New treaty signed in the coastal region after four years at the table

The signing took forty minutes. The four years before it are the story.

What is different about this agreement is where it starts. Previous rounds opened with a blank map and asked the nation to prove its way onto it. This one opened with the nation's own survey and asked the province to argue its way off.

That reversal is not rhetorical. It changed what evidence had to be produced, who had to produce it, and how long each round took. The nation spent the first eighteen months assembling a survey — oral record, archival material, and a great deal of walking — and then spent two years defending it line by line.

We stopped negotiating for recognition somewhere in year two. After that we were negotiating implementation, and that is a different table.

A member of the negotiating team

Implementation begins in April. The first test is the shared decision-making provision on referrals — the clause that took longest to draft, and the one everyone expects to be litigated first.

Referrals are the daily texture of this relationship: a permit application arrives, someone has to say yes or no, and until now the nation has been consulted rather than consulted-with. The new clause requires agreement rather than input. What agreement means when the two parties disagree is exactly what the drafting fights were about, and the language that survived is deliberately narrow.

The first referrals under the new regime arrive in May.

What is not in the agreement is as instructive as what is. There is no extinguishment language, which is the single most fought-over absence in the document and the reason it took until year three to have anything to initial. There is no cash settlement that closes the file. And there is no clause that makes implementation contingent on future provincial budgets, which was struck twice and stayed struck.

The nation's negotiators have been careful in public not to call it a template. Three other tables are watching it closely enough that the word gets used anyway.

The chief said one sentence at the signing and then sat down. It was about her father, who had worked on the first submission in 1994 and did not live to see this one.