Why Indigenous-Led Research, Technology, and Food-Sovereignty Work Needs a Different Name
Most people already have an intuitive sense of what a white paper is; it is a commonly used term today. In plain language, a white paper is a substantial report written to explain a complex issue, persuade decision-makers, and present a proposed path forward. Historically, the term came out of government policy publishing, and over time it expanded into business, nonprofit, technical, and academic-adjacent use. Today, it often means an authoritative document that explains a problem and argues for a solution. At the same time, even mainstream institutions acknowledge that the term is now used loosely, and that there is no single universal classification standard for it. That looseness matters, because it means the title is a convention, not a law. A Red Paper, then, should be understood not as a gimmick or a decorative variation, but as an emerging Indigenous-led publishing convention with a specific historical lineage, a political context, and a methodological logic of its own.
Who is Speaking
Benjamin Feagin Jr. Is Red River Métis, with lineage tracing back to the Battle of Batoche. His maternal bloodline largely lives in Dryden, Ontario, which is within the small portion of Ontario that is rights-bearing traditional territory of the Métis people. His own family thus lived through the experiences in this article in their adult lives.
As co-founder of AgriTech North, Benjamin also incorporates Indigenous sensitivity training within regular staff training activities for all staff, whether or not they are Indigenous. The organization regularly participates in policy advocacy and assists regional and community-level governance in establishing new mandates and policy structure, especially when in the realm of food sovereignty and entrepreneurship. This work effectively puts AgriTech North in-community to participate in regular discussions, storytelling, cultural sharing, and sensitivity training, to ensure a much broader perspective is integrated with AgriTech North and Benjamin's work.
This article intentionally avoids replacing authentic within-community work and Elder storytelling and education, and rather focuses on more academic discourse. We encourage those that are unfamiliar with the real and lasting impacts of the history described in this article to consult with your Elders, or those Indigenous peoples closest to you, that you can engage with in person.
The Canadian History Behind the Term
In Canada, the title “white paper” is not culturally or politically neutral. In Westminster tradition (essentially British legal adoptions by Canada), white papers were government statements of policy, often outlining proposed legislative change. That alone makes the term official and state-facing. But in the Canadian Indigenous context, the phrase is loaded by one particular document: the 1969 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, usually called the 1969 White Paper. The very phrase “white paper” therefore carries a distinct Canadian history, especially for Indigenous peoples, because it is tied not only to bureaucratic procedure, but to a programmatic attempt to reorder Indigenous-state relations on assimilationist terms. Modern debate over the term is not speculative; Canadian organizations and scholars have explicitly noted that the historical significance of “white paper” in Canada differs from other jurisdictions for this reason.
The 1969 White Paper was presented by Jean Chrétien, then Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, and it argued for a “break with the past.” In practical terms, the government proposed repealing the Indian Act, transferring responsibility for “Indians” to the provinces on the same basis as other citizens, winding down the Department’s Indian Affairs role, and moving toward the elimination of separate legal status. The document framed this as equality, but it did so by treating difference, treaty relations, and Indigenous political distinctiveness as problems to be dissolved rather than rights-bearing realities to be honoured. Whatever its rhetoric, the policy’s operational effect would have been to dismantle the legal architecture through which the Crown’s obligations to Indigenous peoples were recognized.
From White Paper to Red Paper
The Red Paper emerged as a direct response to that moment. In 1970, under the leadership of Harold Cardinal and the Indian Association of Alberta, Citizens Plus was presented as a counter-document to the White Paper and came to be known as The Red Paper. Contemporary and later accounts describe it as insisting that treaties be honoured “in the letter and in the spirit of the law,” and as a forceful rejection of the federal attempt to dissolve Indigenous rights into generic citizenship. The response mattered. Accounts from the Canadian Encyclopedia and the University of British Columbia’s Canadian History in Documents Project both note that the Red Paper helped derail the White Paper, and that its effects reverberated well beyond the immediate dispute, feeding later Indigenous political mobilization, self-determination discourse, and rights recognition in Canada. The title “Red Paper,” therefore, begins not in branding, but in an Indigenous counter-assertion against a state policy paper.
That history is the first reason the modern use of “Red Paper” has credibility. A Red Paper is historically rooted in Indigenous resistance to a federal policy agenda that threatened treaties, jurisdiction, and distinct peopleshood. It is not simply “a white paper by Indigenous people,” although it can function in a similar public-policy or issue-education role. Its stronger meaning is that it speaks from a different source of authority. Where the 1969 White Paper presumed the state’s right to define the problem, the Red Paper tradition begins from Indigenous peoples defining the problem, naming the historical structure around it, and setting out alternatives on their own terms. That is why organizations using the term responsibly should not strip it of its origin story. The credibility of the name comes precisely from acknowledging that stark beginning, not from sanitizing it.
How the Term Is Used Today
The second reason the term has credibility is that it is already in active use by Indigenous institutions. Yellowhead Institute describes its Red Papers as “comprehensive research and media projects” that follow a tradition of “agenda-making reports by Indigenous people,” explicitly linking them to the 1970 original. Its Land Back Red Paper repeats that lineage in the report itself, and situates the format as part of substantive research on jurisdiction, consent, dispossession, and alternatives to settler-colonial policy. Seventh Generation Fund uses the term somewhat differently, but in a compatible direction, describing Red Papers as “self-determined storytelling” by and for Indigenous peoples, encompassing issue advocacy, scholarly essays, speeches, poetry, and other forms of discourse rooted in traditional knowledge systems, survivance, and community solutions. These uses show that Red Paper is not a single rigid template. It is an emerging Indigenous-authored family of public documents that can be analytical, policy-facing, cultural, strategic, or all of those at once.
Flexibility is a strength; it reflects something important about Indigenous research and communication practices. Mainstream white papers are usually valued for authority, clarity, and utility. Indigenous Red Paper methodologies do not reject those things, and they ask a more foundational question: authority on whose terms, accountable to whom, and for what purpose? Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony argues that Indigenous research is about accountability to relationships, and that this accountability should shape topic selection, data gathering, analysis, and the way information is ultimately presented. More recent work on Indigenous research governance makes a similar point in contemporary terms, describing how Indigenous peoples are reimagining research through greater self-determination and governance over knowledge production. A Red Paper, in this light, is credible when it does not merely borrow the polish of formal reporting, but reflects a different research ethic and a different accountability structure.
Why Naming Matters
There is also a clear legal and normative basis for this shift in naming and method. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which Canada has affirmed through federal legislation, states that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination, the right to participate in decision-making through their own institutions, the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for development, and the right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and even the manifestations of their sciences and technologies. Canada’s United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act expressly affirms the Declaration as a universal international human rights instrument with application in Canadian law and provides a framework for federal implementation. In other words, there is already a recognized legal and policy basis for Indigenous peoples setting the terms of knowledge, development, and public explanation in matters that affect them.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada reinforces this direction. Call to Action 62 calls on governments, in consultation with Survivors, Indigenous peoples, and educators, to make curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Indigenous peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions mandatory, and to fund the integration of Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods. Call to Action 65 calls on the federal government, through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and in collaboration with Indigenous peoples and post-secondary institutions, to establish a national research program with multi-year funding to advance understanding of reconciliation. Those calls are not instructions on document titles, but they do make a larger point: public education, public research, and public-facing knowledge in Canada are supposed to move toward Indigenous participation, Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous framing. A Red Paper can be understood as one practical expression of that movement.
The contemporary debate over the term “white paper” also supports this repositioning. The Chairs for Women in Science and Engineering network published a brief after consulting academics, librarians, Indigenous leaders, and science-policy experts about the continued use of the term. Their summary states that “white paper” is now used very broadly, that there is no formal way to classify it, and that in Canada the term carries a particular colonial context because of the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy. They also recorded concern that the phrase “white paper” is associated with authority in ways that can reproduce racialized and colonial hierarchies. Not everyone will agree with every part of that critique, but it demonstrates that renaming debates are already happening in professional and research settings. The use of Red Paper, then, sits within a broader and credible conversation about how public documents are named, and whose authority their names are meant to signal.
Red Papers and Indigenous Food Sovereignty
This matters especially in the field of Indigenous food insecurity. The issue is neither abstract nor marginal. PROOF at the University of Toronto notes that national data show high rates of food insecurity among off-reserve Indigenous peoples and that the situation is likely worse than national surveys suggest because of underrepresentation of Indigenous communities, including the exclusion of many on-reserve populations. The First Nations Food, Nutrition and Environment Study (FNFNES) found that almost half of on-reserve First Nations households were food insecure, and reported that barriers to preferred traditional foods included financial and household constraints, industrial activity, government regulation, climate change, and fear of contamination. Its conclusion was blunt: existing systems have been unsuccessful, and improving food security hinges on Indigenous food sovereignty. When a publication addresses this terrain, it is not just selling a tool or summarizing a market opportunity. It is entering a field shaped by treaty relations, land access, state policy, environmental change, and Indigenous governance.
Canadian food insecurity research from PROOF shows that food banks and food charity do not solve household food insecurity, which is fundamentally driven by inadequate income: "governments must focus on addressing inadequate incomes to reduce food insecurity, instead of funding food charity."
It also matters in the technology space. Canadian institutions are already acknowledging that Indigenous communities are developing and evaluating technological approaches to food production in place-based ways. British Columbia’s guide on planning for small-scale controlled environment agriculture (CEA) states that it was built from interviews with First Nations communities and Indigenous organizations already operating or considering such systems, alongside technical experts. At the federal science-policy level, the Council of Canadian Academies has launched an Indigenous Science and Food Sovereignty assessment sponsored by the Indigenous Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (I-STEM) cluster hosted by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), with support from multiple federal science and innovation bodies. That tells us two things. First, Indigenous food systems and technology are recognized as serious scientific and policy subjects. Second, there is already institutional recognition that Indigenous knowledge, food sovereignty, and technological development belong in the same conversation.
Why Red Paper Fits Indigenous-Led Technology Development
For an Indigenous-owned organization bringing new technologies to market to address Indigenous food insecurity, especially technologies developed from within the climatic context in which they are intended to work, “Red Paper” is therefore more accurate than “White Paper.” A white paper generally signals expertise, analysis, and recommendation. A Red Paper generally signals those things as well, but it can add four essential elements that the white paper label often leaves unstated: historical consciousness, Indigenous governance over the narrative, place-based accountability, and a declared relationship between knowledge and community priorities. Research on Indigenous governance has long argued that when Indigenous nations make their own decisions about development, they outperform external decision-makers across multiple domains. A Red Paper title can therefore communicate that the publication is not only expert, but self-determined.
Based on the historical record and the current Indigenous-led uses of the term, a practical lay definition is this: a Red Paper is a rigorous, public-facing Indigenous-authored and/or Indigenous-governed paper that explains a problem, situates it in its historical and political context, grounds its argument in community knowledge and evidence, and sets out priorities, solutions, or demands on Indigenous terms. This definition is an interpretive synthesis of the Red Paper lineage from Citizens Plus, the contemporary Yellowhead Institute model of agenda-making research, the Seventh Generation Fund model of self-determined storytelling, and the rights-based framework of UNDRIP. Its credibility lies in that convergence, not in bureaucratic standardization.
What a Red Paper Should Be
In practical terms, a credible Red Paper in the Indigenous food security and climate-adapted technology space should do more than describe a product. It should identify who is speaking and on whose authority; acknowledge the policy and colonial history that shapes the present problem; explain the evidence base, including community knowledge and local climatic realities; describe the technology in accessible but technically serious language; address governance, consent, data ownership, and intellectual property; and link implementation to community priorities rather than to extraction, dependency, or generic market expansion. It should also be explicit about outcomes: food security, food sovereignty, resilience, affordability, training, maintenance, and long-term control. In other words, the document’s form should match the ethics of its purpose.
For these reasons, calling these publications Red Papers is not merely symbolic, and it is not empty marketing flair. Used carelessly, the term would become decorative and lose its force. Used properly, it does the opposite. It tells the reader that the publication stands in a lineage that began with Indigenous refusal of an assimilationist policy paper, that it is accountable to Indigenous knowledge and self-determination, and that it aims not just to comment on a problem, but to reshape the agenda around it. In a Canadian context, and especially in work on Indigenous food insecurity, climate-adapted technology, and community-defined innovation, that is a serious and defensible position. Our strongest Red Papers will be the ones that make that seriousness visible in both title and substance.
