Article audio narrated by Stewart Muir
There’s a particular kind of irony that only British Columbia can produce.
We passed a law enshrining the right of Indigenous peoples to give or withhold consent — and we did it without meaningfully asking them how they wanted it to work.
The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (Bill 41) arrived in 2019 with genuine momentum behind it. Every sitting MLA voted it in. I examined it as closely as I could at the time and concluded — with caveats, but concluded — that it could work. A lot of serious people did. What none of us, government included, built was the architecture that would have made the thing real. That’s not finger-pointing. I’m in no position to say I told you so. This is something closer to a shared failure of imagination.
I had a conversation last week that I haven’t been able to shake. A friend of many years — a First Nations leader, someone who has spent his career building own-source revenues, who has sat at the table on major projects, who believes with every fibre that economic participation and Indigenous sovereignty are not opposites — told me quietly that he was disappointed.
Not angry. Disappointed. Which is worse.
That stayed with me.
And then I thought about what seven years looks like against a century and a half.
Because that’s the other conversation happening — the one that doesn’t always make it into the columns written by people like me. Imagine carrying that. Imagine being the grandchild of someone whose language was beaten out of them, whose children were taken, whose title to land was simply declared not to exist by a legal system imported from the other side of the world. Imagine watching that system grind on for generation after generation — through residential schools, through the sixties scoop, through resource booms that enriched everyone except the people on whose territory they happened.
And then a government arrives and says: we’re going to fix this. We’re going to write it into law. We mean it this time.
And seven years later, when the fixing gets complicated, when the people most affected by the uncertainty start asking hard questions that have no easy answers — they collapse like a cheap suit.
You brought us the system that damaged us for generations. And when you finally decided to repair it, you couldn’t hold the line for a single political cycle.
I am informed by an incorrigibly reliable source that the Premier recently found himself in a room full of First Nations representatives where he was accused, to his face, of being an “Indian giver” on DRIPA. Where does one even begin. For those with a proper appreciation of one of the great treasures of these borrowed lands — the First Nations funnybone — the story, whether apocryphal or not, is richer than an oolichan smoothie. The irony wrapped inside that particular accusation, deployed by the people to whom the phrase was historically applied against the government that appointed itself their champion, is the kind of thing that could only happen in British Columbia, and only with a straight face for about four seconds before the whole room understood what had just occurred.
I understand the critique of DRIPA. I’ve made versions of it myself. The implementation was under-designed. The governance architecture wasn’t built before the rights were activated. The hard questions about overlapping territorial claims were left unasked. And critically — the legitimate anxieties of ordinary British Columbians about what the law meant for their property, their titles, their futures, were waved away as someone else’s problem. They were not someone else’s problem. They were always the law’s problem, and ignoring them was never progressive. It was just careless.
But there is a difference between fixing a flawed law and abandoning the principle behind it. The First Nations leaders I know who are serious about economic development were never a monolithic bloc on DRIPA — in my opinion, some welcomed it, some were indifferent, some actively didn’t want it. What many of them wanted was never a legislative hand-up, let alone a handout. They wanted the government to get out of their way. The ones celebrating the retreat tend not to be the ones who spent the last decade signing project agreements and hiring administrators. And the ones who are disappointed are calculating what it means for the next negotiation, and the one after that.
And here I have to say something that costs me something to say.
There is a person who has been standing on stages — including stages I’ve hosted — for the better part of a decade, saying exactly this. Not in the abstract. In the specific. From his own life, his own journey from hate to love, from failure to something that looks, from the outside, like hard-won wisdom. I have watched Ellis Ross reduce rooms full of people in cities near and far to a stunned silence. Not the silence of discomfort. The silence of recognition. A sage turned parliamentarian, MP Ross has been telling anyone who would listen that the path to Indigenous prosperity runs through partnerships and own-source revenues and the unglamorous work of economic development — not through legislative declarations handed down by governments performing their own virtue.
He said it clearly. He said it consistently. He said it on the record, in public, for years.
And I, who considered myself reasonably well-informed on these questions, basically ignored him.
That’s on me. And I suspect I wasn’t alone.
There’s a related question that a sculptor friend of mine — a man whose knowledge of his people’s thunderbird creation myth runs deeper than most living practitioners — put to me in a way I haven’t been able to improve on. What is reconciliation, he asked, if you never had a relationship in the first place? There’s nothing to reconcile. What you actually have is an introduction. And introductions require a different kind of patience, a different kind of humility, than reconciliation does.
We keep using the wrong word. And when you use the wrong word long enough, you build the wrong law.
In 2022 I had the chance to ask Jody Wilson-Raybould a question. We were on the stage of the Sapphire Ballroom at the Hotel Pacific Rim, in front of four hundred dinner guests — a location that carries its own freight for anyone with an appreciation of the geography of power, given that it was in the Prime Minister’s Suite — butler, marble spa bathrooms and all — many floors above us that Justin Trudeau had delivered the news of her ejection from cabinet. The bruising from that was still relatively fresh. I asked her: is there a reckoning coming? Is that where this is headed?
The short answer was no. I forget her exact words, but it felt like a relief.
Four years later, a significant portion of the population appears to disagree with that framing — or at least with the patience it requires. And I am not going to wade into the legal architecture of where things now stand. You’ll need to find someone with a law degree and a current retainer for that. What I will say is that the distance between Wilson-Raybould’s answer in that ballroom and the mood in the province today is itself a measure of how much ground was lost — not by the principle, but by the people entrusted to advance it.
I’ve spent time in Huu-ay-aht territory. I’ve watched what self-governance looks like when a nation decides to exercise it not as protest, not as blockade, but as administration. Budgets. Bylaws. Resource decisions made by people who have to answer to their own citizens at the next general meeting. That’s sovereignty. It’s also just governance. Turns out they’re the same thing.
The Nuu-chah-nulth concept of iisak is one philosophy among many held by Indigenous peoples across this part of the world. I make no claim that it speaks for all of them. But I’ve spent enough time with it to conclude that a good grasp of iisak is not a bad guide if you’re trying to think seriously about relationships with First Nations more generally — and about what those relationships actually require of the non-Indigenous party. It runs deeper than most people in this province have been given the chance to understand. It is not a slogan. It is not a land acknowledgment. It is a complete philosophy of relationship — between peoples, between humans and the non-human world, between the living and those not yet born. At its core it holds that rights and responsibilities are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other. The respect that iisak demands is not the respect of deference or sentiment — it is the respect of accountability. Of showing up. Of answering for what happens on your watch.
Applied to the question of governance, iisak would have produced a fundamentally different law. It would have required that relationship precede declaration — that the Crown and Indigenous nations build the architecture of trust before activating new legal frameworks, not after. It would have demanded that consent be treated as a living, ongoing process rather than a procedural checkpoint in a regulatory timeline. And it would have insisted that rights come paired with stewardship obligations — that economic development be understood as an expression of sovereignty, not a compromise of it.
But reciprocity was never the operating philosophy for some of those who drove hardest to transform UNDRIP into BC law. Their message to the province was explicit: this isn’t about you, it’s about us. A framework built on that premise was never going to hold. Iisak would have insisted on something harder and more demanding — that it had to be about all of us, or it would eventually be about none of us. Which is more or less where we are.
The nations that are thriving in BC right now treated self-determination as a management problem, not a messaging one. They hired administrators. They signed agreements. They answered their phones. They didn’t need DRIPA to do any of that.
But they needed to know the government meant what it said.
My friend has seen enough broken promises to last several lifetimes. He wasn’t expecting perfection. He was expecting spine.
The philosophy was never the obstacle. The impatience was. And now, the question of resolve.
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