Implementing Canada's Largest Indigenous Land Claim

Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI) is the Inuit organization responsible for ensuring Canada and the Government of Nunavut fully implement the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, the largest Aboriginal land claim settlement in Canadian history. Under the Agreement, Inuit hold outright title to roughly 350,000 square kilometres of land in the eastern and central Arctic, an area larger than Germany, and share in resource royalties and co-management of wildlife, water and land use across the wider Nunavut Settlement Area. NTI negotiates and monitors the government's treaty obligations on housing, employment, education and Inuit-language services, and helped secure a first-ever comprehensive implementation plan for the Agreement three decades after it was signed. The territory of Nunavut itself, created in 1999 as a direct result of the Agreement, remains the clearest example worldwide of Indigenous land rights translating into self-governing territory.