Indigenous Communities, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development in the New Economy

The 500 million Indigenous Peoples are struggling to rebuild their ‘nations’ and improve their socioeconomic circumstances. Participation in the global economy through entrepreneurship is widely accepted as the key to success. Importantly, most want this participation to be ‘on their own terms—terms in which traditional lands, history, culture and values feature prominently. Using regulation theory, we explore the feasibility of the Indigenous approach to development and conclude that is theoretically sound. Then we present a case study on the Osoyoos First Nation showing how the community has used entrepreneurship to participate in the economy ‘on its own terms’.