The five chairs in the last post are roles in a transaction. There’s a sixth party whose standing is different from all of them, and calling them a stakeholder would understate the case.
Indigenous nations and communities are rights-holders. They hold jurisdiction, treaty obligations and land — and much of what this country calls Arctic security physically sits in Inuit Nunangat.
That isn’t an abstraction. The operations and maintenance contract for the North Warning System, worth $592 million over seven years, is held by Nasittuq, a majority Inuit-owned company. Northern defence infrastructure means northern employment, northern logistics, and northern consent.
Which means adoption can’t be understood simply as a transaction between a civilian innovator and a military customer. Where a dual-use capability depends on Indigenous lands, infrastructure, knowledge or data, the rights-holders are part of the institutional architecture through which that technology has to be developed, governed and put to use. Not consulted about. Part of.
On paper, everyone agrees. The Defence Industrial Strategy names Indigenous rights-holders explicitly, and I’ve not sat in any of the five chairs and heard anyone argue against the principle. It’s as close to consensus as anything in this field.
Whether it’s being carried out in practice is a different question, and I’m not the right person to answer it. I’ve completed OCAP training — the First Nations principles of Ownership, Control, Access and Possession — and the main thing it gave me was a clearer sense of how much I still have to learn. I’d encourage anyone working anywhere near northern infrastructure, data or deployment to take it. It is not long, and it will change how you write your next data-handling section.
One observation from the part I do know. Unanimous agreement on paper is exactly the condition under which nothing gets tested. Friction is how a system finds out whether it is doing the thing. Where no one argues, there is no signal either way.
What this means if you’re building something
One thing, and it’s a sequencing point rather than a compliance one.
If your capability touches northern lands, infrastructure, knowledge or data, the time to bring rights-holders in is while the thing is still being shaped — not at the point where you need a signature. The difference between those two moments is the difference between participating in how something gets built and being asked to approve decisions already made.
That’s not only the right way round. It’s the version that produces a better product, for the same reason talking to operators early produces a better product: the people closest to the conditions know things you can’t infer from Ottawa.
If you want to go further than this post can take you, start with the OCAP principles and with organisations that speak for themselves rather than with summaries written by people like me.
Next: the bench, and the willingness to pick things up.
This is drawn from my essay “The Dual-Use Dimension,” published in 2067 Journal. [Read the full piece →]
