This essay charts the shifting assemblage of the conduct of state, corporate, and Indigenous authority through four historical moments: mercantilism, settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and corporate reconciliation. With reference to Gitxsan territories, it makes a series of interrelated arguments. The development of colonial territorial claims and regimes of governance overlapped pre-existent and ongoing Indigenous territorial relationships. The historical division between the political and economic domain reshaped the relationship between state and corporate authorities, the state deferring to corporate actors to manage relations in the economic domain. The conduct of state and corporate authorities has constrained and modified the exercise of Indigenous jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Indigenous resurgence has opened space for renegotiating the colonial legal order, including relations between extractive resource companies and Indigenous authorities. Emergent corporate practices of contracting with Indigenous authorities over development, however, reflect a reconfiguration rather than rupture of the settler colonial legal order. Corporate-Indigenous agreements rely upon colonial modes of organizing lawful political and economic conduct, and continue to block more radical and anti-colonial expressions of Indigenous jurisdiction. To expand possibilities for articulating forms of Indigenous jurisdiction that refuse the categories of colonial political economy, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between colonial state and corporate authority.
HISTORICIZING THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN STATE, CORPORATE, AND INDIGENOUS AUTHORITIES ON GITXSAN LANDS