# Free Prior and Informed Consent

> Free Prior and Informed Consent is mapped as the prior relation: it asserts political orders, land relations, memory, and sovereignty that precede or resist settler institutions.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:indigenous-decolonial:free-prior-and-informed-consent` |
| Family | Indigenous Governance & Decolonial Change |
| Domain | Rights |
| Kind | movement |
| Archetypal function | The Prior Relation |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Free Prior and Informed Consent belongs to the **Indigenous Governance & Decolonial Change** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Free Prior and Informed Consent asserts political orders, land relations, memory, and sovereignty that precede or resist settler institutions, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Free Prior and Informed Consent, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Prior Relation.** Free Prior and Informed Consent is mapped as the prior relation: it asserts political orders, land relations, memory, and sovereignty that precede or resist settler institutions.

## Gift

restores self-determination and plural legal-political worlds; through Free Prior and Informed Consent, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

gets reduced to symbolism, extraction of tradition, or a single Indigenous voice; Free Prior and Informed Consent can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Free Prior and Informed Consent to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Prior Relation enters through Free Prior and Informed Consent. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Free Prior and Informed Consent becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**leverage.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Free Prior and Informed Consent; another player names a countermove. Initiative 1.

## Relationships

- **distributes costs to — Plurinational State:** Plurinational State distributes costs to Free Prior and Informed Consent by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **depends on — Doctrine of Discovery:** Free Prior and Informed Consent depends on Doctrine of Discovery by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **institutionalizes — Stare Decisis:** Stare Decisis institutionalizes Free Prior and Informed Consent by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **depends on — Capitalism:** Free Prior and Informed Consent depends on Capitalism by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Free Prior and Informed Consent from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Free Prior and Informed Consent is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Free Prior and Informed Consent: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [The Haudenosaunee Confederacy](https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/) — Haudenosaunee Confederacy, ongoing. Contemporary self-description of governance, nations, and the Great Law of Peace.
- [S. Con. Res. 76](https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/senate-concurrent-resolution/76) — U.S. Senate, 1988. Congressional acknowledgment of Haudenosaunee influence claims; not resolution of scholarly debate.
- [UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples](https://www.ohchr.org/en/indigenous-peoples/un-declaration-rights-indigenous-peoples) — United Nations, 2007. International declaration concerning self-determination, culture, land, and participation.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
