What claiming a seat means

IRIS operates as a contemporary treaty, not a vendor agreement. Information about a First Nation belongs to that Nation, collectively. IRIS holds it to run the platform the Nation is using; it does not sell it, does not use it to train models, and does not disclose it to industry except where the Nation’s Chief has made an explicit disclosure decision. The platform never speaks for a community.

A recognized Chief holds the Nation’s record on IRIS. That seat — and only that seat — decides who sits on Council, whether any industry engagement is accepted, what audience an engagement has, when an insight report is generated, and whether anything is ever disclosed to a partner. Every one of those decisions is recorded in the Nation’s own audit log.

Claiming the seat is reviewed by hand by the IRIS team. Filing the claim, signing the declaration, or creating an account grants nothing on its own; a seat becomes active only when a reviewer confirms the claimant’s standing. The reviewer confirms who you are; the reviewer does not judge who should lead your Nation.

A Council member invited by the Chief reads the Nation’s private record — engagements, draft reports and the audit log — and may leave Council-only notes on a draft report. Council does not sign disclosures and cannot change the Nation’s engagement decisions. An invited seat carries no power to vouch another person into a seat. While a Nation has no active Chief, active Council may issue invitations so the Nation stays reachable; that is the one exception, and it ends when a Chief is seated.

• No module engages without the Chief’s opt-in. Industry asks; it cannot oblige. Each engagement is accepted separately, with an audience the Chief sets.
• Disclosure is a signature, not an automation. A report the Nation owns is seen by a partner only when the Chief decides to disclose it, and every view of a disclosed report is recorded and shown to the Chief.
• Withdrawal is a real state change. The Chief may withdraw from an engagement at any time. IRIS then stops displaying what was disclosed inside the platform and revokes pending invitations. It cannot recall a file a partner already downloaded, and it says so rather than pretending otherwise.
• The record stays where the Nation can reach it. Data is stored and processed in Canada. Per-community export of the complete archive is a stated commitment that has not shipped yet; until it does, a Nation may ask for its material at any time.

Enforced in the database, not only the interface: member identities; questions members asked the assistant; sealed and withheld engagement contributions; exact land-use coordinates; a Chief’s own notes; and any other community’s data. What a partner can see is an aggregate the Chief chose to disclose.

A retention period for engagement recordings and sealed testimony has not been set; IRIS would rather say so than publish a period that was not decided with the Nations concerned. External validation of this posture by an Indigenous data-governance body has not yet been pursued. Formal reporting of a concern is informal today — the IRIS team’s contact on the Help page — and any documented deviation from this brief is acknowledged in writing.

The declaration on Form IR-014 asks you to affirm three things: that you are the lawfully elected leader of the Nation and act on its behalf in claiming the seat; that IRIS holds the seat as custodian and never as owner, and that the community may withdraw at any time, taking its record with it; and that you have read this brief and understand that no module engages without your opt-in. The version of this brief you were shown is recorded with your claim, and a later revision never changes what an earlier claim agreed to.