Aboriginal Law & Indigenous Laws

David Milward asks why Indigenous communities seek reform and identifies some of the constitutional barriers in their path. He identifies specific areas of the criminal justice process in which Indigenous communities may wish to adopt different approaches, tests these approaches against constitutional imperatives, and offers practical proposals for reconciling the various matters at stake.

This book is the result of the years-long intellectual and personal journey of an Alberta jurist who went against the grain and actually learned about Canada's Indigenous people in order to become a public servant. "Probably my greatest claim to fame is that I changed my mind," writes John Reilly in this interrogation of the Canadian justice system. Building on his previous two books, Reilly acquaints the reader with the ironies and futilities of an approach to justice so adversarial and dysfunctional that it often increases crime rather than reducing it. He examines the radically different Indigenous approach to wrongdoing, which is restorative rather than retributive, founded on the premise that people are basically good and wrongdoing is the aberration, not that humans are essentially evil and have to be deterred by horrendous punishments. "My proposition is that the dominant Canadian society should scrap its criminal justice system and replace it with the gentler, and more effective, process used by the Indigenous people."

Also available in print: KE8813 .M64 2016 LAW.
This text analyzes the consequences of assimilation policies, dishonoured treaty agreements, manipulative legislation, and systematic racism, arguing that the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the Canadian criminal justice system is not an Indian problem but a colonial one.

This book explores the concept of justice through the eyes of six Omushkegowuk (Swampy Cree) Elders indigenous to northern Manitoba. The author presents a model of restorative justice based on the educational ideas, principles and practices of his people. The knowledge, philosophy, values and experience of the Omushkegowuk is succinctly drawn out, and espoused, by use of the Medicine Wheel, the character Wasekechak, narrative, and with reference to a holistic interpretation of life based upon interconnectedness and healing.

This is the first Canadian open access criminal law casebook, incorporating a wide range of traditional and audio/visual materials such as podcasts and documentary films. It is also notable for being the first to present Indigenous laws alongside Canadian criminal law. Cree law is featured throughout and the editors hope to include more Indigenous laws in future editions.

Funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario Access to Justice Fund, this informative report shares knowledge with respect to both the crisis of Indigenous over-incarceration in Saskatchewan and the justice system’s response. This report is a compilation of the findings from the ILC’s Gladue Awareness Project, which focused primarily on sharing information about the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v Gladue [1999] 2 CNLR 252. The Project reviewed the unique considerations involved in the sentencing of Indigenous people with all those who work in or are exposed to the criminal justice system in Saskatchewan. The Final Report2 summarizes the work completed through the Project and also provides a baseline for future research and education in this area. Ultimately, Gladue Awareness Project: Final Report aims to foster greater knowledge of the Gladue decision and its implementation in Saskatchewan and nationally.

Canadian courts have repeatedly acknowledged that Indigenous individuals and collectives face systemic discrimination throughout the criminal justice system. The system’s disproportionate adverse impacts on Indigenous peoples have also been thoroughly studied and documented. Indigenous individuals are over-represented among those charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison, as well as those who are victims of crime. Among other disparities, Indigenous individuals are more likely to be denied parole, spend a disproportionate amount of time in segregation, and are less likely to receive community-based sentences. At the same time, the criminal justice system has often marginalized the legal responses of Indigenous collectives to wrongdoing among their members. These systemic issues require systemic responses. On April 23, 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada provided one such response in its decision in R v Gladue, articulating a broad open-ended framework to address this crisis of legitimacy and outcomes in the sentencing of Indigenous persons. The Gladue decision’s main principles have since been extended to various other facets of the criminal justice system. At the direction of the BC First Nations Justice Council, this book synthesizes the hundreds of cases that expand on these principles to provide readily accessible guidance to all those involved in their practical implementation.

Indigenous women continue to be overrepresented in Canadian prisons; research demonstrates how their overincarceration and often extensive experiences of victimization are interconnected with and through ongoing processes of colonization. This text navigates the issues in sentencing by examining related discourses in selected judgments from a review of 175 decisions.

This book closes a gap in decolonizing intersectional and comparative research by addressing issues around the mass incarceration of Indigenous women in the US, Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. It illuminates how settler-colonial societies continue to deny many Indigenous peoples the life relatively free from state interference which most citizens enjoy. It also explores the tools of activism and resistance that Indigenous peoples use to resist neo-colonial marginalisation tactics to decolonise their lives and communities.

This book examines four prominent movements: the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipelines, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation.

The horrors of the Indian residential schools are by now well-known historical facts, and they have certainly found purchase in the Canadian consciousness in recent years. The history of violence and the struggles of survivors for redress resulted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which chronicled the harms inflicted by the residential schools and explored ways to address the resulting social fallouts. One of those fallouts is the crisis of Indigenous over-incarceration. While the residential school system may not be the only harmful process of colonization that fuels Indigenous over-incarceration, it is arguably the most critical factor. It is likely that the residential school system forms an important part of the background of almost every Indigenous person who ends up incarcerated, even those who did not attend the schools. The legacy of harm caused by the schools is a vivid and crucial link between Canadian colonialism and Indigenous over-incarceration. Reconciliation and Indigenous Justice provides an account of the ongoing ties between the enduring trauma caused by the residential schools and Indigenous over-incarceration.

Written by CLASSIC and published by the Indigenous Law Centre, this Handbook is meant to increase awareness about community and government resources across Saskatchewan that provide rehabilitative alternatives to custodial sentences, particularly for Indigenous peoples. The manual includes information about addictions and mental health services, alternative measures and extrajudicial sanctions, counselling services, anger management and other programming. CLASSIC hopes the handbook will assist defence counsel in pointing to the applicability of Gladue principles while identifying alternative, rehabilitative programming for their clients. The manual may also assist judges, probation officers and parole officers in the identification of government and community-based services for individuals in conflict with the law. The ultimate aim of the manual is to reduce the representation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system by providing viable programming alternatives that address criminogenic factors and promote healing in the lives of Indigenous people, their families and communities.

Canada's criminal justice system reinforces dominant relations of power and further entrenches the country in its colonial past. Through the mechanisms of surveillance, segregation, and containment, the criminal justice system ensures that Indigenous peoples remain in a state of economic deprivation, social isolation, and political subjection. By examining the ways in which the Canadian justice system continues to sanction overtly discriminatory and racist practices, the authors in this collection demonstrate clearly how historical patterns of privilege and domination are extended and reinforced.