Indigenous Governments and Band Councils Editing and Proofreading Services

An Indigenous government writes across more boundaries than almost any other administration. The same office produces a council resolution, a funding report to a federal department, a community notice that members will read at the store, a legal submission, and material in a language the department cannot read and the community may be actively reclaiming. Each audience has different expectations, and the document that satisfies the funder is often the one that reads to members as though it were written by someone else about them.

We edit what First Nations, Métis, Inuit and other Indigenous governments and organisations produce — council and assembly resolutions, community notices and newsletters, membership and citizenship communications, land code, constitution and law-making documents, comprehensive community plans, funding proposals and reporting to federal, provincial and territorial departments, consultation and accommodation correspondence, referral responses to proponents, impact benefit agreement material, economic development and business plans, housing, health, education and social programme documentation, elections and governance codes, and annual reports to members. We follow the terminology your nation uses for itself, its territory, its institutions and its people, including spellings and orthographies in your own language, and we do not substitute external conventions for them.

The community notice about a major decision is the document that carries the most weight, and it is the one most often crowded out by the reporting a deadline demands. Members are being asked to vote on a land code, ratify an agreement, or accept a settlement, and what reaches them is frequently a summary written in the register of the negotiation rather than the register of the community. We work on these so the decision is stated plainly at the top, so what changes and what does not are set out side by side — because the fear is almost always about what is being given up rather than what is being gained — so the specific effect on ordinary things is named, and so the questions people are actually asking at the band office are answered in the document rather than left for the meeting. Where the honest answer is that something is uncertain or has not yet been negotiated, saying so protects trust that is harder to rebuild than any deadline is to meet.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including material under negotiation, legal advice and information the nation has not made public. We are editors rather than legal, governance or policy advisers, and we offer no view on any negotiation, claim or decision — those belong to your leadership and your members. What we can do is make the writing clear and consistent, in your own terminology.