Ethan Clark

Ethan Clark is Coast Salish from the S’Klallam(nəxʷsƛ̕ay̕əmúcən)-speaking peoples of Chewhaytsum and a member of the Sc’ianew (xʷčiyánəxʷ) First Nation. He is an advocate for the inherent rights and Douglas Treaty rights of his peoples. He supports his community’s economic development efforts and youth capacity building through cultural, professional, and personal development.

His work as an entrepreneur focuses on two main items: financial infrastructure and data infrastructure, and combining those two to develop autonomous infrastructure for Indigenous economic development, from personal, business, and institutional actors to the products and services they require to effectively store, manage, and govern their financial assets. For the data infrastructure, Ethan focuses on how Indigenous peoples can generate, collect, process, store, manage, analyze, visualize, and interpret their data, ensuring place-based ownership, control, accessibility, and possession.

His work in politics has focused on advancing the rights of both on-reserve and off-reserve, status and non-status Indigenous peoples to govern themselves in accordance with the protocols of their distinct tribal nations, language groups, clans, villages, and families, building alternative self-governance structures to those imposed by the Indian Act. In this work, he has led engagements with thousands of urban and rural Indigenous communities, both living on their territory and not, educating on the rights of these distinct groups and opening discussions for self-governance in practice in the modern context. Here, he has done extensive work on inherent rights and the Douglas Treaties and the rights derived from them, as well as non-treaty or unceded territories. He has also done work in understanding the implications of the distinctions-based approach, modern treaties, self-governance agreements, taxation, financial management, and land management agreements.