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Fabris, Michael Paul Christoph

University of British Columbia

In this dissertation, I seek to answer: what are the limits to attempts by Indigenous peoples to articulate our own forms of law through the languages and institutions of settler law? I answer this question through a set of distinct but related case studies: the making of Treaty 7, Piikani challenges to the Oldman River Dam, and the theorization of Urban Indigeneity in Canadian cities. Building on existing works within Indigenous geographies, legal geography, and Indigenous legal studies, this dissertation explores how Indigenous law is operationalized in the face of past and present attempts at erasure on the part of the Canadian state. I thus seek to answer: what are the limits of decolonial manifestations of Indigenous law when expressed through Canadian and other settler forms of law? To do this, I draw from both contemporary discussions concerning Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation and the related ‘articulation’ debates of the 1970s. Instead of articulation between modes of production, however, I explore the relevance of these analytical tools to examine relationships between Indigenous and settler legal orders. I argue: In struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Indigenous legal orders thus tend to exist in a complex unity with settler forms of law, whereby we often attempt to express our own laws through the language, institutions, and other forms of settler colonial law.

Text

2022-11-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83297

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/