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- Title
IF THERE CAN ONLY BE "ONE LAW", IT MUST BE TREATY LAW. LEARNING FROM KANAWAYANDAN D'AAKI.
- Authors
Scott, Dayna Nadine; Boisselle, Andrée
- Abstract
The paper stems from a research collaboration with the Anishini or Oji-Cree community of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI), known as the people of Big Trout Lake in the far north of Ontario. In the face of renewed threats of encroachment by extractive industries onto their homelands, the community leadership invited our research team to visit in 2017. The community was engaged in strategic planning and reflection on the work that they have done in recent years to articulate and record their own laws for the territory, and to gain recognition for those laws from settler governments. Between 2008 and 2018, the community drafted a Declaration of Sovereignty, a Governance Framework, a Watershed Declaration, and a Consultation Protocol, amongst other "operational documents" describing their Indigenous legal order. This period of community-led legal drafting was stimulated by a dispute between the community and a mining company, Platinex, that culminated in 2008 with the jailing of the Chief, four members of Council, and another community member who became known as the "KI6". Despite community members describing their obligation to protect the land drawn from the key legal concept of Kanawayandan D'aaki, roughly translated as "keeping my land", the KI6 were convicted of contempt of court for disobeying a court order to provide Platinex with access for its drilling program. The courts' message to the community in 2008 was essentially that only "one law" could govern the land; the application of settler law on KI lands could not accommodate the community members' obligations under Indigenous law. In our collaboration, community members expressed an interest in exploring the question of whether the process of writing down their laws would assist the community in any future encounters with the Canadian legal system in disputes over resource extraction.
- Subjects
STRATEGIC planning; MINERAL industries; SOVEREIGNTY; NATURAL resources; PLATINEX Inc.
- Publication
University of New Brunswick Law Journal, 2019, Vol 70, p230
- ISSN
0077-8141
- Publication type
Article