Indigenous Economic Wisdom, Sourced

Volume VII — Planetary and Cosmic

Nine movements, four ledgers.

THE PLATE

A woman seated on the forest floor writing in a notebook, sun breaking through the trees behind her. — Plate VII.07The Fish Wheel and the Clipboard.An economy is not proved by what it is thought to believe. It is proved by what it counts, who signs the count, and what the count is allowed to decide.

THE LETTER

This chapter has one rule and it governs every sentence in it.

There is no such person as "indigenous people," and any sentence beginning "indigenous people believe" is already the error. There are the Nisqually Indian Tribe and the Lummi Nation. There is the Menominee Tribal Enterprises board in Neopit, Wisconsin. There is Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, which files audited accounts. There is Warddeken Land Management Limited, which holds carbon contracts under Australian law. There are more than five thousand distinct peoples, most of them with a government, many of them with a balance sheet, and they disagree with one another about economics as thoroughly as Chicago disagrees with Cambridge.

So this chapter does not deal in wisdom traditions. It deals in institutions with documents — treaties, statutes, court judgments, co-management agreements, methodology determinations, audited annual reports — and in the outcomes those institutions can be measured against. Where a claim is famous and unsourced, it is retired here by name and a sourced claim is put in its place. Two of the most repeated numbers in this entire field do not resolve to a primary measurement, and you will find both of them dealt with in the first movement rather than quietly avoided.

The reason for the severity is practical. A textbook that borrows moral authority from peoples it will not cite precisely does them an injury and does its reader one too, because the reader who checks the first citation and finds smoke will not check the second. Precision here is not pedantry. It is the only form of respect that survives being audited.

And the material is strong enough not to need decoration. The institutions in this chapter include the largest fisheries co-management regime in North America, the majority of Australia's national reserve system, a fishing quota holding worth billions, and forests that have been under continuous commercial management since 1854 and hold more timber now than when the cutting began.

— The Editors

DISCOVERY

What is already working

Begin with the two numbers that have to go, because clearing them is part of what works.

The first is "Indigenous peoples protect eighty percent of the world's biodiversity." It appears in agency documents, NGO literature and corporate sustainability reports, usually with no citation, occasionally with a citation to another document that also has none. It does not resolve to a primary measurement, and it could not: there is no global dataset that partitions biodiversity by land tenure in the way the sentence requires, because biodiversity is not a stock that is counted by owner.

What is measured, and measured well, is land. Garnett and colleagues, working across twenty-five institutions and published in Nature Sustainability in 2018, mapped Indigenous peoples' lands at at least 38 million square kilometres in eighty-seven countries — more than a quarter of the world's land surface — intersecting about 40 percent of terrestrial protected areas and of the remaining ecologically intact landscapes. Fa and colleagues followed in 2020 with the intact-forest share. Those are the citations. They are stronger than the folklore they replace, and they have authors.

The second is the speech attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish — the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. The version everyone quotes was written in 1972 by Ted Perry, a screenwriter, for a film produced by the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission. The 1887 newspaper text by Henry A. Smith that it was loosely built on is itself a reconstruction published thirty-three years after the event. Rudolf Kaiser traced the whole chain in

Seattle was a real leader who signed a real treaty with real terms, and

the treaty is the document worth quoting.

Now the institutions.

Pacific Northwest salmon, and the Boldt decision. The Stevens Treaties of 1854 and 1855 — Medicine Creek, Point Elliott, Point No Point, Neah Bay, Quinault River — reserved to the signatory tribes the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds in common with the citizens of the Territory. For a century the state read that as permission to fish under state rules. Nisqually fishermen, Billy Frank Jr. among them, were arrested on the river for exercising it; he was first arrested in 1945 at fourteen. In 1974, in United States v. Washington, Judge George Boldt read "in common with" as what it says — a shared right — and fixed the treaty share at up to 50 percent of the harvestable surplus. The Supreme Court affirmed in 1979.

What followed is the part that is an economic institution rather than a court victory. The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission was constituted in 1974 by the treaty tribes of western Washington — twenty of them, from the Makah at Neah Bay to the Nisqually at the head of the Sound. Seasons are now set jointly each spring with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in a public process called North of Falcon. Tribes run hatcheries, enumeration weirs, genetic stock identification and habitat programmes, and publish their own State of Our Watersheds data. The tribes did not become stakeholders. They became co-managers with a statutory share and their own science budget, which is a different thing and the difference is the whole lesson.

Australia: rangers, protected areas, and fire as a traded commodity. Indigenous Protected Areas are declared voluntarily by Traditional Owners over their own country and managed under their own plans. There are now more than eighty, covering over 87 million hectares — more than half of Australia's entire National Reserve System. They are worked by the Indigenous Rangers Program, which funds on the order of 1,900 ranger positions across about 130 organisations, with a Commonwealth commitment to reach 3,800 positions by 2030.

The commercial layer sits on top of fire. The Nawarddeken of western Arnhem Land and their neighbours re-established early dry-season, patchy, cool burning across roughly 28,000 square kilometres through the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project from 2006, initially under contract to ConocoPhillips to offset the Darwin liquefied natural gas plant. Early burning produces less methane and nitrous oxide than the late-season firestorms that follow an unburnt wet season, and the difference is measurable. Australia turned the method into law: the savanna fire management determinations under the Carbon Farming Initiative and its successor make abatement a tradeable credit, and savanna burning is now one of the largest method categories in the national scheme, with Indigenous organisations owning or partnering the majority of its project area.

Aotearoa New Zealand: settlement capital, compounded. The Waikato Raupatu Claims Settlement Act 1995 and the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 each transferred NZ$170 million in redress. Both iwi built commercial arms — Tainui Group Holdings, Ngāi Tahu Holdings — governed by tribal assemblies and audited to ordinary New Zealand standards. Both now report asset bases in the billions. The Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act 1992 took 50 percent of Sealord, and the Māori Fisheries Act 2004 allocated quota to iwi; Māori interests now hold on the order of 40 percent of New Zealand's commercial fishing quota. And Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 made the Whanganui River a legal person with two guardians, one appointed by the Crown and one by the iwi, and endowed it.

Community forests, where tenure is the variable. In Mexico, roughly 59 percent of forest land is held by ejidos and comunidades, and around a thousand of them run commercial forest enterprises: Ixtlán de Juárez in Oaxaca, Zapotec, about 19,000 hectares with its own sawmill and furniture works; Nuevo San Juan Parangaricutiro in Michoacán, Purépecha, about 18,000 hectares integrating timber and resin. In Nepal, 22,266 Community Forest User Groups manage some 2.24 million hectares on behalf of about 2.9 million households under the Forest Act 1993, over a period in which national forest cover rose from roughly 26 percent to 44.7 percent.

And in Wisconsin, the Menominee have cut their forest continuously since 1854. More than 2.3 billion board feet has come off about 220,000 acres, and the standing sawtimber volume is higher today than when the cutting started. The reservation boundary is visible from orbit.

Five institutions. One pattern: in every case the outcome followed a change in who holds the decision, not a change in who holds the opinion.

And now the cut, because it is not the one you are expecting.

The case for Indigenous-led management is usually made as a case about values. Here is one where it was a case about measurement, and the measurement was wrong by an order of magnitude.

In 1977 the International Whaling Commission set the bowhead strike quota for the Alaskan hunt at zero. The census behind that decision counted whales visually from the ice edge near Utqiaġvik as they passed through the open lead, and put the Bering–Chukchi–Beaufort stock at somewhere between 600 and 2,000 animals. Iñupiaq and Siberian Yupik whaling captains from eleven villages — Utqiaġvik, Point Hope, Wainwright, Nuiqsut, Kaktovik, Gambell, Savoonga, Wales, Kivalina, Little Diomede and Point Lay — said the count was wrong for a reason that had nothing to do with whales and everything to do with ice. Bowheads pass under it, and offshore of the lead, where nobody was looking.

They formed the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and, rather than argue, funded the science. The North Slope Borough stood up a wildlife department. Acoustic arrays were added to the visual count so that animals passing under ice could be heard rather than seen. The estimate rose, and kept rising, and the current accepted abundance for the stock is on the order of 16,800 animals, increasing at about 3.2 percent a year. The 1981 cooperative agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration left the Commission itself allocating strikes among the villages and enforcing its own regulations, with the international body setting only the ceiling.

That is why this sits in a chapter about economics rather than one about whales. The knowledge that corrected the number was not a sentiment about nature. It was a fact about where animals go when the ice is on, held by the only people who were out on the ice, and it was worth roughly an order of magnitude on the input to a decision that would otherwise have closed an economy a thousand years old.

THE ARITHMETIC

What works, what does not, and where the line sits

First, what the Boldt allocation is actually worth, against the counterfactual.

Before 1974 the treaty tribes of western Washington took under 5 percent of the harvest. After Boldt the share is 50 percent of the harvestable surplus. The allocation therefore multiplied the treaty catch by

        0.50 / 0.05  =  10.0x

at any given run size. Now run the counterfactual properly, because a share is not a fish. Let H₀ be the 1974 harvestable surplus and H₁ today's. The post-Boldt catch beats the no-Boldt catch whenever

        0.50 · H₁   >   0.05 · H₀        i.e.   H₁ / H₀  >  0.10

The runs would have to fall to one tenth of their 1974 size before the treaty share was worth less in fish than the share it replaced. They have not. So the ruling remains the single largest transfer of harvest value in the region's history, and its value under any plausible decline is:

  run decline since 1974      treaty catch vs no-Boldt counterfactual
  ------------------------------------------------------------------
        30%                                 7.0x
        50%                                 5.0x
        70%                                 3.0x
        90%                                 1.0x   (break-even)

Second, the honest negative, and it is the most important paragraph in this chapter: a recognised right that is not resourced is an unfunded mandate with a better press release.

The same case that fixed the share also had to decide whether the share implied anything about the fish existing. In the culverts sub-proceeding, the federal court held in 2013 that Washington's road culverts blocking salmon violated the treaty right, and ordered correction of barriers blocking 200 or more linear metres of habitat — about 1,000 state-owned culverts, opening roughly 1,000 miles of stream — by 2030. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2016 and the Supreme Court affirmed by an equally divided court in 2018. The right was recognised three times over.

Then the arithmetic of paying for it. The state's own cost estimate to complete has been revised upward repeatedly, from about $2.4 billion at the time of the appeal to $3.1 billion and beyond, with departmental figures reaching $3.8 billion. Washington's 2022 transportation package, Move Ahead Washington, dedicated on the order of $2.4 billion to fish passage across 16 years — a schedule that ends eight years after the court's deadline.

  funded rate            $2.4bn / 16 yr        =   $150m / yr
  rate required          $3.1bn /  8 yr        =   $387.5m / yr
  funded share of need                             38.7%
  annual shortfall                                 $237.5m / yr
  completion at funded rate   $3.1bn / $150m    =  20.7 yr  ->  2043
  years past the court's deadline                  13

Thirteen years. The right is fifty years old, the habitat duty is a decade old, affirmed by the Supreme Court, and the money arrives on a schedule that finishes more than a decade after the date the court set. That is the documented shape of devolution without resourcing, and it is not unusual. In Australia the same arithmetic appears as a per-position figure: the 2021 commitment of about $746 million over 11 years to reach 1,900 rangers is, averaged, $67.8 million a year, or roughly $35,700 per funded position per year — an average across a ramping profile, and well under the fully loaded cost of a ranger with a vehicle in remote country. The gap is made up from carbon revenue, which is why the carbon method matters so much and why a ranger group without one is fragile.

Third, the carbon arithmetic, where the counterfactual is written into the statute.

The savanna method is unusual and instructive: it defines the counterfactual explicitly as a rolling ten-year pre-project emissions baseline, so abatement is measured against what the same country emitted before the fire regime changed. The West Arnhem contract was 100,000 tonnes CO₂-e per year for 17 years, or 1.7 million tonnes, for about A$1 million a year:

  contract price     A$1,000,000 / 100,000 t   =   A$10.00 / t CO2-e
  at a A$35/t credit price                         A$3,500,000 / yr
  uplift                                                    3.5x
  abatement intensity  100,000 t / 2,800,000 ha =  0.036 t/ha/yr

The 2006 bilateral price was a tenth of nothing much and a third of what the same tonne trades at now. The people who did the work took the price risk and the buyer took the certainty, which is the standard shape of a first contract into a market that does not yet exist, and it is worth naming so the next one is written differently.

Fourth, settlement capital against its counterfactual. Ngāi Tahu received NZ$170 million in 1998. Its audited accounts have since reported net assets above NZ$1.5 billion — take that conservative floor over 25 years:

  compound rate   (1500/170)^(1/25) - 1        =   9.1% / yr
  counterfactual: NZ$170m at 5% for 25 yr      =   NZ$575.6m
  difference                                       NZ$924.4m
  multiple of the counterfactual                   2.6x

Waikato-Tainui, from the same NZ$170 million in 1995 to above NZ$1 billion, compounds at 6.5 percent a year over 28 years. And the figure that reframes the whole settlement debate: the Māori asset base was estimated at NZ$68.7 billion for 2018, against accumulated Treaty redress on the order of NZ$2.6 billion — 3.8 percent. The settlements did not create the Māori economy. They returned a fraction of a base and removed a constraint on it.

Fifth, the cut's own arithmetic, because a corrected input deserves one. Against the 1977 band, the accepted estimate is

  16,800 / 2,000  =   8.4x        16,800 / 600  =  28.0x

and the sustainability question is settled by comparing the take with the recruitment, not with the stock:

  annual recruitment    16,800 x 3.2%          =   537.6 whales / yr
  landed, typical year                             50 whales / yr
  take as share of stock   50 / 16,800         =   0.30%
  take as share of recruitment  50 / 537.6     =   9.3%
  at the strike ceiling of 67                      12.5% of recruitment

A hunt that takes under a tenth of the annual recruitment is not what was limiting that population, and a census that missed nine tenths of it was.

And the negative that applies to all four. None of this works without tenure. The Rights and Resources Initiative's global baseline finds Indigenous peoples and local communities customarily holding more than 50 percent of the world's land while holding legally recognised rights to about 10 percent — a 5.0x gap and 40 percentage points. Every outcome in this chapter sits on the recognised side of that line. The mechanism is not a culture. It is a title, a share, a court that will enforce it, and a budget. Remove any one and the outcomes do not reproduce.

DREAM

What becomes ordinary

In the version of this that has happened, a co-management agreement is a financing document as well as a governance one, and nobody signs the second half without the first.

The share and the money move together. When a court, a statute or a treaty recognises a right of decision, the instrument that carries it names the operating cost of exercising that decision, the source of the money, and the date the funding reaches the rate the obligation requires. A ranger group, a fisheries commission or a guardian programme opens its year knowing its budget for the next decade, because the budget sits in an endowment with a published draw rate rather than in a three-year grant that has to be re-argued by people who should be counting fish.

The science is held by the people who hold the ground. The North Slope Borough's wildlife department, the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission's genetics lab, Warddeken's fire-scar mapping — these are not consultations, they are institutions with instruments, and a regulator that wants a number goes to them for it and pays the going rate. When a state agency and a tribal agency disagree about an abundance estimate, the disagreement is resolved the way science resolves disagreements, and both parties expect to be wrong sometimes.

Carbon, water, fish and biodiversity contracts are written with the price risk where the capital is, not where the labour is. First contracts into new markets carry a ratchet: if the credit trades above the contract price, the producer takes a stated share of the difference. Nobody has to be generous for this to happen. It is a clause, and the clause is in the template because a previous generation of contracts did not have one and everybody saw what that cost.

Balance sheets carry the stock. An iwi holding company, a tribal enterprise, a ranger corporation reports its natural capital position alongside its financial one — standing timber volume, spawner escapement, fire-scar seasonality, hectares under plan — and the auditors have an opinion on it, because a stock that is audited is a stock that can be borrowed against.

And the phrase traditional ecological knowledge has quietly stopped appearing in the passive voice. It is cited like any other body of knowledge, with the holder's name on it, and it is paid for.

DESIGN

The structure that gets there

Five components, in the order they have to be built, because each one makes the next one cheap.

1. The recognised right, specified as a share or a veto, not as consultation. A right to be consulted is a right to be told. The institutions in this chapter all rest on something harder: a numerical share of a harvest, a declared protected area under the holder's own plan, a title, a legal personality with appointed guardians, a treaty enforceable in a court that has already enforced it. Write the number into the instrument. Up to 50 percent of the harvestable surplus is an operable sentence. Meaningful engagement is not.

2. The counting institution, funded before the first dispute. Every durable arrangement here has a science and enumeration body owned by the rights-holder: the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, Warddeken's mapping unit, the Menominee forestry department. Fund it before you need it. A rights-holder who arrives at a regulatory hearing with their own time series arrives as a party; one who arrives with a position arrives as a stakeholder.

3. The habitat or stock obligation, with its cost schedule attached. This is the component most often missing and it is the one the culverts case exposes. A share of a declining stock is a smaller share every year. So the agreement that sets the share must also set the obligation on the party that controls the habitat, and the funding rate that discharges it inside the deadline. The test is arithmetic and it takes one line: divide the estimated cost by the years remaining and compare it to the appropriation. If the appropriation is smaller, the deadline is decorative.

4. The revenue method, so the institution is not a grant recipient. Savanna fire abatement, quota, timber, tourism concessions, carbon, water. The method must be one the rights-holder can operate without a broker taking the margin, which means the methodology determination, the registry account and the verification relationship all sit with them. Warddeken and its neighbours own their projects. That is the difference between revenue and a fee.

5. The endowment, sized to the operating cost. Grants expire, endowments draw. The Great Bear Rainforest agreements capitalised Coast Funds at C$120 million in 2007 — C$60 million philanthropic, C$30 million federal, C$30 million provincial — split between a conservation endowment and an economic development fund, and Coast Funds has since reported more than C$130 million invested across four hundred-odd projects and over a thousand permanent jobs. The Great Bear Sea agreement of 2024 repeated the structure at C$335 million. This is the component that converts a right into an institution, and it is the subject of the last movement.

The sequence matters and it is not the obvious one. Most programmes begin at component four, because revenue is the part a funder understands. Begun there, the rights-holder becomes a contractor. Begun at component one, with two and three attached, component four is something they sell rather than something they are given.

DESTINY

How it holds when nobody is pushing

It holds when the counting is theirs, the money is endowed, and the obligation on the other party has a date and a rate.

It fails in four ways, each documented.

It fails when the share is recognised and the habitat is not. Fifty percent of nothing is nothing, and the culvert arithmetic above is the measured form of it. The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission said this in Treaty Rights at Risk in 2011 and has repeated it in every State of Our Watersheds since: habitat is being lost faster than restoration replaces it.

It fails when responsibility is devolved and authority is not. In Yahey v. British Columbia in 2021 the court found the Province had breached Treaty 8 with Blueberry River First Nations through the cumulative effect of decades of permits, each individually approved, none assessed together. The Nation held a treaty right the whole time. What it did not hold was a say in the permitting rate. The 2023 implementation agreement that followed attached restoration money and a planning role — which is the remedy naming the disease.

It fails on funding cycles shorter than the asset. A ranger group on a three-year contract cannot hire a twenty-five-year-old and keep them to fifty. A fire regime takes a decade to shift and the mapping to prove it takes longer. Short cycles convert an institution into a series of applications, and the people writing applications are the people who should be on country.

It fails when the knowledge is taken and the holder is not paid. The extractive version of this movement is a researcher, a consultancy or a textbook that harvests a practice, publishes it, and leaves. The Firelight Group's model — Indigenous-directed research, community-owned data, published under the community's name — exists because the alternative was the norm. The test is ownership of the dataset, and it is asked at the start or not at all.

DELIGHT

What it feels like

There is a specific pleasure in a boundary you can see from space. The Menominee line in northern Wisconsin is one of them: dense closed canopy on one side, fragments on the other, and the difference is a hundred and seventy years of a community deciding annually not to take the extra cut. Nobody stood over them. They simply kept counting, and the counting became a forest.

There is a quieter pleasure in the North of Falcon room in March, which is not a romantic place. It is a hotel conference space with bad coffee, laptops and argument, and two sets of biologists disagreeing about a run size using the same model. The delight is in the ordinariness. A right that was won at Frank's Landing with arrests is now exercised in a spreadsheet, and that is what winning looks like when it has finished being dramatic.

And there is the fire. The early dry season in western Arnhem Land smells particular, and the burns move slowly enough to walk beside. The country that was burning in October firestorms now burns in May in patches you can step across, and somewhere in a registry in Canberra that difference is a number with a price. The oldest continuous land management practice on earth now has an account number. People find that funny, and they are right to.

OPERATIONALIZE THIS

At the level of finance

The instrument: a project finance for permanence agreement, closing a conservation endowment against a governance transfer.

This is the structure behind the Great Bear Rainforest, Thaidene Nëné and the Great Bear Sea. It is not philanthropy with a plaque. It is a single simultaneous close in which every party signs at once: the Indigenous government, the state, the federal government and the philanthropic funders. The governance transfer and the capital land together, which is the entire point — it is the structural answer to the culvert arithmetic.

The structure.

Two funds, not one. A perpetual conservation endowment sized to the operating cost of the management institution, and a separate economic development fund that can take risk. Coast Funds split C$120 million evenly. Different mandates, different draw rules, different boards.
The single close. No tranche releases before the governance instrument is executed. Funders often want staged release; stage the spending, never the close, because a staged close returns the leverage to the party that already has it.
Counterparties. The Indigenous government or its holding entity as recipient and manager; the provincial or state government for the land and tenure instrument; the national government for matching capital and, where relevant, fisheries or carbon jurisdiction; two or more philanthropic funders so no single one holds a veto.
Balance-sheet treatment. The endowment is a restricted permanent fund on the Indigenous entity's statements, with the annual draw recognised as operating revenue. It is not deferred income and it is not a grant liability. The land or tenure interest is a separate recognition question and it is worth paying for the opinion early. Where a carbon method is in play, the credits are inventory with a measurable net realisable value, and an audited inventory is borrowable against — which is how the endowment becomes leverage rather than a ceiling.
Term. Perpetual for the endowment. Ten years minimum for the development fund. The governance instrument does not have a term; that is what permanence means.

The number that decides it. One line, and it belongs on the front page of the term sheet:

        endowment corpus  x  real draw rate   >=   annual operating cost
                                                   of the management
                                                   institution

Everything else is negotiable and this is not. Worked for a guardian programme of thirty positions at a fully loaded C$95,000 each:

  annual operating cost    30 x C$95,000       =   C$2,850,000 / yr
  at a 4.0% real draw      2,850,000 / 0.040   =   C$71,250,000 corpus
  at a 3.5% real draw      2,850,000 / 0.035   =   C$81,428,571 corpus

A half-point on the draw rate is C$10.2 million of corpus. Negotiate the draw rate before the headline number, because the headline number is what the press release says and the draw rate is what the programme lives on.

The first ninety days.

Days	Action	Artifact
1–15	Size the management institution: positions, vehicles, science, overhead	The operating cost model
16–30	Fix the real draw rate with the trustee; derive the corpus	The corpus requirement, one line
31–45	Map the governance instrument — what decision transfers, under whose plan	Draft governance term sheet
46–60	Assemble counterparties; confirm two independent philanthropic funders	Signed expressions of interest
61–75	Cost schedule for the other party's habitat or restoration obligation	Obligation and rate schedule
76–90	Single-close term sheet, all parties, one signing date	The term sheet with one close date

What to refuse. A staged close. A draw rate set by the funder. A dataset held by anyone but the community. A deadline without an appropriation rate beside it. Each of those has a measured failure in the record above, and each is easier to refuse in week two than in year six.

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS

Twelve, for a room

Discovery — what is already working

Where in our own dealings has a rights-holder's own count been better than ours, and what happened in the room when that became clear?
Which of our agreements already names a number — a share, a rate, a hectare — rather than a process, and what has that number let both sides do?
Who in this arrangement currently owns the data, and when did we last say that out loud?

Dream — what becomes possible

If the funding for every obligation we have recognised arrived at the rate the obligation requires, what would we start doing next month?
Imagine our partners' institution ten years from now, funded from an endowment rather than from us. What does it do that it cannot do today?
If our contracts carried a price ratchet so the producer shared the upside, which of our existing contracts would we most want to rewrite first?

Design — what we build

What is the smallest decision we could transfer this year that would still be a real transfer?
What would it cost to fund our partners' counting institution before the next dispute rather than during it, and who has that signature?
Which of our deadlines currently has no funding rate beside it, and what would the honest completion year be if we divided the cost by the appropriation?

Destiny — how it holds

What would keep this running if every person in this room left, and which of those things is written down?
Where is our funding cycle shorter than the asset it is meant to manage, and what is the longest cycle we could actually commit to?
What would be the first visible sign that responsibility had been devolved without authority, and who would see it first?

WORKS CITED

Treaty of Medicine Creek (1854), Treaty of Point Elliott (1855), Treaty of Point No Point (1855), Treaty of Neah Bay (1855), Treaty of Olympia / Quinault River (1855–56). United States Statutes at Large.

United States v. Washington, 384 F. Supp. 312 (W.D. Wash. 1974).

Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association, 443 U.S. 658 (1979).

United States v. Washington (culverts sub-proceeding), 827 F.3d 836 (9th Cir. 2016), affirmed by an equally divided Court, Washington v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 1832 (2018).

Wilkinson, C. F. (2000). Messages from Frank's Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way. University of Washington Press.

Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (2011). Treaty Rights at Risk: Ongoing Habitat Loss, the Decline of the Salmon Resource, and Recommendations for Change.

Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. State of Our Watersheds Report. Successive editions.

Washington State Department of Transportation. Fish Passage Performance Report. Annual editions, and the fish passage provisions of Move Ahead Washington (2022).

Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Cooperative Agreement, 1981 and successive renewals.

International Whaling Commission. Schedule, aboriginal subsistence whaling catch limits for the Bering–Chukchi–Beaufort Seas stock of bowhead whales.

George, J. C., Zeh, J., Suydam, R. and Clark, C. (2004). "Abundance and population trend (1978–2001) of western Arctic bowhead whales surveyed near Barrow, Alaska." Marine Mammal Science, 20(4), 755–773.

Huntington, H. P. (2000). "Using Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Science: Methods and Applications." Ecological Applications, 10(5), 1270–1274.

Russell-Smith, J., Whitehead, P. and Cooke, P. (eds) (2009). Culture, Ecology and Economy of Fire Management in North Australian Savannas: Rekindling the Wurrk Tradition. CSIRO Publishing.

Russell-Smith, J., Cook, G. D., Cooke, P., Edwards, A. C., Lendrum, M., Meyer, C. P. and Whitehead, P. J. (2013). "Managing fire regimes in north Australian savannas: applying Aboriginal approaches to contemporary global problems." Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 11(s1), e55–e63.

Australian Government, Clean Energy Regulator. Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative — Emissions Abatement through Savanna Fire Management) Methodology Determination, 2015 and 2018, and the project register.

National Indigenous Australians Agency. Indigenous Rangers Program and Indigenous Protected Areas programme documentation.

Social Ventures Australia Consulting (2016). Consolidated Report on Indigenous Protected Areas Following Social Return on Investment Analyses. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Waikato Raupatu Claims Settlement Act 1995 (NZ).

Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 (NZ).

Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act 1992 (NZ); Māori Fisheries Act 2004 (NZ).

Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (NZ).

Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. Annual Report. Successive years.

Waikato-Tainui / Tainui Group Holdings. Annual Report. Successive years.

Business and Economic Research Limited (2021). Te Ōhanga Māori 2018: The Māori Economy. Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

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Note on figures. Every figure in this chapter and its apparatus is computed in lib/verify/VII_07.py and printed there with its inputs, units and source. Allocation shares, statutory thresholds, treaty and settlement quanta, programme counts, contract terms and published abundance estimates are quoted from the instruments and reports named above and are labelled INPUT; the counterfactual ratios, the culvert funding rate and completion year, the compound growth rates, the abatement price and the endowment corpus requirement are computed. The seven-generation attribution question is treated in Chapter IV.09 and is not re-argued here.