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The institutional frameworks that Indigenous groups put in place to govern economic processes within their communities are critical to the advancement of their diverse cultural-ecological, social, and economic development goals. Through the lens of institutional logics, this article examines the ways in which First Nations community sawmill enterprises in British Columbia, Canada, navigate the sectoral demands brought by a productivist paradigm of forestry. We find that First Nations community sawmill enterprises represent spaces of both logical tension and innovation where conflicts that arise between dominant “commercial” logics and culturally legitimate “Indigenous” logics can be reconciled. Through this analysis, this article offers an empirical example of the emergence of Indigenous institutional frameworks, as well as a contribution to the growing body of literature that addresses the ways in which hybrid organizations can and do navigate and overcome conflicting institutional logics.

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This paper uses the example of First Nations housing in British Columbia to explore how culturally legitimate community economies are being advanced to overcome the deficiencies of top-down, state-led housing efforts and market relations. Through the lens of the diverse economy, we highlight how First Nations community institutions can and do serve to oversee the utilization of territorial forest resources for the production and distribution of housing materials locally. The findings point towards First Nations communities navigating (often in latent ways) complex sites of decision-making through: ethical negotiations related to (de)commoditization; needs and surplus evaluation; and transactions and rules of (in) commensurability. While these examples appear to challenge the conventional logics of capitalist-market institutions, First Nations communities also must contend with the many structural barricades to change that exist within the settler-colonial institutional framework.

In Canada, the advance of industrial resource extraction has been moderated by a series of key legal decisions that have found that development activities within the traditional territories of Indigenous Nations may infringe on Aboriginal and treaty rights, requiring a duty to consult and potentially accommodate those affected. In British Columbia this duty is primarily satisfied through the Crown referrals process, whereby affected First Nation groups are notified by the Crown regarding potential rights-affecting decisions and are given an opportunity to formulate a response. This form of institutionalized engagement presents an ongoing challenge for First Nation groups who struggle to manage the influx of Crown referrals, as well as a dilemma for those who question its fairness and inherent colonial structure. For others, it is seen as an opportunity to leverage the duty to consult and accommodate in order to strengthen territorial self-governance. In this paper we introduce the idea of counter-institutionalizing and explore the conditions under which the Crown referrals process is being redrawn to better address, and not, the ability of First Nation groups to improve territorial self-governance and the trade-offs involved.