Indigenous Law & Aboriginal Law

Addresses procedural issues of Aboriginal and treaty rights litigation. Aboriginal & Treaty Rights Practice consolidates, in one place, Canadian Aboriginal and treaty rights procedural and evidentiary law. It contains essential information necessary for identifying the procedural and evidentiary issues unique to this subject area, and reviews how Canadian courts have applied the law.

Written by a leading Aboriginal law practitioner and acclaimed author, Aboriginal Law, Fifth Edition, is a comprehensive, authoritative resource that highlights the most important aspects of Canadian law, its impact on Aboriginal people, and their relationship with the wider Canadian society.

A practical reference work to the law as it affects Aboriginal peoples and organizations, for both lawyers and non-lawyers. Every chapter contains a brief summary of key issues, as well as a bibliography of secondary sources for further research. It also features an in-depth analysis of a number of legal and policy issues affecting Aboriginal people.

A comprehensive summation of the entire field of Aboriginal law across every subject area relevant to the First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples of Canada, including Aboriginal title and rights, treaty rights, First Nations governance and land management, criminal and family law matters, and the Indian Act.

"Indigenous Peoples and the Law in Canada: Cases and Commentary, 2023 (formerly titled "Annotated Aboriginal Law: The Constitution, Legislation, Treaties and Supreme Court of Canada Case Summaries") features the Indian Act and selected regulations, accompanied by hundreds of annotations and section-by-section summaries of all significant court decisions interpreting or applying the legislation. It also includes annotations of case law under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867 (division of powers), sections 2, 15 and 25 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (fundamental freedoms, equality rights and Aboriginal rights and freedoms not affected by the Charter), and section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 (Aboriginal and Treaty rights). Available on reserve in the Law Library.

Includes chapters on: Governance -- Aboriginal rights -- Aboriginal title -- Treaties -- Crown obligations -- Inuit rights -- Métis rights -- Federalism/constitutional issues -- Indigenous women -- Child well-being -- Taxation -- Indigenous peoples and criminal justice.

A collection of the most recent legislation affecting Aboriginal peoples rights in Canada, their lands, and their institutions.

Can Canada claim to be a just society for Indigenous peoples? To answer this question, and as part of the process of reconciliation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission urged a better understanding of Aboriginal law for all Canadians. Aboriginal Peoples and the Law responds to that call, introducing readers with or without a legal background to modern Aboriginal law and outlining significant cases and decisions in straightforward, non-technical language.

In Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History, Arthur Ray examines how claims-oriented research is often fitted to the existing frames of indigenous rights law and claims legislation and, as a result, has influenced the development of these laws and legislation.

This work explores the origins of common law concepts of land ownership, the attempts to reconcile European and Aboriginal traditions in the treaty process, and the consequences of the application of British colonial law and Crown

This book traces the history of Indigenous claims in Canada and the work of the ICC from 1991 until it was decommissioned in 2009.

Canada's Indigenous Constitution reflects on the nature and sources of law in Canada, beginning with the conviction that the Canadian legal system has helped to engender the high level of wealth and security enjoyed by people across the country. However, longstanding disputes about the origins, legitimacy, and applicability of certain aspects of the legal system have led John Borrows to argue that Canada's constitution is incomplete without a broader acceptance of Indigenous legal traditions. With characteristic richness and eloquence, John Borrows explores legal traditions, the role of governments and courts, and the prospect of a multi-juridical legal culture, all with a view to understanding and improving legal processes in Canada. He discusses the place of individuals, families, and communities in recovering and extending the role of Indigenous law within both Indigenous communities and Canadian society more broadly. This is a major work by one of Canada's leading legal scholars, and an essential companion to Drawing Out Law: A Spirit's Guide.

This book critically reconstructs the Gerald Stanley/Colten Boushie case to examine how it may be a miscarriage of justice. Roach provides historical, legal, political, and sociological background to the case including misunderstandings over crime when Treaty 6 was negotiated, the 1885 hanging of eight Indigenous men at Fort Battleford, the role of the RCMP, prior litigation over Indigenous underrepresentation on juries, and the racially charged debate about defence of property and rural crime.

Canadian Law and Indigenous Self-Determination demonstrates how, over the last few decades, Canadian law has attempted to remove Indigenous sovereignty from the Canadian legal, social, and political landscape.

Creating Indigenous Property identifies how contemporary Indigenous conceptions of property are rooted in and informed by their societally specific norms, meanings, and ethics. Through detailed analysis, the authors illustrate that unexamined and unresolved contradictions between the historic and the present have created powerful competing versions of Indigenous law, legal authorities, and practices that reverberate through Indigenous communities.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from a wide array of professional contexts, this volume demonstrates the power of Supreme Court of Canada cases to directly and indirectly shape our conversations about and conceptions of what Indigeneity is, what its boundaries are, and what Canadians believe Indigenous peoples are "owed."

In Drawing Out Law, John Borrows (Kegedonce) skillfully juxtaposes Canadian legal policy and practice with the more broadly defined Anishinabek perception of law as it applies to community life, nature, and individuals. This innovative work combines fictional and non-fictional elements in a series of connected short stories that symbolize different ways of Anishinabek engagement with the world.

Demonstrating how Canada’s constitutional structures marginalize Indigenous peoples’ ability to exercise power in the real world, John Borrows uses Ojibwe law, stories, and principles to suggest alternative ways in which Indigenous peoples can work to enhance freedom. Among the stimulating issues he approaches are the democratic potential of civil disobedience, the hazards of applying originalism rather than living tree jurisprudence in the interpretation of Aboriginal and treaty rights, American legislative actions that could also animate Indigenous self-determination in Canada, and the opportunity for Indigenous governmental action to address violence against women.

In From Recognition to Reconciliation, twenty leading scholars reflect on the continuing transformation of the constitutional relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. The book features essays on themes such as the role of sovereignty in constitutional jurisprudence, the diversity of methodologies at play in these legal and political questions, and connections between the Canadian constitutional experience and developments elsewhere in the world.

The paternity policy of the Indian Act required individuals claiming Status to demonstrate the lineage of both parents. Harmful to Indigenous mothers and children, and imposing a high evidentiary burden on Indigenous people claiming Status, it was overturned on April 20, 2017, in what is now known as the Gehl decision. Using Indigenous methods of first-person experience, embodied knowledge, emotional knowledge, observation, reading, writing, role-modelling, learning by doing, repetition, introspection, and storytelling, Gehl shares the journey to her court victory

This book, the first of 2 volumes, presents the history of law in what is now Canada, from the first European contacts with northern North America in the very early sixteenth century to immediately before Confederation. Divided into four parts, the book first looks at the roots of Canada’s three legal traditions, Indigenous, French and English

In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian-White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada-U.S. border, King debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.

Indigenous people are the most over-represented population in Canada’s criminal justice system. Their experiences within the system are interwoven with issues of colonialism and discrimination. Indigenous People and the Criminal Justice System, 2nd Edition, examines these issues and their impact to provide lawyers and judges with a deeper understanding of this area of the law.

Indigenous Peoples and the Law provides an historical, comparative and contextual analysis of various legal and policy issues affecting Indigenous peoples. It focuses on the common law jurisdictions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, as well as relevant international law developments.

In 31 essays, Chelsea explores the Indigenous experience from the time of contact to the present, through five categories--Terminology of Relationships; Culture and Identity; Myth-Busting; State Violence; and Land, Learning, Law, and Treaties. She answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community.

The essays collected here by Catherine Bell and David Kahane provide a balanced view of ADR, exploring its opportunities and effectiveness alongside its challenges and limits. The essays are international in scope, with examples of efforts at dispute resolution involving Inuit and Arctic peoples, Dene, Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en, Tsuu T’ina, Cree, Metis, Navajo, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and Torres Strait Islanders.

Law's Indigenous Ethics examines the revitalization of Indigenous peoples' relationship to their own laws and, in so doing, attempts to enrich Canadian constitutional law more generally. Organized around the seven Anishinaabe grandmother and grandfather teachings of love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect, this book explores ethics in relation to Aboriginal issues including title, treaties, legal education, and residential schools.

The book analyzes the impact of s.35 of the Constitution Act which defines the Métis as an aboriginal people and the aboriginal rights which are guaranteed by the Constitution.

Why should Canada’s original inhabitants have to ask for rights to what was their land when non-Aboriginal people first arrived? The question lurks behind every court judgment on Indigenous rights, every demand that treaty obligations be fulfilled, and every land-claims negotiation. In On Being Here to Stay, Asch retells the story of Canada with a focus on the relationship between First Nations and settlers.

Our Box Was Full provides fascinating insight into the Delgamuukw case and sheds much-needed light on the role of anthropology in Aboriginal rights litigation.

In Otter’s Journey, Borrows makes use of the Anishinaabe tradition of storytelling to explore how the work in Indigenous language revitalization can inform the emerging field of Indigenous legal revitalization.

Traditionally, nêhiyaw (Cree) laws are shared and passed down through oral customs — stories, songs, ceremonies — using lands, waters, animals, land markings and other sacred rites. McAdam, a co-founder of the international movement Idle No More, shares nêhiyaw laws so that future generations, both nêhiyaw and non-Indigenous people, may understand and live by them to revitalize Indigenous nationhood.

An urgent, informed, intimate condemnation of the Canadian state and its failure to deliver justice to Indigenous people

In Telling It to the Judge, Ray recalls lengthy courtroom battles over lines of evidence, historical interpretation, and philosophies of history, reflecting on the problems inherent in teaching history in the adversarial courtroom setting. Telling It to the Judge is a unique narrative of courtroom strategy in the effort to obtain constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights.

In The Wetiko Legal Principles, Hadley Friedland explores how the concept of a wetiko can be used to address the unspeakable happenings that endanger the lives of many Indigenous children. Friedland critically analyses Cree and Anishinabek stories and oral histories alongside current academic and legal literature to find solutions to the frightening rates of intimate violence and child victimization in Indigenous communities.

In the nineteenth century many Canadians took pride in their country's policy of liberal treatment of Indians. In this thorough reinvestigation of Canadian legal history, Sidney L. Harring sets the record straight, showing how Canada has consistently denied Aboriginal peoples even the most basic civil rights.