About

I'm Aaron Lambie. I'm not Indigenous, and I don't pretend to speak for anyone who is. I work alongside First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities on economic development, sustainable finance and the tools that measure whether the benefits promised to communities actually arrive. This blog is where I think out loud about that work.

The title is deliberate. An accomplice is different from an ally. An ally can stand beside a cause and still be measured by how they feel about it. An accomplice is measured by what they put at risk, what they change, and who they answer to. For me, the answer to that last question has to be the Nations themselves.

Too much of what passes for reconciliation today has turned into a vanity project. Land acknowledgements read and forgotten, orange shirts worn once a year, Indigenous participation counted in press releases rather than in contracts, payrolls and ownership. Corporations and governments set the terms, define success, grade their own work and collect the credit. The journey becomes about the organization's reputation, not the community's outcomes. That isn't reconciliation. It's public relations with a borrowed vocabulary.

Accountability to Nations means something harder and more concrete. It means communities decide what counts as benefit, not the proponent. It means commitments are written down, measured against real data from payroll and procurement, and reported back to the people they were made to, in a form they can check. It means when the numbers fall short, that is visible, and someone is responsible for fixing it. It means Indigenous ownership and decision-making rather than consultation after the fact.

That is the thread running through everything here: how we build systems, standards and businesses that make promises to Nations verifiable, and how non-Indigenous people like me can be useful in that work without centring ourselves in it.

Some of these essays were first published on the Pehta Foundation blog, which has since been retired. They live here now so they stay available. The views are my own.