliminates old ideas and installs new ones.

Creative disruption, on the other hand, aims to make space for new ideas by forcing the old ways to adapt and adopt. First Nations communities are doing this in a number of ways.

As an academic with a background in urban land economics, I have studied how First Nations are using creative disruption to shape businesses, urban communities and the health-care system in Canada.

Sen̓áḵw development project

One of the ironies of modern Indigenous land law is how the reserve system defined by the Indian Act, originally designed to assimilate Indigenous nations and communities into mainstream Canadian culture, has morphed into a strategic asset for First Nations.

As author Bob Joseph notes in 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, the Squamish Nation lost 14 acres (about 0.05 square kilometres) of their territory in Vancouver to a lumber company through expropriation in 1904.

After a century of litigation, the Squamish Nation recovered some of the lost land and is now in the process of building Sen̓áḵw, a massive economic development project in Kits Point, Vancouver.

Sen̓áḵw is the largest Indigenous-led housing retail development in Canadian history and will add much-needed housing supply to a market that has become unaffordable for most. The development plans to build 11 towers and 6,000 housing units.

Naawi-Oodena urban reserve

A second example of creative disruption is the creation of the Naawi-Oodena urban reserve in Winnipeg. It’s the largest urban reserve in Canada, covering 64 hectares.

Naawi-Oodena was officially established after the land the reserve sits on — the former Kapyong Barracks — was recently repatriated to the seven Treaty One First Nations.

Treaty One Nation fought to have the land returned to them under the provisions of the Treaty Land Entitlement Framework Agreement after the Canadian government tried to transfer the land to a Crown corporation years ago.

After a prolonged legal process, a judge ruled the federal government failed to adequately consult with Treaty One Nation and the land transfer was ruled illegitimate in 2015.

An incorporated consortium run by the Treaty One Nation, called the Treaty One Development Corporation, will oversee developments on Naawi-Oodena.

As a self-governing nation, Treaty One will set its own land management policies, potentially in contrast to the zoning and building codes of Winnipeg. In reality, it’s likely to gently push or disrupt urban development, rather than outright destroy current practices since its goal is to attract tenants, the majority of which will be non-Indigenous.

First Nations health care

First Nations entrepreneurs are also seeking out ways to revolutionize the Canadian health-care system. Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta entered into an agreement with contractors to create a private health clinic offering simple hip and knee surgeries.

The provincial government will fund the procedures through medicare and publicly funded hospitals will still handle more complicated surgeries.

Enoch Cree Nation joins a growing number of private health clinics in Canada forming public-private partnerships. They are not the first First Nation to get involved with health care, either.

In 2012, Westbank First Nation announced a plan to build a private, for-profit hospital. Some constitutional experts warned that Westbank First Nation was violating the Canada Health Act, but the nation responded by arguing that, as a self-governing nation, it was not bound by federal laws.

Enoch Cree Nation’s private clinic will face other challenges. While COVID-19 has shaken the faith Canadians have in our health-care system, and receptivity to private health care may be growing, the affinity for public health care remains strong.

Legal redress

First Nations have also become creative disrupters by pursuing legal redress for past injustices. The courts have reached back through treaties all the way back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to widen Canada’s constitution beyond the formal acts to include treaties with First Nations.

Institutional changes supporting disruption include Article 35 of the 1982 Constitution Act that recognizes the “existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” This clause is widely interpreted as creating a nation-to-nation relationship between First Nations and Canada.

Equally important for commercial ventures is Article 87 of the Indian Act which exempts First Nations land from taxation by any order of government. This means an urban reserve does not pay property tax to a municipality.

Despite criticism of the Indian Act by authors like Joseph, Article 87 offers a major fiscal benefit for First Nations individuals and businesses on reserve. Although a complex area of law, this tax exemption is an important reason why First Nations may prefer to add land to existing reserves or to create new reserves, rather than owning land conventionally like corporations.

Furthering reconciliation

Despite some First Nations regaining rights and titles to their lands, Indigenous communities in Canada still face many barriers to economic participation. By engaging in the examples of creative disruption here, First Nations are working toward economic prosperity for their communities and, in the process, are also working toward reconciliation.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — the framework for reconciliation according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — states Indigenous people have the right to pursue their own means of economic development. By starting their own entrepreneurial and developmental projects, First Nations are engaging in their inherent “right to maintain and develop their political, economic and social systems or institutions.”

Reconciliation also works best when all parties involved benefit from changes. These examples of creative disruption will benefit non-Indigenous Canadians as well as Indigenous people by increasing the housing supply in Vancouver and Winnipeg, bringing remote First Nations into the economic orbit of cities and offering increased health treatment options.

Gregory C Mason is an associate professor of economics at the University of Manitoba.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Transition, by its very nature, is about feeling uncomfortable. If we’re comfortable, that likely means nothing is changing, because we’re enjoying the ease of the status quo.

Cities everywhere have to negotiate and navigate the complexity that comes with the different views and perspectives that make consensus on climate action a challenge. Is an energy transition needed? What actions are reasonable? Who should act, and when? Who should pay for it?

This is particularly difficult for cities at the epicentre of conventional energy-centred economies, such as Edmonton and Calgary. Local governments, business communities, community organizations and citizens give me a call when they are faced with this sort of challenge and realize they don’t know how to work together. I get invited into the heart of city conflict, over and over again, and I’ve found that bringing these historically divided groups together is a profound way for cities to make choices and act. Three principles guide my work at any scale, from small projects, such as supporting city hall and developers to create new infrastructure cost-sharing strategies to accommodate increased density, to the work of planning a whole city.

City work belongs to all

Cities are a messy web of relationships and interests, desires and priorities, where no single person – or sector – has control over the future. Government, business leaders, community organizations and citizens have unique and interconnected roles to play in legislating, innovating and making sure our cities serve their citizens well. Leadership comes from those who convene and connect these roles with each other.

Jorge Garza works with the Community Climate Transitions team at Tamarack Institute, a 19-community climate transition network. Building on their track record of supporting a movement of 330 communities that have reduced poverty for more than one million Canadians, they are now focusing on a just and equitable energy transition. The climate network collaborates with communities to localize the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and build their capacity to host robust community engagement, develop a community-wide common agenda, and track and report on outcomes.

When it comes to integrating the perspectives of government, business leaders, community organizations and citizens, Garza observes that “systematically, we are not coordinated in our cities in ways that are inclusive and informative. Everyone needs to be involved in the process of changing. Government, business, everyone. We’re not there yet.”

Instead of thinking we each need our own plan, successful cities knit the various plans together.The learning edge for climate work is to bring community, government and business together in ways that allow us to hear each other and choose to act together. Town hall meetings are insufficient because we need to build our capacity to roll up our sleeves and get to work with people we don’t usually work with, not just talk at them. Tamarack’s work is vital to build our cities’ capacity to engage with each other and make a difference.

Practise thinking differently

Transition is a tricky business because it asks us to think differently not just about our energy use but about ourselves – and to be engaged in a process of changing.

As a director in what was then the City of Edmonton’s Urban Form and Corporate Strategic Development Department, Kalen Anderson led the development of Edmonton’s City Plan. She was equipped with a carbon budget to guide city government choices and accountability tools to connect the plan’s goals with budget decisions. Anderson invited her city to think outside the box as they created the plan for the capital of Canada’s oil and gas province, establishing policy direction for the entire municipal corporation, rather than only the city planners, with the expectation that everyone will work together to achieve climate goals.

Now, as executive director of the Urban Development Institute–Edmonton Metro, Anderson focuses on how to build the city the plan envisions. Net-zero construction, for example, increases the cost of buildings. According to Anderson, “We need to look at ways to reduce other costs, such as adjusting infrastructure standards. A series of thoughtful trade-offs are needed.” When it comes to housing, if those trade-offs aren’t made, we will have a city out of economic reach to its citizens. Will citizens tolerate paying more up front for net-zero homes or narrow streets with fewer parking spaces to avoid escalation in housing prices? Will policy-makers have the fortitude to work through potential resistance to new ideas and make the necessary changes?

While Edmonton thought differently about how to plan for a climate-resilient city, the work is just beginning. To implement its plan, it will need to step into polarizing conversations and make the choices that come with trade-offs.

The currency of city improvement is relationships

The cultivation of meaningful relationships is how we learn to work well with ideas and interests beyond the status quo.

Indigenous business leader Aaron Aubin is a Kwakwaka’wakw person living in the traditional territory of Treaty 7 First Nations and Métis Nation of Alberta Region 3. From Calgary, he operates a consultancy that supports Indigenous nations, governments and businesses throughout Canada. Aubin advises that cities and businesses benefit economically and culturally when they engage in conversations with Indigenous people: “Across Canada, Indigenous Peoples’ ways of knowing and doing are essential to the dialogues on how to build more sustainable and inclusive cities.”

The energy transition is an opportunity to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into our city-improvement work by crafting relationships of reciprocity with Indigenous Peoples, their governments and Indigenous-run businesses. When we reach out to create and sustain relationships with other interests, we strengthen our collective capacity – through our connections with each other – to take wise climate action.

Opportunity for economic and cultural transformation

Climate action can serve as an opportunity for economic and cultural transformation – if we are willing to work with others in ways that feel unfamiliar, awkward and even tense. Feeling comfortable may well mean we’re not doing anything new, and if we’re not doing anything new, then we’re not participating in our transition. The hard work ahead: learning how to work well together. Our survival depends upon it.

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It takes courage, persistence and steadfast determination when you are fighting for equality, especially when it seems like there are endless obstacles blocking the path. Indigenous people from across Canada have been fighting for acceptance and their place at the economic table for centuries. The National Indigenous Economic Strategy (NIES), released earlier this month, stands as an important pillar of strength for Indigenous people and organizations across Canada in breaking down barriers and creating a conversation for change.

Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business is a joint member of the core working group of 20 Indigenous organizations from across Canada that jointly held the pen to create this monumental document. The NIES lists 107 economic calls to prosperity for Indigenous Canadians laid out in four pathways: land, infrastructure, people and finance.

The time is now to realize that Canada’s future prosperity will depend on the success of its growing Indigenous population. Currently, Indigenous Peoples are the youngest and fastest-growing demographic in Canada, and they are creating businesses at nine times the rate of the average non-Indigenous Canadian.

There are close to 60,000 Indigenous businesses across Canada, in every sector and size and every province and territory. And Indigenous women are leading this growth, especially when it comes to introducing new products and services and creating innovative business practices. It has been estimated that the Indigenous population contributes over $32 billion annually to Canada’s GDP, with the private sector economy contributing just over $12 billion.

The time is now to realize that Canada’s future prosperity will depend on the success of its growing Indigenous population.

As the NIES document states, “economic reconciliation is a multifaceted process that includes political and social challenges. Economic reconciliation is not possible when many Indigenous people live in poverty, have inadequate housing, and lack access to clean water and other public services.”

The history of inequality for Indigenous Peoples in Canada is well documented. In 1867, through the Indian Act, inherent Indigenous economic rights were taken away. From 1881 until as recently as 2014, the Indian Act contained a permit system to control First Nations’ ability to sell products off the reserves. And until 1951, Indigenous Peoples were not considered Indians under the Indian Act if they obtained post-secondary-school degrees, which then meant that if you were a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor, your Indian status was stripped away.

When civil liberties were taken away from Indigenous people, so were the mentors and role models for youth, as well as the opportunity for intergenerational wealth. The repercussions have paved the way to generations of financial struggle and trauma. Nothing could paint a better picture of Canada’s history of oppression of Indigenous people than the discovery last year of the 215 children’s remains confirmed at the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc institution and the thousands since at other residential “school” locations.

The discovery, which happened during the 30 months that our coalition of organizations was developing this economic strategy, provided a solemn reminder of all that our communities have lost. While we continue to be aware of the past, the NIES document lays out the necessary steps the Canadian Council of Aboriginal Business, Indigenous organizations across Canada and every Canadian must take toward making this country whole.

An essential part of that is improving economic reconciliation for Indigenous Canadians by urging corporate Canada to conduct meaningful consultations with Indigenous communities and treat them as economic stakeholders, not only through obtaining informed consent, but as equal partners.

We see leaders in corporate Canada building and benefiting from opportunities in procurement, in partnership and in investment. Corporations, investors, institutions, governments and all Canadians stand to benefit by supporting, partnering with, procuring from, and investing in Indigenous communities, businesses and peoples.

When Indigenous people do well economically, so does Canada as a whole.

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Fuelled by a desire to address systemic inequity and armed with a master’s in political studies, Cyr took on lead roles in government agencies that gave him the opportunity to work from the inside to create space for Indigenous people at the proverbial table. But the roles also exposed him to the almost insurmountable barriers that Indigenous people face in every aspect of Canadian society.

Cyr didn’t grow up immersed in Canada’s troubled relationship with Indigenous Peoples. Born on the east coast of Vancouver Island, he spent his early childhood on a Canadian military base in Germany. His family returned to Canada when he was 10 and planted roots in the traditional Métis area of White Horse Plains, in southern Manitoba. Closer to his people, he began experiencing what it meant to be an Indigenous person in Canada: poorer health, lower levels of employment, high suicide rates, inadequate housing.

A high school exchange trip to India brought him face to face with another example of how a colonial past shows up in present-day policies, socioeconomics, and identity and cemented his determination to work toward removing systemic barriers. By the time he was taking leading negotiator positions in government, he was a firsthand witness to how the government’s attempts at inclusion were failing to break down “the very systems they put in place to excise Indigenous people,” a failure that prevented Indigenous people from becoming “full economic citizens.”

After more than a decade in government, Cyr felt compelled to find a different route to economic reconciliation. As the executive director of the National Association of Friendship Centres, he met Indigenous entrepreneurs working to build economic systems based on Indigenous knowledge and practices, guided by the wisdom of Elders and ancestors. Indigenous communities were innovating long before we started to hear corporations and governments speak to its value, Cyr points out. “We survived colonization, disease and economic exclusion because of our ability to innovate.”

“We survived colonization, disease and economic exclusion because of our ability to innovate.”

– Jeff Cyr, co-founder of Raven Indigenous Capital

 

But he noticed that Indigenous entrepreneurs remained unconnected to mainstream social innovation hubs, which offer access to capital, knowledge and networks. To increase the profile of Indigenous innovation within the larger social-innovation community, Cyr reached out to a number of organizations, including the McConnell Foundation, to hold the first Indigenous Innovation Summit. In 2018, he and two partners (including Paul Lacerte of B.C.’s Nadleh Whut’en First Nation) co-founded Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, Canada’s first Indigenous venture-capital intermediary.

Cyr explains that to transform historical power dynamics from dependency to self-determination, Raven leans in to a model that allows communities to set their own development priorities and then collectively brainstorm solutions rooted in Indigenous values and knowledge. A solutions-lab approach is used to determine needs and desired outcomes and connect with impact investors, foundations and governments.

Animikii, an Indigenous digital agency that was turned down for financing by big banks, was the first company to receive an investment through the Raven Indigenous Impact Fund in 2019. Animikii has sustained year-over-year growth, and the team has doubled in size. Other companies in Raven’s portfolio: Cheekbone Beauty, OneFeather (a digital voting and banking app), Virtual Gurus (a virtual assistant service) and Plato (a software-testing service).

“Decolonizing the investment process will open up niche market growth,” says Cyr.

Fundraising for the impact fund far surpassed the initial goal of $5 million, raising more than $25 million.

Cyr is proud of what Raven has accomplished to date, though he’s quick to point out that this moment is a result of many years of working with his Indigenous community and family. “Ultimately, we want a human-centred economy, one that centres on a balance between people and the planet.”

Shilpa Tiwari is the founder of Her Climb, a social enterprise with the mission to increase the number of racialized women in senior positions in corporations.

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Equality translates into a civil society, one that acts cohesively in the interests of the many. Besieged by division and inaction on the climate crisis, we need solutions that are far broader than technological fixes. A $1 billion per year Indigenous Climate Fund (ICF), if established by the federal government, could offer some multifaceted solutions. What would such a fund look like?

Its first mandate would be to work with Indigenous peoples across Canada to build smart communities (appropriate, energy-efficient infrastructure in remote and urban communities that delivers smart buildings and amenities, clean energy, water and waste management alongside health, education, training, communication and social services). This endowment part of the fund would not be intended to generate standard financial returns; it would use Canadian clean technologies to amplify results of investments already made by federal and other governments.

Its second mandate would be to set up an asset fund to co-invest in global infrastructure assets (together with pension funds and large project developers) that meet strict investing criteria. That criteria would integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals and recommendations from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

Under this umbrella, Indigenous communities may decide to raise additional capital for participation in projects, such as power transmission lines or planting forests for carbon sequestration, thereby helping with Canada’s climate change commitments. This part of the ICF would be the long-term wealth generator, with some of the proceeds redirected to the “smart community” part of the fund, hence increasing the endowment, with the rest cycled back into the asset fund.

The time is ripe for an Indigenous Climate Fund. If Canada gets this right it could support economic reconciliation and equality and address the climate crisis while serving as a model for the world.

 Vicky Sharpe is a corporate director and was the founding president & CEO of Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

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