Chapter 7: “Building a Ladder of Arrows: Re-Storying Partnership through The War with the Sky People”

This chapter takes up the question of what kinds of economic cooperation are necessary in the projects of truth and reconciliation in Canada today. In particular, the question of how to reimagine respectful business relationships in the matrices of colonial laws and Indigenous legal orders that coexist across kinship, transformation and time. The chapter begins by setting the 2015 vision of “partnership” offered by the Prime Minister of Canada in conversation with the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and British Columbia’s partnership laws. It then moves into a close and careful reading of the Secwépemc story The War with the Sky People in order to contextualize the myriad ways that responsibility, leadership, community, kinship, intervention, repair, success and story are integral to what it means to do public-private partnership in postcolonial times. By engaging with the conflicts between the Bird, Fish and Sky peoples, a diversity of governance and community ways of being and knowing sits at the heart of this reimagination. The chapter models that the intellectual and affective work of building meaningful partnerships — within families, in business structures and intersocietally — requires a genuine openness to legal pluralism in order to decolonize our current patterns of business storytelling.