Canadian Law and Indigenous Self?Determination

Canadian Law and Indigenous Self?Determination Synopsis

For centuries, Canadian sovereignty has existed uneasily alongside forms of Indigenous legal and political authority. 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 and social landscape. Adopting a naturalist analysis, Gordon Christie responds to questions about how to theorize this legal phenomenon, and how the study of law should accommodate the presence of diverse perspectives. Exploring the socially-constructed nature of Canadian law, Christie reveals how legal meaning, understood to be the outcome of a specific society, is being reworked to devalue the capacities of Indigenous societies. Addressing liberal positivism and critical postcolonial theory, Canadian Law and Indigenous Self-Determination considers the way in which Canadian jurists, working within a world circumscribed by liberal thought, have deployed the law in such a way as to attempt to remove Indigenous meaning-generating capacity.

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