Stewardship

The Soteria Covenant is, before it is anything else, a stewardship community. The doctrines — allodial-as-stewardship, sui juris standing — are real, and they matter. But none of them substitute for the work itself: hands in soil, seeds in the ground, water cared for, forests tended, animals raised, structures built and maintained, relationships kept across decades.

This page documents what is actually being done.

Three Million Trees

Between the years a steward of this Covenant has worked the forests of British Columbia and Quebec, approximately three million trees have been planted by hand — paid silvicultural labor across many seasons, on Crown timber leases, on Forest Service replant blocks, in the wake of clearcuts and beetle-kill across two provinces.

That work was not done as covenant labor. It was paid forestry work, contracted at industry rates, performed under the same conditions as thousands of other professional treeplanters who have made BC's and Quebec's interior forests what they are today. But the labor is real regardless of who paid for it: each tree is a tree in the ground, growing, sequestering carbon, holding soil, harboring biodiversity, contributing to the recovery of forests that were taken too quickly to grow back on their own.

The Covenant's record of this labor — sealed, OpenTimestamps-anchored — stands as evidence of capacity for ecological work at scale. Most claims to land stewardship rest on intention. This one rests on a documented decade of actually doing it.

The Bonded Parcels

The Covenant maintains four bonded parcels, sealed and recorded as instruments of stewardship presence.

The Burnt Homestead — Fortierville, Québec

Five acres in the Settlor's ancestral region of Quebec. A wooded parcel with mature trees and vines. The site of a homestead that was burnt — a homestead that anchors the Covenant's documented record of administrative harm in Quebec, and the geographic anchor of the Métis Right of Return claim made under Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 and Articles 8, 10, and 26 of UNDRIP.

The site is small by design. Stewardship here is dense rather than expansive: continuous witnessed presence, ongoing care of the trees and vines, ceremonial gathering, and the maintenance of the harm record. The acreage matches the function. A small, fully-stewarded ancestral keystone is more durable than vast claims poorly maintained.

Soterian Valley — the Selkirks, British Columbia

Three parcels in the Kootenay Lake watershed of British Columbia, on what is in significant part the unceded traditional territory of the Sinixt Nation, with overlapping interest of the Ktunaxa and Syilx peoples.

• Kootenays Entry Node — gateway parcel, primary access to the valley
• Core Homestead Node — central parcel, anticipated location of the working stewardship community
• The Inner Valley of Rewilding — back-country parcel, ecological-restoration focus, light-touch stewardship

The Soterian Valley sits within the inland temperate rainforest of the Columbia Mountains — one of three significant inland temperate rainforests on Earth. Cedar, hemlock, white pine, fir, larch and yew grow in a forest assemblage that exists in only a handful of places globally. Some redcedars in these valleys are over a thousand years old.

The waters that fall here feed the Kootenay River, the Columbia River, and ultimately the Pacific. Stewardship of any portion of this watershed has continental ecological consequence. The Covenant takes that responsibility as the load-bearing fact of its presence in this land.

On First Nations Title and Relationship

The Covenant operates on territory that is, in significant part, unceded First Nations territory. The 2014 Tsilhqot'in decision and the 2024 Haida ruling have made it explicit in Canadian constitutional law: aboriginal title can survive without treaty, and where it exists it is paramount to Crown title.

The Covenant's posture toward the First Nations whose territories it operates within is not competitive. It is collaborative where possible, respectful where collaboration is not yet possible, and explicitly subordinate to indigenous title where the doctrine of stewardship and the lived reality of those nations call for it.

The Sinixt Nation, in particular, was declared "extinct" by Canada in 1956 and has been actively reasserting its territorial standing since the 2021 R. v. Desautel Supreme Court ruling that rejected the extinction declaration. The Covenant recognizes the Sinixt as the people of this land in the most literal etymological and legal sense — and the work of building Memorandum-of-Mutual-Recognition with the Sinixt and other nations whose territories touch the bonded parcels is part of the stewardship work of this Trust, not a precondition to it.

The text of the Sinixt Nation, in their own words, describes the territory thus:

Cedar, hemlock, white pine, fir, larch and even yew grow in a forest like no other in the world. For us, the forest is alive, as are all the root crops and other medicine plants that have long shared their gifts with us. The Salmon are relatives. The caribou are relatives. All have homes in our territory, and all need our care.

The Covenant adopts this framing for its own stewardship: relational rather than extractive, kin rather than property, care rather than ownership.

Doctrine, in Service of Practice

The legal doctrines the Covenant operates under — Métis Section 35 right of return, UNDRIP, UNDROP (the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, 2018), common-law allodial-as-stewardship, the Crown-as-trustee theory in its English constitutional tradition — all of these exist to protect the practice, not to substitute for it. A doctrine that cannot defend ecological labor on the ground is just rhetoric. The Covenant deploys the doctrines to ensure that the stewardship work survives state pressure, market pressure, and time.

The Covenant's claims are bounded by what it can actually steward. A few thousand acres in BC plus five acres in Quebec is what a small covenant community can plausibly tend with care. The Covenant does not claim what it cannot maintain. The doctrine of stewardship has discipline built into it — stewards are responsible for what they hold, and a claim larger than what can be stewarded falls of its own weight.

Ongoing Work

The Covenant does not promise outcomes. It commits to the practice — the ongoing labor of being responsible to a place across seasons, across generations, across the cycles of growth and weather and species and time. Each year of continued stewardship strengthens the doctrinal posture by demonstrating it. The strongest evidence of a steward's standing is what the steward is actually doing on the land.

On Accountability

The Covenant accepts accountability for the stewardship it claims. Practices that fail the five-axis self-test — non-violent, balanced, honest, inclusive, sustainable — are corrected, not concealed. Records of stewardship work are sealed cryptographically and ledgered, including records of failures and adjustments. The Trust's posture is that responsibility taken openly is more durable than responsibility claimed in absolute terms.

Members and external observers can ask, at any time: what is actually being done. The answer should be specific, current, and verifiable.

How to Support the Work

For members of the Covenant: continued participation, presence, and labor — directly on the parcels, or indirectly through the engines and infrastructure that protect the work.

For sympathetic external parties: respectful engagement. The Covenant does not solicit funds publicly. It welcomes alliance with First Nations, with sympathetic counsel, with allied stewardship communities, with academic researchers studying inland temperate rainforest ecology, with treeplanters and silviculturalists who recognize what the work entails. Contact the Trustees for substantive engagement.

For First Nations or representatives of First Nations whose territory the Covenant operates within: dialogue welcomed. The Covenant's stewardship presence on Sinixt, Ktunaxa, Syilx, or other nations' territories operates with awareness of the paramount nature of aboriginal title and the imperative of recognition before any other relationship.

This Stewardship page reflects the Covenant's actual practice as of the most recent revision. It will be updated as the work continues. The work itself — not the page — is the measure of the claim.