Northern scholar wants to make land claim agreements more reader-friendly

Land claim settlement agreements can be full of legal jargon and complex writing, but Marlisa Brown said she has an idea of how to make them more accessible.

Her policy research paper Reconnecting to Our Relations: The Need for Formal Land Claim and Self-Government Education in the Northwest Territories, looks at the current resources in place aimed at helping people better understand self-government and land claim agreements and gives policy recommendations to further support this.

One of the recommendations is to digitize land claims and self-government agreements to make them more accessible to people. She also suggests creating or supporting summer student and internship positions and creating a centre for Northern Indigenous Governance within Aurora College.

The paper was published in May as part of The Jane Glassco Northern Fellowship.

Brown, who is Gwich'in, born in Inuvik, N.W.T., and raised in Yellowknife, is in the fifth — and latest — cohort of fellows.

It's an 18-month policy and leadership development program for northerners between the ages of 25 to 35. It's built around four regional gatherings, and offers training, mentorship and networking opportunities. The website says the fellows are recognized to have leadership potential and to be "eager to address policy challenges facing the North."

She said her policy paper really stems from her own upbringing.

"I've heard countless times from community members and my own family just really encouraging me to read the claim and that it is important to know about," Brown said. "It really instilled this yearning inside myself to get the agreement and read it."

She had the chance to read it when she was gifted one from her mom in her mid-teens. But it was a struggle to get through, she said.

"I felt really stuck. And at that time, I wasn't really aware of sort of like the nature of the agreements being a legal agreement," she said.

"It felt really frustrating and discouraging trying to read it and not really fully understanding what it was or how to sort of approach reading it in the first place."

But instead of the challenge stopping her, she pushed herself to understand it better. She said it particularly piqued her interest at the time with self-government negotiations coming up.

With no programs that touched this topic when she arrived in university, she set out to find a way to make this part of her future career.

For her recent paper, Brown spoke to people that were part of the modern Treaty Negotiations, implementation or worked on treaty education.