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This paper uses the example of First Nations housing in British Columbia to explore how culturally legitimate community economies are being advanced to overcome the deficiencies of top-down, state-led housing efforts and market relations. Through the lens of the diverse economy, we highlight how First Nations community institutions can and do serve to oversee the utilization of territorial forest resources for the production and distribution of housing materials locally. The findings point towards First Nations communities navigating (often in latent ways) complex sites of decision-making through: ethical negotiations related to (de)commoditization; needs and surplus evaluation; and transactions and rules of (in) commensurability. While these examples appear to challenge the conventional logics of capitalist-market institutions, First Nations communities also must contend with the many structural barricades to change that exist within the settler-colonial institutional framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the Hope–Princeton Highway, a regional route in the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, through the lens of uneven mobilities. Bringing together insights from infrastructure studies, mobility studies, and settler colonial studies, uneven mobilities is a concept that historicizes mobility research in terms of colonial and carceral logics. Using this concept, the article provides insight into political actors, namely incarcerated forced laborers of Japanese descent, whose unjust confinement and forced labor on this infrastructural route remained unacknowledged until recently. The article relies on a range of archival sources that engage the visual culture of the highway and the subtle linkages between an imagined scenic landscape and an imagined multicultural Canada. The article also narrates this highway route by constructing pictorial and landscape relationships of colonialism and carcerality, linking it to uneven mobilities and economic development through the ubiquitous highway road sign—a contemporary initiative to mark and interpret sites of historical and cultural importance along this and other BC routes. The article then explores the infrastructural politics of this route at the scale of the body to highlight modes of resistance. This article advances a tentative theory of uneven mobilities by centering so-called road disturbances through acts of resistance such as rest, play, and work stoppages to reveal how uneven mobilities are entwined with the production of embodied subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutional frameworks that Indigenous groups put in place to govern economic processes within their communities are critical to the advancement of their diverse cultural-ecological, social, and economic development goals. Through the lens of institutional logics, this article examines the ways in which First Nations community sawmill enterprises in British Columbia, Canada, navigate the sectoral demands brought by a productivist paradigm of forestry. We find that First Nations community sawmill enterprises represent spaces of both logical tension and innovation where conflicts that arise between dominant "commercial" logics and culturally legitimate "Indigenous" logics can be reconciled. Through this analysis, this article offers an empirical example of the emergence of Indigenous institutional frameworks, as well as a contribution to the growing body of literature that addresses the ways in which hybrid organizations can and do navigate and overcome conflicting institutional logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]