Values In Transition

Arrived in today's mail:

Galit Sarfaty, Values In Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank (Stanford Studies in Human Rights)

The World Bank is the largest lender to developing countries, making loans worth over $20 billion per year to finance development projects around the globe. To guide its investments, the Bank has adopted a number of social and environmental policies, yet it has never instituted any overarching policy on human rights. Despite the potential human rights impact of Bank projects—the forced displacement of indigenous peoples resulting from a Bank-financed dam project, for example—the issue of human rights remains marginal in the Bank's operational practices.

Values in Translation analyzes the organizational culture of the World Bank and addresses the question of why it has not adopted a human rights framework. Academics and social advocates have typically focused on legal restrictions in the Bank's Articles of Agreement. This work's anthropological analysis sheds light on internal obstacles including the employee incentive system and a clash of expertise between lawyers and economists over how to define human rights and justify their relevance to the Bank's mission.

Indians in Madison's Constitutional Order

This paper is now online. One of the two epigraphs is one of my favorite Madison quotes:

‘‘What’’—they [the Indians] may say—‘‘have we to do with the Federal Constitution, or the relations formed by it between the Union and its members? We were no parties to the compact and cannot be affected by it.’’ And as to a charter of the King of England—is it not as much a mockery to them, as the bull of a Pope dividing a world of discovery between the Spaniards and Portuguese, was held to be by the nations who disowned and disdained his authority?

Hither and yon, down under

Rationalism, Pluralism, and Hayek's History of Liberal Thought, The Centre for Independent Studies, Level 4, 38 Oxley St, St Leonards, Sydney 2065, 17 August 2011, 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm

Conference, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, University of Western Sydney, 18-20 August 2011. Paper: "Indigenous Rights, Modern Political Concepts, and the State."

More on Cobell

First of all, good for the Obama administration for conducting serious settlement talks and not stonewalling in the way the Clinton and Bush administrations did so relentlessly.

Second: the $3.4 billion headline figure for the settlement is misleading.

$1.4 billion will go to the plaintiffs. I think this is on the low end of conscionability: better than nothing, but nothing to be especially proud of on the government's part. I do think that the Clinton and Bush administrations bequeathed the Obama administration an exhausted plaintiff and plaintiff class, willing to settle for much less than they should have received.

$2 billion will go to a related cause: cleaning up the inalienable fractionated property holdings that plague Indian Country. Those fractionated interests contributed to the Individual Indian Monies accounts problem-- the accounting becomes more of an administrative nightmare with every generation. And buying up the fractionated interests will put some cash into the pockets of many of the people whose IIM accounts were mishandled. But it's not compensation or restitution; it doesn't make whole the past losses.

Third: that repurchase fund is nonetheless a very good thing, and may carry economic benefits for Indian Country far beyond its cost. The insane regime of property law imposed on Indian Country during allotment and its aftermath is extremely inefficient, and makes it very hard to put a lot of land to economically productive use. The costs of the status quo aren't just the administrative costs mentioned by the Times:

For example, one 40-acre parcel today has 439 owners, most of whom receive less than $1 a year in income from it, Mr. Haynes said. The parcel is valued at about $20,000, but it costs the government more than $40,000 a year to administer those trusts.

That system also results in astronomical transaction costs that interfere with anything that anyone might want to do with that land. It can't be developed beyond the resource-extraction that generates a couple of hundred dollars per year in revenue. It can't be built on without the consent of 400+ owners; can't be consolidated into large parcels that are more efficient for farming or ranching; can't be subdivided into smaller parcels that are more efficient for housing. (And, just to emphasize the point: the interests are inalienable. No one owner can buy out the other 438.) It's economically dead land, and the foregone development possibilities are huge.

There's no reason the repurchase of fractionated interests had to be tied to the Cobell settlement, and it shouldn't really count as part of the settlement. But it's well worth doing, and in the long term could pay significant dividends.

Cobell: A look back

I wrote about the Cobell litigation, a tentative settlement for which was announced today, back in my very first piece for The New Republic online, about seven years ago. It's been lost down the archive black hole at TNR, but thanks to this copy at the Wayback Machine I can reproduce it here.

DAILY EXPRESS
Broken Trust
by Jacob T. Levy

Only at TNR Online | Post date 01.29.03

In its dollar magnitude, it's almost certainly the biggest case of financial mismanagement in U.S. history. While a final tally is years away, in part because of suspiciously lost or missing documents, there's good reason to think that the dollar figures will dwarf WorldCom's $9 billion. It's a scandal that crosses partisan lines and reaches into high levels of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. And it's got nothing to do with Wall Street.

The shameful mishandling by the federal government of the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust fund--created to manage the proceeds from leases of Indian land--encompasses 300,000 accounts and 56 million acres, spans more than 100 years, and involves amounts of money estimated at between 10 and 100 billion dollars. The class-action lawsuit Indian landowners have filed against the Department of Interior--currently named Cobell v. Norton--has been going on for nearly seven years, though knowledge of trust-fund mismanagement dates back much further than that. Robert Rubin, Bruce Babbitt, and Gale Norton, along with assorted deputies, have all been held in contempt of court by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. And yet, thanks to a combination of convoluted detail, media bias, and ideological blindness, most Americans have never even heard about it.

In 1887, thanks to the Dawes Act, tribal lands were broken up into individual lots (the policy was known as "allotment") and assigned to individual Indians as property. This was done in a combination of good and bad faith. Since the Founding there had been many in the American government--prominently including Thomas Jefferson--who wanted to encourage Indians to take up individual landownership as a way of increasing Indian agriculture and wealth. But, on the frontier, allotment was chiefly understood as a way to make it easier for outsiders to buy Indian lands at bargain prices.

Having carved up the land, the federal government took the authority to grant resource leases on those new lots--leasing out mining, drilling, and lumbering rights without the consent of the new landowners, who were presumed to be incapable of managing such affairs themselves. (That, and they might have had an inconvenient lack of interest in granting the leases at all.) The royalties from those leases were--and are--collected by the government. They are supposed to be paid into the relevant IIM accounts, and then paid out to individual Indians on a regular basis. The money at stake, in short, isn't government revenue. The government claims to be operating as a trustee, and to be administering a trust fund on behalf of Indian landowners.

The federal government--specifically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the Department of Interior--has botched that task hopelessly for decades and admits it can't begin to provide an accurate historical accounting of who has or hasn't been paid what they're owed. It appears that for most of the trust fund's history, there was scarcely even a pretense of running it according to principles of fiduciary responsibility: Some checks came in, some checks went out. Where there should be records, there are none.

So in 1994 Congress passed legislation ordering an overhaul. And two years later, when that effort appeared to be going nowhere, Eloise Cobell of the Blackfeet tribe filed suit. Since then, BIA, Interior, and occasionally Treasury have stalled, dragged their feat, obfuscated, and self-investigated. Judge Lamberth, whose judgments are filled with strikingly sharp criticisms of government conduct and accusations of bad faith, may be drawing close to ordering a remedy. But even if, as the plaintiffs want, the IIM accounts are taken out of BIA's hands and placed into receivership, the Bureau and Interior will have to be involved in the reconstruction of the trust fund's history. That means the judiciary can't solve this problem on its own; either congressional oversight or a deliberate decision by Interior to do the right thing will be necessary.

But mustering the political pressure to make that happen will be nearly impossible. One reason is that Indian landowners and tribal governments--many of which also have lands held in trust, and which control the bulk of Indians' lobbying power--don't have quite the same interests. Individual Indians have no real reason to want any agent of the U.S. government to continue to act as their trustee, or even to continue the mandatory trusteeship at all. Given its shameful record, they certainly have no reason to want the funds managed by any part of Interior.

Tribal governments, by contrast, have an ambivalent but intimate relationship with BIA and Interior, one based on the idea that the government acts as trustee for the tribes, and one that is sure to survive the current litigation. BIA is the conduit for federal funds that go to the tribes for law enforcement, elections, and government operations; and the Bureau is in charge of the process of granting (or withholding) federal recognition of each tribe's existence and self-government rights. More importantly, though, the tribes (unlike IIM account-holders) have the legal authority to take their lands out of the trust system and handle the leases and royalties themselves; several have done so. This combination of circumstances means that the urgency of reforming the system is far lower, and the importance of the relationship with BIA much higher, for tribes than for the individual landowners. Norton tried to take advantage of this divergence of interests last year, by proposing a reform that would combine tribal and individual trust lands in a new bureau outside BIA--a move aimed at weakening tribal support for the lawsuit.

And none of this is helped by the issue's near-invisibility. While The Washington Post and some western dailies have provided pretty extensive coverage, The New York Times has run only a handful of stories since the lawsuit was filed, and broadcast coverage has been almost nonexistent. Beyond one extended piece by Sam Donaldson and one "60 Minutes" segment, there has been only the occasional two-sentence notice that cabinet secretaries were being held in contempt. In a sense the story is too big to cover; a scandal that lasts for a century isn't news. Moreover, Interior has been so slow to release documents, and the suit has dragged on for so long it's rare that there's anything fresh to say about it. And, of course, Interior--especially under Norton--has tried its hardest, with some success, to change the subject from the substance of the landowners' claims to the eye-glazing process of its own self-investigation and bureaucratic reshuffling.

But if nothing else you'd expect the right to be turning out in force on behalf of Indians in this case. Critics of government handouts, reservation governments, and intra-tribal collective ownership of property might have noticed that, this time, it was individual Indian property-owners facing a bureaucracy that was unjustly taking their royalties. Norton once counted herself among the libertarian property-rights crowd; she could have distinguished herself from Babbitt and fit property rights into compassionate conservatism by cooperating, settling the case, and getting Interior out of the money management business it does so badly. She didn't.

Nor do you hear much from the conservative and libertarian advocates of landowners' rights. The standard conservative story about Indian poverty--most recently rehearsed in a John Miller cover story for National Review--is an indictment of reservation governments, of their collective ownership of land, the barriers they put up to business formation, and their sometimes-serious difficulties sustaining an independent judiciary and other components of the rule of law. There's a great deal of truth in this story. But it's also true that, historically, the major alternative strategy to reservation governments and tribal sovereignty was ... allotment and the Dawes Act. With the mess from 1887 still unresolved, Indians have good reason not to want to go down that road again.

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, "The Tenth Justice Lost in Indian Country"

Turtletalk's Matthew Fletcher has written a paper with a very smart insight.

This short paper prepared for the 2009 Federal Bar Association’s Annual Meeting offers preliminary results of a study of the OSG in the Supreme Court from the 1998 through the 2008 Terms. I study the OSG’s success rates before the Court in every stage of litigation, from the certiorari process, the Court’s calls for the views of the Solicitor General, and on the merits of the cases that reach final decision after oral argument.

The paper begins with the preliminary data on the OSG’s success rate in Indian law cases. The data demonstrates that the OSG retains its success rate in both the certiorari process and on the merits when the United States is in opposition to tribal interests. But when the OSG sits as a party alongside tribal interests, and especially when the OSG acts as an amicus siding with tribal interests, the OSG’s success rate drops dramatically.

I've commented before on strong the OSG's brief was in Plains Commerce, and how surprising it is that the court ruled the other way without even seeming to take the OSG's office seriously. The finding here-- which amounts to the finding that "impairs tribal sovereignty" is a better predictor of which way the court rules than "outcome argued for by the Solicitor General," and that the SG office's general success record before the court doesn't carry over to the pro-tribal side of Indian law cases-- is the general form of that surprise. Recommended.

Hither and yon, Santa Fe edition

Tomorrow at the Federal Bar Association's Indian Law conference I'll be presenting Three Perversities of Indian Law.

Federal Bar Association Indian Law Conference

I'll be revisiting the perversities of Indian Law thesis in light of last year's Plains Commerce Bank v Long, in a talk at the Federal Bar Association's Indian Law Conference, April 3, Pueblo of Pojoaque outside Santa Fe.

Here's an utterly unsurprising spoiler: the outcome in Plains Commerce only aggravated the perversity of the incentives facing tribal governments. In the article I said that the Montana exceptions had been whittled away to near-nothingness; in Plains Commerce the Court just shaved a bit more wood off the paper-thin bit that remained. Step by step, the Court continues to make a bad situation worse.

For newcomers to Plains Commerce, I recommend the superb amicus brief from the Solicitor General.

On the value of studying Indian law

A good article in the Chronicle about rising interest in law schools, and rising interest among those hiring lawyers, in the serious study of U.S. Indian law.

Now online

The final, published, version of Three Perversities of Indian Law, 12(2) Texas Review of Law and Politics 329-68 (2008).

Something I had not realized...

that greatly surprised me.

The Solicitor General filed an amicus brief in Plains Commerce Bank v Long in favor of tribal jurisdiction. (The Court ruled the other way, of course.)

That was the correct position for the federal government to take, in its capacity as trustee for Indian tribes and in line with its official policy of encouraging institution-building for self-determination. But just because it's correct doesn't mean I would have expected it.

The brief is quite good. (The SG's office hires pretty good lawyers, after all.) A pleasant surprise-- the first so far, in my reading of the case and its materials.

Plains Commerce comes down

This actually happened yesterday, but I was offline.

The most important Indian Law case of the year came down yesterday, and it was disappointingly but unsurprisingly ugly. In Plains Commerce Bank v Long, a 5-4 majority further restricted tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians and non-Indian businesses on reservations. The supposed exception to the non-jurisdiction rule that jurisdiction can apply when the non-Indians enter into consensual commercial relations with the tribe or its members appears to be a dead letter.

As I discuss in this paper, the court has been narrowing tribal jurisdiction over non-members on reservation lands for some thirty years, and in counterproductive, destructive ways.

The decision was written by Roberts for the five conservatives. Ginsburg wrote for the dissent. (It's a "concurrence in part," but the part is not the important part.)

Bad news. More commentary to come.

In the meantime, see this post at Turtletalk.

In my view, there are several things to take from this ruling:

1.) We have been reassured that the Montana exceptions, while available in theory, will never be applied, and that tribes can forget about exercising any jurisdiction, no matter how great or small, over non-Indians on fee lands;

2.) We have also been reassured that non-Indian litigants are at a significant advantage against tribes and tribal citizens. Non-Indian parties can choose to litigate in tribal court, at a low-cost, and seek a positive outcome. If they get a desired outcome, it’s game over. If not, they get a second bite at a fresh apple, because they can take their claims to state or federal court and argue that the tribal court has no jurisdiction over them.

There's more. As I put it in the "Perversities" article linked to above:

After twenty years of Montana progeny, the exceptions appear vanishingly small. No unified Supreme Court majority has ever agreed that any regulation fell into either one. Circuit courts have followed the same general rule. The second exception has never been found to be satisfied in a court of appeals. Besides the Tenth Circuit’s finding in favor of the Navajos in Atkinson, later reversed, the consent exception has been triggered twice at the circuit court level, both times on the Ninth Circuit. A non-Indian filing a cross-claim against a fellow defendant in a reservation court does consent to that court’s jurisdiction in that case, and so falls under the first Montana exception —a seemingly minimal proposition that had nonetheless not been accepted by a panel of the court two years before —and a non-Indian contracting to carry out tribally-licensed bingo operations on a reservation is subject to the tribe’s bingo regulations. And the second exception is interpreted without any “aggregation analysis;” that is, the particular non-Indian’s particular activity must imperil the tribe, and it will not suffice to show that many non-Indians engaged in the activity many times over would do so. As one District Court judge asked rhetorically,

What does it mean to have the "ability to enact and be governed by its own laws" if the Navajo Nation cannot extend the scope of its own laws to protect the very lives of its own police officers on its own lands, and in its own courts? When does the exception for "conduct [that] threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity, the economic security, or the health and welfare of the tribe" apply?

Yesterday "vanisingly small" got yet another step closer to "vanished."

Hm.

As far as I can tell, the Supreme Court Justices in oral arguments in this year's important Indian law case, Plains Commerce Bank v Long Family Land and Cattle Co., were pretty close to laughing Plains' attorney ("Mr. Banker," remarkably enough) out of court.

I'm happy to see that, because an adverse ruling in this case would be very, very bad for the ability of tribal governments to exercise even minimally coherent jurisdiction, something I've written about at some length.

At the same time, I kind of feel for the guy-- because, while he did not correctly describe the current state of the law, he did a pretty good job describing the first derivative of it. He plotted the dots of the various Supreme Court cases, drew the line connecting them, and extrapolated out to the next case. Several times he kind of stammers that he figures the Justices would want to keep going in the direction they've been going. In some areas of law, that's the right argumentative approach- you say "here are the principles underlying the caselaw, they successfully account for the trajectory and give it coherence, and we see that those principles get us this outcome in the case at hand, even though that's not actually what the current rules would say."

In Indian law, the correct answer to that is: "Principles? Coherence?" It's not always clear here that the Justices even remember what their own recent cases say, so they're left just looking at the place Banker wants to take them, not whether that place really does lie on the straight-line path connecting their previous cases. They seem to think it's a ridiculous place, which is true.

Anyway, it does now seem possible that the Court will find that the consent exception in Montana can be satisfied short of a non-Indian expressly choosing Indian law and tribal court jurisdiction. The Court has... not been in the habit of finding that the Montana exceptions could ever really be satisfied, which Banker appeared to be counting on. And it seems possible that the Court will reconcile the genuine tension in its caselaw about the relationship between adjudicatory jurisdiction and regulatory jurisdiction in favor of bringing them into line with each other.

These are both Good Things. Therefore I don't bet that they'll happen. In particular, I'm sure Kennedy is just playing with arguments in his exchanges with Banker-- his own past opinions mean that he's not really skeptical of Banker's view of non-members' rights. Oral argument can be like that sometimes; Justices explore ideas, and it's dangerous to treat that as if they were telegraphing their ultimate votes. But in the meantime, it's nice to see Scalia making Banker squirm, and to see at least some realization of how ridiculous the anti-tribal-jurisdiction arguments can become.

Over at the Legal Times blog, Tony Mauro notes a funny exchange between Roberts and Long's lawyer.

Better late...

Australia will issue its first formal apology for past mistreatment to the country's indigenous people Feb. 13, a senior minister said Wednesday.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said the apology to Australia's so-called "stolen generation" of Aborigines would be the first item of business for the new Labour-dominated Parliament.

"The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people," Macklin said in a statement.[...]

An apology would mark a significant milestone in a decade-long debate about how best to acknowledge Aborigines who were affected by a string of 20th century policies that separated mixed-blood Aboriginal children from their families - frequently referred to as Australia's stolen generation.

From 1910 until the 1970s, around 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children were taken from their parents under state and federal laws based on a premise that Aborigines were a doomed race and saving the children was a humane alternative.

A national inquiry into stolen generation held in 1997 found many children taken from their families suffered long-term psychological effects stemming from the loss of family and culture.

The inquiry recommended state and federal authorities apologize and pay compensation to those who were removed from their families. But former prime minister John Howard steadfastly refused to do either.

I discussed Howard's refusal in chapter 8 of The Multiculturalism of Fear

A state that can act in its own name, a state that has a corporate existence, can commit wrongs in its own name—and can legitimately apologize in its own name. This is not even only true of states. The Catholic Church—which both legally and as a matter of its own self-understanding has a corporate, institutional existence and is not merely the sum of its faithful at any moment—has apologized for some of its failures during the Holocaust. That this means some persons who hold church offices today, and who were not yet born at the time of the Holocaust, have apologized for the actions of others long dead, is neither a conceptual nor a moral problem. There would have been a problem had Catholic prelates apologized in their capacities as natural persons for the actions of other natural persons; but this is not what they did. And it is not what state officials do when they properly apologize for past actions of the state, either. Australian Prime Minister Howard thus got matters precisely backward when he resisted an official apology to the ‘stolen generation’ of Aboriginal children but issued a personal statement of regret. That personal statement could be no more than the expression of sorrow of an onlooker to a tragedy; Howard had no hand in the policy. It was the Australian state, not the person of the head of government, that owed (and still owes) an apology.

I'm pleased not only by the fact that an apology is forthcoming but by the symbolism of its being the first act of the new Labor-majority Parliament. Good on them, as one might say.

Inuit reach deal with Quebec

The Montreal Gazette:

ELIZABETH THOMPSON, The Gazette

Quebec's Inuit have reached a landmark agreement in principle with Ottawa and Quebec City to create an Inuit-controlled government covering the northernmost third of the province.

It will be unlike any other level of government in Canada. Answerable to Quebec's National Assembly, the Nunavik Regional Government will encompass not only the functions normally assumed by a municipality but also those of a school board and a health authority.

"It's quite unique," said Jean-François Arteau, chief negotiator for the Inuit-run Makivik Corporation. "We'll have real elected officials taking real decisions for issues regarding Nunavik residents."

Arteau said the deal should be instrumental in helping the Inuit take charge of their own future and find the solutions best adapted to their communities.

For example, when it comes to a problem such as youth protection or suicide prevention, the new government will be able to adopt a comprehensive strategy that encompasses both education and social services, he said.

The regional government will also have the power to allocate resources where it believes they are most needed, he said.

For example, money can be allocated to address the area's housing shortage instead of being locked in to such specific programs as small business creation. "With the same amount of money, they will be able to do better and manage it more efficiently."

[...]

While contained in only 25 pages, the agreement in principle sets out a detailed blueprint for the Nunavik Regional Government, which will govern the territory north of the 55th parallel, even further north than the giant James Bay hydro-electric site.

The existing Kativik Regional Government, the Kativik School Board and the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services will be amalgamated to create one regional government. It will be run by a Nunavik Assembly, consisting of at least 21 elected members including representatives of each of the territory's 14 communities. An executive council, consisting of five members of the Assembly and headed by the Leader of the Executive Council, will carry out decisions reached by the Assembly.

While the Nunavik Regional Government will have the power to impose property taxes in addition to money it will continue to receive from Quebec and Ottawa, it will not have the authority to collect income or sales taxes. Arteau said the second phase of the agreement, yet to be negotiated, will deal with such issues as royalties for mining in the mineral-rich territory.

Hmm. Good news, but I'm uneasy. There's no mention of any legislative authority, and the reference to municipal powers makes me suspect that legislative authority will be extremely weak and-- more important-- at the ongoing mercy of the Quebec National Assembly. Indigenous self-government can be a powerful force, but there's a constant danger that the indigenous government will become little more than the local branch of social workers and social service administrators controlling the use of funds allocated elsewhere. I'm reminded of the failed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in Australia, and policies there that amounted to self-administration, not self-government.

Development as such doesn't seem to be anybody's priority. (While I don't think that small businesses are best fostered with subsidies, it's a bad sign when that's the only example of something that's not worth spending money on, with no discussion of what the better ways to foster them would be.) And it's worrisome to have resource royalties be punted when that would be one of the chief local sources of revenue.

But I'll provisionally file it under "good news as far as it goes," especially on the basis that a unified level of Inuit government might simply provide a more powerful political voice and focal point for political strength than has existed before. (This is an argument about why even weak and apparently doomed-to-be-unsuccessful indigenous self-government is probably worth having in an essat in Nomos from a couple years ago.)

Update: there's a map in this story.

Big news

From the Montreal Gazette:

Land claims agreement worth $1.4 billion
Jeff Heinrich, CanWest News Service

MONTREAL - First they made peace with Quebec, now they're making it with Ottawa - and becoming masters in their own house. Dropping lawsuits totalling $4.5 billion, leaders of the 16,500 Cree of northern Quebec announced a historic $1.4-billion deal with Ottawa on Monday.

If ratified in a referendum in October and approved by Parliament, it will see them take control of all policing, courts and social and economic development in their communities - and perhaps eventually form their own state within Canada.

It's the first time the Cree have reached a significant financial agreement with the federal government since 1983.

t ends three years of intense negotiations aimed at resolving differences over the landmark 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which compensated the Cree for lands flooded by Hydro-Quebec's mammoth James Bay hydroelectric projects.

A little over five years ago, the Cree signed a similar deal with the Quebec government. Under the so-called Paix des Braves, the Cree got $4.5 billion to settle decades of lawsuits against the province that, like the Ottawa ones, stemmed from the 1975 James Bay treaty.

At a packed news conference Monday, current and former Cree leaders and negotiators joined federal officials, negotiators and politicians to announce what they described as a 50-year deal, covering the 30 years since the original James Bay accord was signed and 20 more years after the new deal is eventually ratified.

"We've come a very long way since 1975," said Matthew Mukash, grand chief of the Grand Council of the Crees.

[...]

Under the agreement, the Crees will take over programs now under Ottawa's jurisdiction: the administration of justice, including rehab centres, workhouses and refuges for women; training and manpower; construction of community centres, sewage systems and firefighting services; and economic development programs.

A second stage of negotiation would then begin on Cree self-government, including eventual status as a fully fledged Cree state within Canada.

This is one of the biggest and longest-standing indigenous rights disputes in the world. The Cree are the largest First Nations group in Canada. I'm not sure why the article uses the language of a "Cree state;" I presume that what's envisioned is an autonomous territory like Nunavut, or conceivably (though this is unlikely) a province. "State" is a word without constitutional meaning in the Canadian federation.

I can't find any online discussion of what territory the "state" might occupy; the question of Cree territory in Quebec, and whether the Cree could be forced to accompany a seceding Quebec out of Canada, is a critical one in Quebec secession debates. Carving a self-determining territory even partly out of Quebec's current landmass would be politically explosive; but it would be very strange for a settlement of the James Bay case to lead to the creation of a territory that didn't include the huge, overwhelmingly Cree, Quebec side of the James Bay watershed.