Encountering Indigenous Law in Canada

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter reflects on the work happening at the intersection of anthropology and law in Canada with respect to Indigenous peoples’ rights, title, governance, and legal orders. Indigenous legal scholars have ignited an important new engagement with Indigenous legal orders that are reshaping mainstream Canadian legal discourses. The chapter reviews how this work has profound implications for the direction of the recognition of Indigenous land title, territorial rights, and Indigenous jurisdictions. It argues that anthropologists have the opportunity to shift their engagement with Indigenous law from essentialized production of traditional cultures to ethnographically engaging with the logics and practices of Indigenous legal orders. The chapter develops a brief ethnographic case-study involving several closely related Island Hul’q’umi’num’ (Coast Salish) communities on the east coast of Vancouver Island (British Columbia) as they work to mobilize longstanding Indigenous principles and understandings of land tenure and harvest rights among themselves in a complex, state-regulated environment of shellfish harvesting. The purpose of the case-study is to highlight a path of anthropological engagement with contemporary Indigenous law, working both to appreciate the ways Indigenous and state legal orders are brought to life concurrently over time, and to reflect on the on-the-ground ways legal pluralism is experienced. The case also offers conceptual opportunities to transcend problematic state discourses of ‘overlapping claims’ and makes space for workable principles of co-existence through Indigenous legal sensibility.