Graham White's Indigenous Empowerment through Co-management: Land Claims Boards, Wildlife Management, and Environmental Regulation is an impressively detailed analysis of a relatively new political institution in Canada: the land claims board. Stemming from comprehensive land claims agreements—also known as final agreements or modern treaties—between First Nations, territorial governments and the federal government, claims boards are very much emergent political institutions. The federal government embarked upon a comprehensive land claims process in the 1970s with First Nations whose Aboriginal rights and title had not been recognized via historical treaty or other legal means. Most claims boards—which have jurisdiction over land use planning, environmental assessment and wildlife management—were established through this process in the 1990s, although some are just getting started.

Land claims boards have received little attention from political scientists, which White seeks to remedy. Indigenous Empowerment through Co-management explores just that: the extent to which Indigenous peoples are, in fact, empowered by claims boards and can exercise influence through them. White examines the 30+ boards that are mandated under final agreements in the territorial North of Canada: Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Despite their relative newness, White argues, claims boards are significant for incorporating Indigenous peoples into Canada's governing structures and for promoting and protecting Indigenous worldviews within Canadian federalism.

The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 consists of two chapters that outline the conceptual frameworks for the work—treaty federalism and co-management—and contextualize claims boards within the socio-political milieu of the territorial North. Part 2 presents a series of four case studies of claims boards and their operations in Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The case studies focus primarily on detailing operations and are presented as stand-alone cases. White systematically presents the operation of each board, including its governing structure, board members, financial structure and key events. These stand-alone narratives make for an uncomplicated read of what are complex proceedings and incidents, many of which are nuanced and particular to specific claims boards, their members and their socio-political and cultural context. The breadth and depth of the case studies represent a substantial and generous contribution to the field. Drawing on a wide range of written and interview sources, White weaves together rich case studies that shed light on his central question: Have claims boards “been effective in ensuring substantial Indigenous influence over policies affecting the land and wildlife of traditional territories?” (4).

Part 3, which makes up the book's final three chapters, offers an analysis of the case study findings, largely organized around three subthemes that operationalize the concept of “substantial Indigenous influence”: Indigenous representation on boards, the actual power of boards and the incorporation of traditional knowledge into board operations. In discussing the first subtheme, White demonstrates through statistical evidence that “invariably half or more—sometimes a good deal more” of board members are Indigenous (17). His discussion of power is more complex. Claims boards are legal entities that have quasi-constitutional status, making them markedly more powerful than co-management boards not sanctioned by final agreements. Ultimately, however, they put recommendations forward to government, which has the final decision-making power. Given this limit, White argues, board independence ultimately hinges upon tripartite cooperation and trust among First Nations, territorial and federal governments and a shared practice of transparency that can head off possible threats to independence.

The most central and difficult subtheme involves the extent to which boards have incorporated traditional knowledge into their operations. If Indigenous peoples are to exert genuine influence, then board structures, procedures and operations need to reflect their worldviews and modes of thought. While boards are formally mandated to incorporate traditional knowledge, White finds that fulfilling this mandate is proving challenging, in part because the nature of the modern bureaucratic state “put[s] firm limits on just how far such efforts can go” (296). Yet he maintains that the overall record is positive. Although boards are deeply challenged by working with traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) systems, many are committed and have “made important strides towards incorporating TEK ideas and methods into key elements of their work” (295). Claims boards, White argues, are on a positive trajectory and “through community involvement, traditional knowledge, and the personal perspectives of board members, substantial Indigenous influence does exist” (298).

White's book clearly demonstrates the nuances and complexities of co-management and extends our understanding of treaty federalism within a fledgling modern treaty regime. However, alternative perspectives rooted in Indigenous theory challenge elements of his analysis. Given Canada's colonial past (and present) and a modern treaty politics in which Indigenous nations must extinguish their Aboriginal title to the majority of their territories in exchange for the recognition of rights, the question arises: Is genuine power-sharing—ostensibly a core element of co-management—currently possible? White argues that there is no viable alternative to co-management. Yet Indigenous scholars, artists and practitioners are actively creating and enacting alternatives (albeit on localized scales), the full impact of which has yet to be seen. In addition, White's use of the term “Euro-Canadian” instead of “settler” obscures the way that settler colonialism operates, as it clouds the intentions—and institutions—of the settler state as benevolent in relation to Indigenous peoples.

These considerations speak to a larger question: How does continued settler colonialism affect the operation of modern treaty governance structures? Analyzing Indigenous influence on boards, for example, must take into consideration Indigenous communities’ continued battle with poverty, substance abuse, domestic and gender-based violence, racism and myriad challenges navigating the education and health systems—all symptoms of settler colonialism. In addition, many of the Indigenous nations within the territorial North practised matrilineal and matriarchal governance systems prior to the imposition of the Indian Act. Yet, as White notes, women—Indigenous women specifically—have very low representation on claims boards. Women both hold and enact Indigenous governance values and are part and parcel to traditional governance systems, but first the Indian Act and now, arguably, modern treaty processes erode their centrality.

Readers seeking empirical research on the nuances of claims board governance as an extension of modern treaty governance will wholeheartedly welcome White's contribution. Certainly, political scientists, an intended audience of this book, will greatly appreciate and uphold its empirical analysis of the operations of this new tripartite institution in Canada. In pursuit of equity, though, I wonder about the accessibility of this style of text for everyday Indigenous peoples—community members, hunters, cultural practitioners, aunties, youth, and so on. They are the potential claims board members and/or active participants in their nations’ governance systems: What of their education, awareness and further empowerment? How might Indigenous Empowerment through Co-management be presented, disseminated or shared otherwise in order to benefit the peoples and communities in real need of the findings this work presents?