Members of the Carcross-Tagish First Nation have rejected their proposed land claim and self-government agreements becoming the first to do so.

Chief Mark Wedge declined comment this morning on the results of last week's three days of voting, which ended Thursday.

Wedge said the executive council of the first nation was meeting this afternoon and he did not want to say anything until Tuesday morning, following that session.

Premier Dennis Fentie was unavailable for comment this morning. He was enroute from his hometown riding of Watson Lake to Whitehorse.

It's not clear what happens with the years of negotiations to reach the proposed agreements nor the millions of dollars borrowed by the first nation from Ottawa to negotiate the land claim and self-government agreements.

Of the 14 Yukon first nations, nine have approved final land claim and self-government agreements.

The White River and Kwanlin Dun first nations are preparing for a vote and the two Kaska first nations stopped negotiating two years ago.

Results from the Carcross-Tagish vote fell far short of what was required. The first nation had decided that 60 per cent of eligible voters would have to approve the agreements for acceptance.

But 60 per cent of the membership didn't vote. That means that if all those who cast ballots had voted yes, the agreements still would not have passed, as approval of both the land claim and self-government agreements was required.

Numbers circulated last Thursday night by the committee overseeing the voting show 58.2 per cent of the 596 eligible voters cast ballots, or 1.8 per cent short of the total support needed for the approval.

Of the 323 votes needed to approve the land claim package, 202 voted yes while 119 voted no.

Of the 329 votes needed to approve the self-government package, 210 voted yes and 124 voted no.

Elder Stanley James, a former Carcross-Tagish chief, said this morning he suspects the membership was not comfortable with the amount of information they had, and that too much went on behind closed doors.

There should have been a greater effort to keep the membership informed as the different issues were being negotiated and settled, James said.

He also noted that the elders' council, for instance, had asked about 18 months ago for some sort of workshop to explain their existing aboriginal rights and how the agreements would affect them.

Such a workshop never happened, he said.

'Nobody came out and said, These are the rights you have, these are the rights you will be giving up and these are the rights you will be keeping,'' James said.

He also suspects there was too much focus at the annual general meetings on the land claim and self-government agreements, and not enough on actually moving the first nation to where the membership wanted to go.

The former chief, however, believes rejection of the agreements is a good thing. Now the first nation can focus on developing things like forest and land management policies, he noted.

Also unknown, he suggested, is what happens now with the Council of Yukon First Nations (CYFN) and its move to rework its constitution.

The CYFN was established as the former Council for Yukon Indians whose primary goal as a central aboriginal government was the settlement of land claims in the territory.

Russ Smoler, the federal government's acting director of claims and Indian government, said this afternoon he is not sure what the implications are of the no-vote.

There are, he agreed, a myriad of questions that arise and it will take some time to sort matters out.

'All of our efforts have been focused on ratifying postively,' Smoler said, explaining nobody was looking at the ramifications of a no-vote.

Smoler said the questions are many. They range from what happens to the certainty the land claim negotiations and subsequent agreements were supposed to establish, and what happens to the several million dollars the first nation has borrowed?

There are questions about what happens to the many boards that were set up under the land claim process, and how they may or may not apply to the traditional territory of the Carcross-Tagish First Nation.

For years, first nations and federal officials maintained that negotiating land claims settlements was preferrable to going to court.

Among the issues first nations have argued, for instance, is that they have never surrendered ownership of the territory, and that Canada had an obligation to settle with first nations before they started handing out land to anybody else.

Certainty of ownership of aboriginal land and Crown land was an issue to be addressed but so was certainly of juridication, consultation, economic development and so forth, said Smoler.

He said there is no process right now that contemplates a second vote. It may be the first nation wouldn't even want a second vote.

Smoler said those are all matters and questions to be sorted out in the days and weeks to come.

The first four first nations signed their agreements in 1995, with the next five coming at different times in the last nine years.