Clusters of real agreements, a steady way of reading any one of them, and a kintsugi shelf for the broken ones. Take a copy, annotate it, argue with it.
Established record, cited
The record / treaty atlas, world edition
Every treaty is a promise between peoples.
Some promises are alive and growing. Some are contested in courtrooms three centuries after signing. Some were broken so thoroughly that the break itself is now the historical record. And in many places the page is still blank, no treaty was ever made at all. This atlas holds all four conditions in one view, because a fair map shows the cracks.
Last research run
2026-07-10
Statuses checked against primary announcements on this date. This is a reference sketch drafted Luke × Claude, in the same family as the Australian treaty atlas, a thread-puller, not a register. Each nation's own record remains the master.
Why this room
The terms are being rewritten, quietly.
The common story says treaties with native nations are history. The record says otherwise: the first treaty between an Australian government and First Peoples commenced within the last year; courts in North America keep affirming treaty rights the wider public assumed were dead; and new instruments, from data-sovereignty principles to Indigenous trade arrangements, are being written right now. This atlas exists so that renegotiation can be read as one connected, worldwide motion rather than isolated local news.
No entry here speaks for the nations party to it. Status words are reading aids, not rulings. Any nation may rewrite or strike its entry, the onboarding room shows how.
A lens, not a verdict
Five questions for any agreement, old or unborn.
The same lens the P4A family uses on Australia's inherited treaties, carried to world scale. Questions, not judgements, two readers can share the lens and land in different places.
Every party at the table, and everyone who never sat there: neighbouring peoples, future generations, living systems, and those bound by rules they had no hand in writing.
Who gains, who carries the cost or the risk, and whether the balance still looks fair from more than one seat, especially the seats that were empty at signing.
How it was made, in whose language, under what pressure. Would the same agreement be signed again, freely, today, by the same peoples?
Honoured, dormant, litigated, or quietly shaping daily life. Some promises outlive the states that made them; some die while still on the books.
A calm menu rather than a guillotine: honour as-is, renew, modernise, repair, or replace with something freely chosen, and the real path each would take.
The map so far
Eight clusters, four conditions.
Each entry carries a status word: living, contested, broken or unwritten. Most real agreements are more than one at once, the chip marks the loudest note, not the whole chord.
Signed in two languages that do not say the same thing: the Māori text retains tino rangatiratanga (chieftainship/sovereignty); the English text claims cession. The Waitangi Tribunal, standing since 1975, hears claims against the Crown, and settlement negotiations continue. A treaty argued with, in court and parliament, for nearly two centuries, which is what a living document looks like.
The first treaty between First Peoples and an Australian government, exchanged with the democratically elected First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, which becomes a permanent representative body within the new entity Gellung Warl. On a continent where no treaty was ever signed at colonisation, the page has finally been written, by negotiation, in public. Further Traditional Owner negotiations entered the register through 2026.
Canada's numbered treaties (1871–1921) remain constitutionally protected and constantly litigated, while the modern era, opened by the James Bay agreement of 1975, has produced comprehensive claims including the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, which created the territory of Nunavut in 1999: a public government born from a treaty.
The United States ratified some 370 treaties with tribal nations before Congress ended treaty-making in 1871. Many were broken; all remain law. The Supreme Court's McGirt decision in 2020 affirmed that much of eastern Oklahoma remains reservation land under an 1866 treaty, the record's way of saying broken is not the same as void. 574 federally recognised nations continue government-to-government relations today.
The Sámi people, across four states, elect their own parliaments in Norway (from 1989), Sweden (from 1993) and Finland (from 1996). A draft Nordic Sámi Convention, negotiated between three states and three Sámi parliaments, has existed since 2017 and remains unratified: an agreement standing in the doorway.
Home Rule in 1979 became the Self-Government Act of 2009, which recognises the people of Greenland as a people under international law with a defined path to independence should they choose it. A negotiated, revisable constitutional relationship, renegotiation as a standing feature rather than a crisis.
Most of Australia has no treaty; much of British Columbia is unceded; many peoples worldwide have never been offered terms at all. The blank page is itself a status, and, read through this atlas, an opening: the newest entries here began as blank pages within living memory.
UNDRIP (2007) as the shared floor; the Indigenous Peoples Economic and Trade Cooperation Arrangement linking Indigenous economies across Australia, Aotearoa, Canada and Taiwan (with the United States as observer); and the data-sovereignty principles in the next room. Increasingly, native nations write agreements with each other, not only with states, a weave that needs no empire's permission.
The kintsugi shelf
Broken promises, held in the light.
Kintsugi repairs broken pottery with gold, on one condition: the break stays visible. Applied to treaties, the method has three rules: name the break precisely, keep the memory of it in the repaired object, and make the repair more valuable than the original by adding what was missing the first time. Usually, what was missing was consent.
One example, from the record: the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) guaranteed the Black Hills to the Sioux Nation; gold was found; the land was taken. In 1980 the US Supreme Court ruled the taking unlawful and awarded compensation. The Sioux Nation has refused the money, now grown to well over a billion dollars, for more than four decades, because accepting it would validate the taking. The refusal is itself a treaty document: it says the promise is still open.
A kintsugi repair of a broken treaty is not a payout, and it is not forgetting. It is a renegotiation in which the break is written into the preamble. The proposal room on reciprocity treaties sketches how that could work, flagged purple, as always.
Where consent lives
How these promises get made, and remade.
Often in the signer's language only, under duress, with terms translated selectively, and sometimes with negotiators who had no authority over the peoples they claimed to bind.
Victoria's treaty was negotiated with an elected assembly; Nunavut was ratified by vote; the Sámi convention waits on parliaments, including Sámi ones. Consent machinery is improving where peoples build it themselves.
Free, prior and informed consent as the standard for every clause, with withdrawal rights, review clocks and the affected peoples holding the pen, not just the response form.
How you could explore this
From one agreement to a rehearsed repair.
One cluster, or one agreement touching your people, your place or your work.
Primary text first, both texts, where two languages were signed. The differences are usually the story.
Who it touches, who it serves, whose consent, whether it lives, and what a deliberate keep-or-change would look like.
Take a copy of this atlas and correct it, extend it, or write your nation's entry in your own words, or send a note and we'll fix ours.
Sources and honesty
A sketch with its receipts showing.
Entries were checked against primary announcements and court records on the stamped date: the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria and Victorian government for the Statewide Treaty; UN publications for UNDRIP; national archives and court records for the North American, Aotearoa and Nordic entries. Statuses shift, treat the stamp as part of every sentence. Nothing here is legal advice or any nation's official position.
reference not registerstatuses dated 2026-07-10nations hold the master recordnot legal adviceopen to correctionfree to copy