Aboriginal and Treaty Rights

For the past years, the treaties between the Aboriginal Peoples of Eastern Canada and the British, at the fall of New France, have been arousing a great deal of interest, on a legal point of view, because they could possibly bear specific rights for the Natives. This article tries to define the terms of the agreement negotiated at Oswegatchie, the 30th of August 1760, by the Seven Nations representatives and William Johnson, British superintendent of Indian Affairs. In order to be able to identify the commitments that were agreed on at that moment, we have to rely on the native oral tradition that have been collected during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because there is no existing written documents related to that agreement. After confronting that oral source with what we know about the British policies concerning the Native allies of the French at the end of the Seven Years war, it is possible to make the general frame of the talks of Oswegatchie emerge, and its four central concerns: the absence of reprisals; the free exercise of the catholic religion; the protection of existing rights and privileges during the French Regime; and the protection of the Aboriginal lands and possessions.

The honour of the Crown requires good faith negotiations to resolve land claims of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and litigation is not consistent with the ethos of reconciliation.  Negotiations require a collaborative approach and must include mechanisms to address power imbalances. Treaties are essential to creating a just foundation for Crown sovereignty and for determining how Canada and sovereign Indigenous peoples share jurisdiction. Courts best promote the objective of reconciliation by enforcing the Crown’s obligation to negotiate and providing remedies for failing to meet this obligation. Substantive terms governing the treaty relationship must be determined though negotiations between political representatives, not courts. At the same time, courts must scrutinize Crown conduct to ensure constitutional compliance. In the absence of treaties, courts can temporarily use the de facto doctrine to uphold constitutionally deficient laws. The Crown has the onus of demonstrating that the rule of law requires the continued application of this doctrine. Combined with an enforceable duty to negotiate, this will mitigate the imbalance in bargaining power, will add to the Crown’s incentives to negotiate, and will bring the process closer to the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, unresolved Aboriginal claims to land remain highly contentious. Since the early 1990s, a unique treaty negotiation process has sought to resolve questions about land ownership and establish a new relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. After almost two decades, the limitations of this treaty process are increasingly evident and answers to the land question remain elusive. This article examines this treaty-making process through a property lens, focusing on how particular models of property are privileged by and produced through this approach to treaty. I argue that the treaty process, as currently structured, works to entrench dominant Western forms of property across Aboriginal territories in a highly separate and unequal manner, and as such, serves to re-inscribe asymmetrical relations of power between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. To a considerable extent, this asymmetrical approach to property making explains the lack of progress towards treaties. The final part of the article explores alternative approaches to treaty proposed by Aboriginal groups. I argue that these proposals, which reflect Aboriginal understandings of property, offer a new and more promising direction for treaty making. In particular, the emphasis on sharing lands and resources, as well as the wealth generated from these, provides a path to reconcile competing property interests and to build a new and more respectful relationship between the Crown and Aboriginal peoples. I suggest that the difficulties of treaty making in British Columbia reflect broader challenges associated with land restitution and reconciliation in settler colonies.

Over the course of the last decade, the federal and provincial governments concluded three self-government agreements with the Nisga’a, the Tlicho, and the Labrador Inuit. These agreements notably establish new Aboriginal government institutions. This article studies the role that these three agreements accord to legal culture and Aboriginal languages in the creation and diffusion of law. The author concludes that only the Inuit Agreement manifests an audacious openness towards Aboriginal legal cultures, and in particular towards custom as a non-state source of law.

The author observes that the Aboriginal jurisdictions created by the agreements are closely aligned with the state model in terms of their functioning, and are entirely integrated in the judicial hierarchy of the state. As a consequence, in the absence of true legal pluralism, the author believes that there is no guarantee that the judges charged with articulating Aboriginal law will exercise their functions with respect for Aboriginal legal cultures.

After suffering decades of repression and decline, Aboriginal languages have received recognition in these self-government agreements and in Aboriginal constitutions as legal languages able to play a role of the highest order in the creation and diffusion of Aboriginal law. However, Aboriginal languages are subordinated to English, which remains the primary language of interpretation of the agreements and fundamental Aboriginal laws.

Finally, with the exception of the Inuit Agreement, the agreements studied in this article do not express a strong formal openness to legal diversity in Aboriginal governance. In spite of this, the resilience of Aboriginal legal cultures and the capacity of Aboriginal peoples to use these agreements as an interpretive source of law for future government entities must not be underestimated.

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Au cours de la dernière décennie, les gouvernements fédéral et provinciaux ont conclu trois accords ayant valeur de traité avec les Nisga’a, les Tlicho et les Inuits du Labrador. Ces accords mettent notamment en place de nouvelles institutions gouvernementales autochtones. Cet article étudie la place que ces trois accords octroient aux cultures juridiques et aux langues autochtones dans la production et la diffusion du droit. L’auteur conclut que seul l’Accord inuit manifeste une ouverture audacieuse aux cultures juridiques autochtones et en particulier à la coutume comme source extra-étatique de droit.

L’auteur constate également que les juridictions autochtones créées par les accords sont étroitement alignées sur le modèle étatique du point de vue de leur fonctionnement et entièrement intégrées à la hiérarchie judiciaire étatique. Par conséquent, en l’absence d’un véritable pluralisme judiciaire, l’auteur estime qu’il n’existe pas de garantie que les juges chargés de dire le droit autochtone exercent leurs fonctions dans le respect des cultures juridiques autochtones.

Par ailleurs, après des siècles de répression et de déclin des langues autochtones, celles-ci sont reconnues par les accords et les constitutions autochtones comme de véritables langues juridiques aptes à jouer un rôle de premier ordre dans la production et la diffusion du droit autochtone. Ces langues restent toutefois subordonnées à l’anglais, qui demeure la langue prééminente d’interprétation des traités et des lois fondamentales autochtones.

Au final, à l’exception de l’Accord inuit, les accords étudiés dans cet article n’expriment pas une très grande ouverture formelle à la diversité juridique dans la gouvernance autochtone. Il ne faut toutefois pas sous-estimer la résilience des cultures juridiques autochtones et la capacité des peuples autochtones d’en faire une source matérielle du droit pour les nouvelles entités gouvernementales.

This article explores different understandings of reconciliation within the context of modern treaty making in British Columbia, focusing on the role of the BC treaty process in resolving the longstanding dispute between Aboriginal Peoples and the Crown over rights to land. Although the treaty process was created to reconcile competing interests in the land, Crown and Aboriginal negotiators often have contradictory understandings of how this reconciliation is to take place. Drawing on a case study of the Hul’qumi’num Peoples, a group of Coast Salish First Nations, I examine how different understandings and approaches to reconciliation impede progress at the treaty table. I conclude that progress towards treaty and reconciliation in this case will require coming to terms with the Hul’qumi’num territory's colonial history and geography, something that the current treaty process actively avoids, plus the crafting of a treaty agreement that allows for a more equal sharing of the burden that colonialism has created in this place. More particularly, meaningful reconciliation will require a fuller recognition of Aboriginal title and rights across the breadth of the territory and a commitment to meaningful compensation of Hul’qumi’num Peoples for the wrongful taking of their lands.

Cet article est une réponse au texte de Jean Leclair publié dans la même revue, sous le titre « "Il faut savoir se méfier des oracles" : regards sur le droit et les autochtones ». Le texte de Jean Leclair vient enrichir la critique de la théorie des droits ancestraux des peuples autochtones développée par la Cour suprême du Canada depuis le milieu des années 1990 à la faveur de son interprétation de l’article 35 de la Loi constitutionnelle de 1982. Il dénonce avec justesse le « piège identitaire » que constitue le critère de la « partie intégrante de la culture distinctive » formulé dans l’affaire Van der Peet pour identifier les pratiques dignes d’être élevées au rang de droit ancestral. Ce critère, tel que le souligne Jean Leclair, occulte la vitalité des sociétés autochtones et ramène leur statut constitutionnel à une approximation autoritaire de ce que le pouvoir non autochtone juge « authentiquement » autochtone. Dès lors que l’enjeu du débat constitutionnel contemporain devient la préservation d’un mode de vie hérité des ancêtres précoloniaux, et que cet héritage est tout ce que les autochtones peuvent attendre de la loi fondamentale, on peut, à l’instar de Jean Leclair, redouter que le discours d’une altérité sacralisée en vienne à imprégner la réthorique autochtoniste au risque de brider la libre expression des identités complexes et mouvantes des individus comme des groupes. C’est ce que Jean Leclair appelle le spectre d’une « essentialisation » du discours identitaire des peuples premiers.
Je ne partage toutefois pas ses préoccupations relatives à l’usage de la grammaire des « droits » dans la quête d’un statut rénové pour les autochtones.
Il y a peut-être un risque de « jeter le bébé avec l’eau du bain » si on pousse la critique du dogme culturaliste jusqu’à remettre en cause la référence aux « droits » des peuples autochtones. Les autochtones ne se réclament pas d’une conception « fondamentalisée » ou irréductible de leur altérité ; cela leur a été imposé par l’État, dont les juges. Il faut dire sans ambages que l’affirmation d’un « droit » est parfaitement adaptée lorsqu’on l’insère dans l’horizon du « droit à l’autodétermination » qui est la clé du débat. La reconnaissance des autochtones comme communautés politiques au sein du constitutionnalisme canadien que Jean Leclair appelle de ses voeux peut sans difficulté s’insérer dans la matrice du droit à l’autodétermination.

In 1961 the federal Indian policy known as termination ended the Klamath Tribes' federal recognition and transferred the majority of communally held reservation land out of Klamath tribal ownership. Studies of the Klamath Tribes' termination generally focus on the negative impacts of this policy and tend to victimize the Klamath Tribes. During the 1970s, however, the Klamath Tribes affirmed their treaty rights and sovereignty in federal court, reestablished their tribal council, and appointed a tribal wildlife commission. Threatened by the Klamaths' actions, the State of Oregon resisted recognizing the Klamaths' treaty rights and sovereignty but succumbed to tribal pressure by 1981. This article challenges the trope of native resistance. Rather than victimize the Klamaths and assume that their activism was merely resistance against a more powerful state, this article demonstrates that the Klamath Tribes wielded more political power than the State of Oregon. This novel approach for understanding episodes in twentieth-century American Indian history further suggests that Indian-state-U.S. relations can be more fully understood through an examination of tribal entities, such as natural and cultural resource departments.