This comprehensive toolkit from Future Cities Canada provides practical guidance for municipalities, urban planners, and civic institutions seeking to build genuine partnerships with Indigenous community based on respect, reciprocity, and recognition of sovereignty. Unlike superficial consultation approaches, the toolkit centers indigenous-led placekeeping—ongoing relationship with and care for land—as foundation for meaningful collaboration. Grounded in reconciliation principles and developed through extensive engagement with Indigenous partners, the resource offers frameworks, case studies, and actionable practices for non-Indigenous institutions learning to work in right relationship with the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional territories they operate.
Key Highlights
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Placekeeping vs. Placemaking: The toolkit distinguishes indigenous placekeeping (ongoing relationship and care for land rooted in millennia of presence) from settler placemaking (creating new places through development). This reframes urban development as entering into relationship with lands that have always been cared for rather than “creating” community from scratch.
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Sovereignty and Self-Determination: Unlike consultation models that maintain colonial power structures, the toolkit emphasizes indigenous sovereignty and self-determination—recognizing Indigenous community’ inherent rights to govern their lands and make decisions affecting their territories rather than merely being “consulted” within settler frameworks.
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Land as Relationship: The resource centers understanding land not as property or resource but as kin—alive, sacred, and in reciprocal relationship with human and more-than-human community. This relational understanding fundamentally shifts how urban planning and development can proceed ethically.
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Reconciliation as Ongoing Practice: The toolkit frames reconciliation not as event or achievement but as ongoing commitment requiring institutional transformation, power redistribution, and accountability. It provides practical frameworks for long-term relationship-building rather than checkbox diversity initiatives.
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Multiple Partnership Models: The work documents diverse partnership structures from different Canadian contexts, showing how meaningful collaboration takes context-specific forms rather than universal templates. Case studies demonstrate both successes and ongoing challenges with honesty.
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Addressing Power Imbalances: Unlike neutral partnership rhetoric, the toolkit explicitly addresses power differentials between well-resourced municipalities and often underfunded Indigenous community, providing guidance for resource sharing, capacity building, and structural changes to equalize relationships.
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Protocols and Cultural Safety: The resource includes guidance on indigenous protocols, cultural safety, and trauma-informed approaches—helping non-Indigenous practitioners understand responsibilities when engaging with communities experiencing ongoing colonial violence.
Practical Applications
This toolkit enables immediate implementation across civic contexts:
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Municipal governments can use the frameworks to transform consultation processes into genuine partnership models that recognize indigenous sovereignty, redistribute decision-making power, and resource indigenous-led initiatives rather than merely gathering input
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Urban planners and developers can apply placekeeping principles to development projects, centering relationship with land and indigenous stewardship knowledge rather than imposing settlement patterns that ignore thousands of years of care and relationship
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Community organizations can reference the toolkit when advocating for indigenous-led approaches to local initiatives, using the documented case studies to show decision-makers that alternative models exist and work
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Funders and foundations can implement the power-balancing recommendations to shift resources toward indigenous-led work, address capacity imbalances, and restructure grant processes to respect indigenous governance and timescales
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Environmental and conservation organizations can integrate indigenous placekeeping knowledge into land stewardship, recognizing that ecological health in many regions depends on renewing indigenous relationships with territory
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Educational institutions can adapt the reconciliation frameworks for campus planning and community engagement, addressing how universities occupy unceded territories and can support indigenous self-determination through land and resource sharing
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Cross-sector initiatives can use the partnership models to structure collaboration that centers indigenous leadership, redistributes power, and commits to long-term accountability rather than extractive engagement
The toolkit’s combination of principles, practical frameworks, and honest case studies makes it immediately applicable while maintaining necessary complexity.
Connection With SuperBenefit
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The toolkit’s distinction between placekeeping (ongoing indigenous relationship with land) and settler placemaking challenges SuperBenefit to recognize that regenerative coordination must honor existing relationships with territory rather than imposing new structures—suggesting that bioregional organizing and place-based work requires entering into relationship with lands already cared for through millennia of indigenous stewardship, not creating coordination systems from scratch.
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Provides practical frameworks for power redistribution and resource sharing that ground SuperBenefit’s commitment to decolonial practice in concrete actions beyond consultation, showing how meaningful partnership requires institutional transformation, capacity building, and recognizing indigenous sovereignty rather than merely including indigenous voices in predetermined Web3 governance structures.
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The reconciliation-as-ongoing-practice framing challenges SuperBenefit to understand decolonization as continuous accountability and relationship-building rather than achieved state, informing how regenerative projects must address complicity with colonial systems through sustained commitment to land back, sovereignty support, and structural change.
Related Concepts
- Community - Local and network organizing
- Coordination - Mechanisms for collective action
- Governance - Decision-making and leadership frameworks
- Culture - Values and practices shaping coordination
- Sustainability - Regenerative community approaches