Review: “Neither Justice Nor Reason is directed toward a broad nonspecialist audience. The writing is exceptionally clear. Readers who know very little about any of the main topics--Australia, law, and anthropology-- will find enough information included to allow them to engage with the text. Gumbert examines the social and legal underpinnings of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and the anthropological models of social organization underlying the presentation of claims under the act. In addition, he presents his own alternative model of Australian Aboriginal social organization and tests it against the requirements of the act as well as against evidence presented in a number of land claims” (Rose 1987)*.
*Reviewed by Deborah Bird Rose, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies
Abstract: At many Canadian universities it is now common to publicly acknowledge Indigenous lands, treaties, and peoples. Yet, this practice has yet to be considered as a subject of scholarly inquiry. How does this practice vary and why? In this paper we describe the content and practice of acknowledgment, linking this content to treaty relationships (or lack thereof). We show that acknowledgment tends to be one of five general types: of land and title (British Columbia), of specific treaties and political relationships (Prairies), of multiculturalism and heterogeneity (Ontario), of no practice (most of Quebec), and of people, territory, and openness to doing more (Atlantic). Based on these results, we conclude that the fluidity of acknowledgment as a practice, including changing meanings depending on the positionality of the acknowledger, need to be taken into account.
Abstract: The aboriginals in Canada have a history of colonisation for over two hundred years. The European settlers used racist legislations to destroy their socio-cultural systems and suppress their efforts to build political organisations. The shift in policy of the Government of Canada is seen in the recognition of aboriginal rights to lands by the Supreme Court in 1973. This article deals with the emergence and growth of aboriginal business. It is based on secondary data generated at the government level, empirical studies conducted by Wanda Wuttunee and Yael Levitte, and interviews with twenty-four aboriginal businesspersons in Winnipeg city. It emphasises the significance of organisational characteristics of aboriginal communities, the social networks of their members, and the government policy on aboriginal business and entrepreneurship.*
*With focus on p. 265, Treaties rendering Aborigines resourceless.
Abstract: Theorists concerned with processes of urban citizenship have not accounted for their connections to a changing national citizenship regime and their internal dynamics, notably as they relate to evolving Aboriginal/indigenous rights. Using transformations in the low-cost-housing sector in Winnipeg, Canada as the empirical basis, I examine how changes in the trajectories of social and Aboriginal citizenship have intersected at the urban scale. This is done by combining document and policy analyses with data from thirty-seven semi structured personal interviews with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal housing actors. Following changes to federally driven social-housing policy in 1993, housing stakeholders in Winnipeg self-organised to engage all sectors of society in processes of urban citizenship around low-cost-housing goals. Aboriginal citizenship pursuits have not been interwoven with the pursuit of these social goals. There is a role for the federal government in ensuring the coupling of Aboriginal with urban social citizenship.
Conclusion: “This paper argues that the recognition of indigenous people’s rights to country may result in something that bears little resemblance to their own conceptualisation of their rights in country. Recognition of rights and interests, rather than of a form of ‘root’ title on which all rights and interests depend and flow, contrasts with Aboriginal views of the inalienability of the relationship between people and country. Aborigines widely consider that ancestral figures supernaturally inscribed the country, giving it shape and form, leaving traces of their noumenal essence throughout, laying down the language and the laws that ‘go with’ the country. In the Kimberley region, as in many other regions of Australia, Aborigines understand themselves to be instantiations of spirit beings who have inhabited the country from ancestral times, and will return to the country when they die. They are responsible for maintaining the Law, in order to maintain the country and themselves as a people, since all of these elements are interdependent. This reflects a holistic view of the connections between people and land, between ritual and rights in country—a view far removed from the bundle of rights approach to native title.” (Glaskin 2003: 85).
Abstract: Impact and benefit agreements (IBAs) have become a common part of a standard package of agreements negotiated between an industrial proponent and a representative aboriginal organization. Among other things, BAs recognize aboriginal peoples’ interests with the land and parallel more broadly with the corporate social responsibility phenomena. IBAs include their confidential nature and their relationship to conventional environmental assessment (EA). IBAs go beyond the regulatory and advisory EA processes and often find themselves in conflict due to overlapping objectives and blurred boundaries. IBAs can perpetuate injustices if benefits are not equally distributed to the community or if monitoring and follow-up on behalf of both parties are not continuous. To consider both challenges and opportunities, brief descriptions and comparison of IBAs and EAs are discussed and questions regarding the advantages of IBAs are considered.
Tribal Land Claims: A generation of Federal Indian Law on the Edge.
Attorney Arlinda Locklear demonstrates how attorneys for tribes have used the doctrine of discovery of federal common law to assert claims in tribal land claim cases. She lays out the history of the Oneida land claim case against the state of New York beginning in the 1784 when the state began an aggressive campaign to acquire Oneida territory leading to their currently pending case.
“Conflict, Coercion, and Settler Colonialism in Western Canada” reviews the documentary The Pass System. The film strongly refutes Canada’s “myth of benevolence” – the belief that the country was created peacefully, without conflict or coercion – by showing how the pass system was devised in direct response to colonial conflict.
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