Quadruple Bottom Line

This paper describes the intersection of the cooperative movement and Indigenous communities in Canada. The paper brings a lens of nation, ethnicity and race to an analysis of the cooperative movement in Canada, a perspective which has received limited attention in published literature. Cooperatives have had a dual role in Indigenous communities. In a historical context, Indigenous cooperative development in Canada is inseparable from government colonization policies. Cooperatives were utilized by successive British, Canadian, and provincial governments as a policy tool to increase European settler control over land, permanent settlement of Indigenous communities to limit their use of land, and to secure Arctic Sovereignty. The extraordinary growth of Indigenous cooperatives is Canada, particularly in Inuit communities in the North, has been primarily supported by government policy implementation including financial and technical management support. In the contemporary context, cooperatives have been utilized by Indigenous communities as a tool for economic and social development. Indigenous cooperatives demonstrate innovative combinations of Quadruple Bottom Line goals, including financial, social, environmental and cultural goals. Cooperatives are explained as an organizational form that can be co-opted for colonization or decolonization, capitalism or socialism, settler or Indigenous communities for their own specific purposes.