"Property" and Aboriginal Land Claims in the Canadian Subarctic: Some Theoretical Considerations

Abstract

Many of the world's aboriginal peoples are currently engaged in struggles over land and self‐government with the states that encompass them. In Canada, aboriginal people have effectively used the concept of "aboriginal title" to force the government to negotiate land and self‐government agreements with them. Such agreements, however, along with the notion of "aboriginal title" itself, are based on the European concept of "property"; they grant First Nations "ownership" of certain lands and spell out the rights they possess in relation to those lands. This means that aboriginal people have had to learn to think and speak in the "language of property" as a precondition for even engaging government officials in a dialogue over land and sovereignty. Yet the concept of property is in many ways incompatible with many Canadian First Nation people's views about proper human‐animal/land relations. In this article, I argue that the land claim process—because it forces aboriginal people to think and speak in the language of property—tends to undermine the very beliefs and practices that a land claim agreement is meant to preserve. [Key words: property, First Nations, aboriginal land claims, Canada, Subarctic]