Creating Pathways to Reconciliation Through Incorporating Indigenous Voices and Culture into the Development of Impact Benefit Agreements (IBAs) on First Nation Traditional Territory

This Dissertation-in-practice (DiP) is a declaration for leaders to engage in ongoing and edifying activism in the form of Indigenous advocacy. Due to the unjust generational trauma of Indigenous peoples, this work promotes Indigenous authorship, participation, and empowerment, specifically in negotiated land agreements, commonly known as Impact Benefit Agreements (IBAs). Red Pine Economic Development Corporation (EDC) (pseudonym), a for-profit Indigenous organization owned by Red Pine First Nation, holds two IBAs that lack Indigenous participation, voice, and culture. To address this omission, Red Pine EDC must work with Red Pine First Nation to redraft a more fulsome cultural chapter of the IBA, a redrafting process involving Indigenous leadership in the form of an Indigenous-led Advisory Council (IAC). The cultural chapter will be a culmination of pertinent Indigenous objectives, such as Indigenous sovereignty practices, Indigenous language reclamation, and decolonization methodologies. Using both care-based and adaptive leadership theory in tandem with Duck’s five step change curve model, as well as Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit), I identify, throughout the change process, actionable steps in conjunction with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, to promote future reconciliation practices.\nKeywords: Indigenous, allyship, advocacy, decolonization, generational trauma, sovereignty, reconciliation