Indigenous Environmental Justice: Comparing the United States and Canada’s Legal Frameworks for Endangered Species Conservation

Canada and the United States are both committed to the protection of endangered species. This article examines how the legal frameworks created around the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Canadian Species at Risk Act (SARA) intersect with Indigenous environmental justice (EJ). Specifically, the distribution of benefits and burdens is examined since critical habitat designations can limit activity on Native American and First Nation tribal lands. Legal documents and recent court cases also give insight into Indigenous inclusion and recognition in conservation approaches in North America. Overall, it is argued that Canada’s approach comes closer to EJ, but neither legal framework meets the criterion of genuine EJ for Native Americans and First Nations.     

“Our Journey,Our Choice,Our Future”: Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ Self‐Government enacted through the Maa‐nulth Treaty with British Columbia and Canada

In 2011, Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations became one of five Nuu‐chah‐nulth Nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Canada to implement the Maa‐nulth Treaty with the Province of British Columbia and Canada. Modern treaties are dense and lengthy legal documents that exhaustively set out the obligations of each signatory party. They are heavily criticised for being unjust extensions of colonialism that limit Indigenous self‐determination and transform homelands under settler colonial property regimes. Yet, some First Nations accept these agreements as their chosen path for self‐government in state structures. We document Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ decision‐making that resulted when the Maa‐nulth Treaty was implemented and replaced the Indian Act by analysing the Maa‐nulth Treaty and interviews conducted with Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations leadership. We demonstrate how ?iisaak (respect) and ?uu?a?uk (taking care of) guided Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ self‐government, while nesting this discussion in the complexities and critiques of modern treaties.     

Edmonton,Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan,and a Papaschase suburb for settlers

The Papaschase Indian Reservation outside Edmonton, Alberta was established as part of Treaty 6 in 1877, but annulled in 1888. A significant portion of the land was later assembled in Canada's first land bank and sold at below-market prices to create “Mill Woods,” an idealistic vision for a planned mixed-use suburb. Settler Colonial Theory is introduced to explore the history of the Papaschase Cree and the Reservation. This testifies to the process of dispossession, settler colonial occupation, and respatialization of the Canadian landscape. Canadian suburbia is not placeless. Methods for examining such “erased spaces” and layers of previous occupation are discussed. Canadian urban historical geography and suburban research have not sufficiently examined settler colonial dispossession. This is an opportunity for geographers to contribute to Canadian reconciliation between Settler and Indigenous cultures.     

Truth and Decolonization: Filling the Educator Achievement Gap Darn It!

Public attention on the systemic oppression of Indigenous people in Canadian Residential Schools raised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) marks a possible turning point for Canada to enter a respectful relationship with First Nations. Calls for widespread education initiatives that promote Indigenous perspectives indicate a path to reconciliation. However, access to this path is obstructed by two barriers: 1) recurring colonial approaches to enacting Indigenous education policies; and 2) teachers’ bewilderment upon facing such a steep learning curve. In an attempt to overcome these barriers, I designed a workshop to assist educators and I approached teachers to engage on a grassroots level. The workshop developed from a combination of critical policy analysis and autoethnography to provide an accessible overview of Canada’s legacy of colonialism. Delivery of the workshop revealed participants’ readiness to learn about colonization in Canada, while exposing the need for capacity building within the Ontario public education system for Indigenous leadership to direct TRC initiatives.     

The Geopolitics of the ‘Future Return’: Britain's Century-Long Challenges to Norway's Control over the Spitsbergen Archipelago

Within the context of Arctic geopolitics, the article focuses on British policies toward Spitsbergen or Svalbard over the past century. The 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty accorded Norway sovereignty over the archipelago, but it gave other signatories, including Britain, non-discriminatory access to its natural resources. It is argued that while geopolitical interests have played a role in Britain's policy-making, its main rationale has been a determination to use international law to protect pre-existing mining rights and potential future oil rights in the Svalbard area. Apart from Russia, Britain has been most active in challenging Norway's interpretation of its sovereign rights, especially the view about the treaty's non-applicability to Exclusive Economic Zones and continental shelves. It is shown that the Britain's economic focus was tempered during the Cold War by the need for Western solidarity and for supporting Norway's resistance to Soviet Spitsbergen claims. But having been instrumental in watering down Norway's sovereignty provisions in the negotiations on the Spitsbergen Treaty, Britain has never been prepared to abandon its interpretation of the treaty's stipulations on natural resources and equal access to the archipelago's maritime areas.     

Insights from Cameroon: Five years after the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In September 2007, after 23 years of negotiation between nation states and indigenous peoples' organizations, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly finally adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Among its most significant assertions were indigenous peoples' rights to self‐determination; to lands, territories, and natural resources; and to free, prior, and informed consent. Activists and organizations concerned with human and minority rights saw the adoption of the declaration as an important step toward the improvement of the precarious situation of many minority groups. Today, five years have passed since the declaration's adoption. What difference has it made? Have the activists' expectations materialized? How has the declaration been implemented? Which are the responses of governmental and civil society actors? Drawing on institutional developments at the United Nations as well as the case of Cameroon and the Mbororo as a national minority group, I aim to provide some answers to these questions.     

PROJECTIONS OF RACE,NATURE, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC CHILDHOOD IN EARLY EDUCATIONAL CINEMA AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CANADA

In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.     

Working Towards Regional Agreements: Recent Developments in Co‐operative Resource Management in Canada's British Columbia

Canada's experience with ‘regional agreements’ has attracted considerable attention in Australia as a means by which Indigenous people can secure their native title rights to land and sea and ensure they can participate in the development and management of their homeland territories. However, regional agreements implemented in Canada thus far have often taken years to negotiate. To provide a degree of certainty for resource management and decision‐making while the native title claims process is underway, Canadian governments have proceeded to establish interim resource use and management agreements with Indigenous communities. While both governments and Indigenous people stress that interim arrangements do not replace or limit the scope for future claim settlements, it is recognised that the development of such co‐operative relationships will make long‐lasting formal agreements easier to achieve. This paper draws on several recent examples of interim agreements that have been negotiated for the salmon fishery resource in the Skeena River catchment, and considers how these local experiences offer useful approaches for resource management and native title issues in Australia. These examples demonstrate the importance of building shared understandings of resource values and management approaches prior to cementing co‐management partnerships in formal settlements. They also show some of the problems and prospects facing Indigenous peoples in their efforts to benefit from such co‐management agreements.     

Racializing the Canadian landscape: whiteness,uneven geographies and social justice1

Canada is a land troubled by questions of race and space, whether we are speaking of First Nations land claims, Quebec nationalism, or the 'absented presence of others. (Walcott 1997, 37)     

Hydraulic Imperialism: Hydroelectric Development and Treaty 9 in the Abitibi Region

This study aims to untangle the knot of treaty-making, industrialization, and hydroelectric development in the Lake Abitibi region in northeastern Ontario by examining the extent to which industrialist discourses on waterways influenced changes to the physical and political landscape. An analysis of events leading up to the signing of Treaty No. 9 in 1906, and then the Abitibi River hydroelectric dams and concomitant flooding of Lake Abitibi in 1914–15 made possible by the treaty, is provided. Changes to Lake Abitibi during this period are evidence of a process of hydraulic imperialism whereby the Canadian state used waterways to exercise control of the James Bay watershed and encourage industrial and agricultural development in northeastern Ontario in the early twentieth century. This process not only contextualized the state’s understanding of Treaty No. 9 but is further evidence of inherent ambiguities concerning First Nations reserves around Lake Abitibi created by the treaty.     

Hegemony Contests: Challenging the Notion of a Singular Canadian Hockey Nationalism

ABSTRACT

Sports media, athletes, and the public alike have framed Canadian professional men’s hockey as an important symbol of the nation as a whole, while scholars have devoted considerable energy to pointing out that this celebrated hockey symbol tends to marginalize those in Canada who are not white, male, straight, and/or able-bodied. Yet various linguistic, racial, and ethnic minorities play and celebrate hockey in Canada, and indeed use hockey to express their own subordinated nationalisms. Their styles of play and the meanings they bring to the game have issued counter-hegemonic challenges to white, male, Anglo-Canadian hockey hegemony. Exploring the “hockey nationalisms” of Indigenous, Québécois, Acadian, and Central/Eastern European populations as case studies, this article argues for a reconsideration of Canadian hockey nationalism from below.     

Reciprocal Repossession: Property as Land in Urban Australia

Repossession of land by Indigenous people is commonly understood as a legal act that unfolds within the confines of state apparatuses. But for many Indigenous urbanites, legal repossession is both impossible and irrelevant due to their histories of dispossession and dislocation. Moreover, while land repossession in Australia is predominantly non‐urban, I demonstrate that land is also reclaimed within cities. Urban repossession of land, considered here as reciprocal rather than legal, challenges the model of private ownership by asserting a territorially transferable relationship to property as land. The order of property entrenches Indigenous people's dispossession by demanding immobility as precondition to ownership and rendering Indigenous urbanites all “too mobile”. Against this framing and the liquidation of their lands as capital, Indigenous people practice reciprocal forms of repossession that challenge both liberal and traditional meanings of ownership. This helps retrieve urban Indigenous subjectivities while compelling partial relinquishment of non‐Indigenous properties.     

Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler‐Colonialism

The changes in regulation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands, wrought by the advent of native title in Australia, created an impression that the political economy of mining on Indigenous people's lands would be fundamentally transformed. In this paper we argue, in reality, a deeply seated settler‐colonial mentality endures in Australia within the institutions presiding over mineral governance, particularly in those States that are heavily dependent upon resource extraction. Focusing on the governance of mineral development in Queensland, Australia, we offer an analysis of the rationalities that inform the endurance of an inequitable architecture of extractive governance in that State. Our conceptual framework draws on a synthesis of the concepts of “accumulation by dispossession”, “settler colonialism”, and Indigenous critiques of the politics of recognition, to argue that liberal states remain deeply committed to the facilitation of mineral development on Indigenous people's lands in direct contravention to international norms.     

The Indigenous Challenge to Westphalian Sovereignty

Indigenous peoples achieved a diplomatic success in 2007 when the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This paper analyses why this occurred, and assesses what the Declaration means for state sovereignty. It highlights two reasons why the Global Indigenous Caucus gained widespread endorsement for a Declaration that strongly affirms Indigenous self-determination. First, as a transnational advocacy network the Caucus used a boomerang pattern of lobbying, by engaging the support of powerful allies. Second, the Caucus understood that the concerns of African states about territorial integrity differed from the concerns of states like Australia about external scrutiny of human rights. The Declaration enhances the likelihood of such scrutiny without threatening the territorial integrity of states.     

The Indigenous Land Corporation's First Land Management Policy: Reconciling National Policy with the Contingencies of Local Context

The Indigenous Land Corporation was established to acquire lands for Indigenous peoples who were unlikely to benefit from recognition of native title. The Corporation is also charged with assisting Indigenous peoples manage their lands. The First Land Management Policy of the Indigenous Land Corporation is examined, and the strengths as well as the omissions and flaws of this initial policy approach to land management are noted. Ways to improve the assistance that the Corporation provides to Indigenous landowners in the management of their lands are proposed. The paper suggests that the Corporation's approach to land management needs to resolve the demands of a national policy mandate with the contingencies of local context.     

“This is an Indigenous city; why don't we see it?” Indigenous urbanism and spatial production in Winnipeg

This paper examines indigeneity and spatial production in the city of Winnipeg, home to the largest urban Indigenous population in Canada. Using data from semi‐structured interviews with Indigenous inhabitants, municipal officials, and Indigenous leaders, this paper argues that the right to the city and to difference are deradicalized for urban Indigenous communities. Indigenous engagement in processes of everyday urbanism occurs through broadly participatory public consultation and through mechanisms designed by City Hall to communicate with Indigenous communities about municipal initiatives. To arrive at a more robust and meaningful Indigenous urban visibility in Canadian cities, spatial production and programming mechanisms will need to be reconstituted. Guided by the perspectives of Indigenous participants, this paper considers some of what Indigenous urbanism might yet entail. Fulfilling coexistence and reconciliation is dependent on enabling Indigenous urbanism to guide the course taken in urban governance, spatial planning, and the built environment of Canadian cities.     

Contesting the Settler City: Indigenous Self‐Determination,New Urban Reserves,and the Neoliberalization of Colonialism

In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial‐capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self‐sufficiency, exercise self‐determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler‐colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place‐making.     

Federalism,constitutional recognition and Indigenous Peoples: how a new identity-based state can be established in Australia

ABSTRACT

The debate on constitutional recognition of Indigenous Peoples in Australia has highlighted the desire for meaningful responses to Indigenous Peoples’ claims to sovereignty and self-determination. One potential response is to apply federal principles and establish a new state, or states, for Indigenous Peoples in Australia. This proposal has been most prominently put by Tasmanian Aboriginal leader Michael Mansell. Others have followed. However, (at least) one fundamental problem with this federal idea has not been properly addressed, namely the dispersal and limited geographical concentration of Indigenous people in Australia. This paper asks whether and how federalism can be used to institutionalise the shared and self-rule of widely dispersed minorities, or more specifically, Indigenous Peoples in the settler-majority country of Australia. It demonstrates that a non-territorial approach can be applied to federalism in Australia, and that it may form one possible response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.     

种族问题研究中三个基本概念的界定与阐释

"原住民"、"土著"和"第一民族"是种族问题研究中常常遇到的三个基本概念。原住民是指最早定居在某地方的族群;土著最初是西方殖民者对当地原住民的称谓,而现在也泛指原住民;第一民族原来是加拿大的一个种族称谓,与印第安人同义,指的是在当今加拿大境内的北美洲原住民及其后裔,后来也可指代其他国家的意在凸显其历史渊源、独特文化和地位的原住民。     

The Sector Theory and the Canadian Arctic, 1897–1970

ABSTRACT

Although European discovery in the Arctic began during the Middle Ages, sovereignty issues did not become a major concern until the early twentieth century. At that time, the controversial sector theory was taken up by Canada, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, but opposed by the United States and Norway. This article examines the sector theory in Canadian state practice, clarifying the version of the theory to which Canadian officials subscribed and the aims they hoped to achieve through its use. The international response to Canadian claims is also described.

The article demonstrates that Canadian use of the sector principle during the 1920s was pragmatic and successful, but in later decades, confusion arose both inside and outside the government. Inconsistent public statements were made by government representatives in the 1950s and 1960s; these have puzzled and misled scholars ever since. Differences between the Canadian and Soviet versions of the sector theory, lack of adequate institutional memory in Ottawa, and partisan political rivalries all played a part in creating the confusion, but perhaps the key factor was the inherent difficulty of state control over this remote yet geopolitically crucial region.