Decolonizing Scaffolding: Learning from First Nations’ Resurgence to Recalibrate Entrepreneurship

Indigenous communities are resurging and harnessing this momentum to reshape their social world. As they reclaim their cultural resources, rights, and identities, they gain control over how and whether to engage with Western social structures. Using the metaphor of metal frame and grass basket materials, we conceptualize how First Nations communities mobilize scaffolding materials from different social realities and innovatively combine them to shape and reshape their social world. We theorize that the degree to which a community integrates different scaffolding materials is consequential for whether and how the community will engage with outsiders. We learn from First Nations communities across northern Turtle Island (Canada) by running a cluster analysis and identifying three different ways communities construct scaffolding using Indigenous and Western materials. Then, using a unique dataset of 240 Canadian First Nations communities, we use those clusters to predict the likelihood a given community will engage in a partnership agreement with an outsider, in this case a non‐Indigenous mining company, and when they might do so. This analysis highlights a kind of entrepreneurial activity, the construction and use of scaffolding, and a context that is overlooked by mainstream entrepreneurship scholars and management scholars in general. We aim to contribute to the recalibration of entrepreneurship literature through a decolonial lens.