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Histories That Bind: Doctrinal Productivity and Legal Governance in Canadian Aboriginal Law

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Histories That Bind: Doctrinal Productivity and Legal Governance in Canadian Aboriginal Law Histories that Bind: Doctrinal Productivity and Legal Governance in Canadian Aboriginal Law by Jeremy Patzer A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario ©2016, Jeremy Patzer Abstract This work applies a sociological lens to juridical practice in order to illustrate the tendency of law to lag behind extra-juridical historical phenomena, and to examine how this has influenced both the occurrence of, and the nature of, moments of doctrinal productivity in Aboriginal law. In effect, historical practices of colonization in the common law world have more often than not outpaced the law which would sometimes be called upon to adjudicate their legitimacy. The result is that the juridical field has been caught in legal-normative binds and left to accommodate history through doctrinally creative means. Using other common law jurisdictions as a springboard for an examination of Aboriginal law in Canada, I argue that the judiciary has made use of the unacknowledged elasticity in the law to manage such dilemmas, and it has done so in a manner which presents this juridical work as fundamentally grounded and self-evident. In Canada, a bind developed in the late twentieth century because the law’s largely unsympathetic legal positivist approach to Aboriginal title and rights became socio- normatively anachronistic. Available jurisprudential adaptations for the resolution of this, however, were just as risk-laden as the bind itself. The jurisprudence presented as offering a new justice was thus also oriented toward managing risk. Two concepts that help conceptualize how that doctrinal productivity has allowed the juridical field to manage risk and navigate historical binds are injusticiability, the rendering of something unavailable for adjudication by articulating it as a political question rather than a legal question, and incommensurability, the inscribing of difference upon the Aboriginal legal i subject in order to accommodate exigent circumstances with novel forms of justice. With the aid of these techniques, the SCC has tempered rights and title by deducing for them inherent limitations and implicit overrides, and this in a fashion which preserves the juridical field’s ability to maintain rights and title as objects of continuing legal governance. The profound ambivalence of contemporary Aboriginal law, however, is that rights and title can be won under the new jurisprudence—but only with the tacit acceptance of these limitations as the self-evident manifestations of justice. ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisory committee, consisting of Alan Hunt, William Walters, and Jane Dickson, for having extended to me the considerable autonomy I assumed in pursuing this research, while still always according their time and consideration when I sought it. My thanks also goes to my family, above, alongside, and below: Ed, Arlene, Tori, Noah, and Elise. Without their support and patience this project would not have been possible. My doctoral endeavours have been generously supported by the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship and the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement granted by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as various doctoral scholarships contributed by the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... iv Preface: A Duck, and Other Motivations .................................................................................... 1 1. The Lag and Latency of Law .................................................................................................... 6 Terra Nullius and Australia’s History Wars ........................................................................... 7 Whither Terra Nullius? ........................................................................................................... 20 The Historical Bind and Doctrinal Productivity ................................................................... 32 2. An Unsettling Settlement ......................................................................................................... 41 Early Relationships .................................................................................................................. 44 After the Seven Years’ War .................................................................................................... 55 Treaty-Making in an Age of Shifting Relationships ............................................................. 66 A Stable Foundation? .............................................................................................................. 82 In Retrospect ............................................................................................................................ 97 3. Early Jurisprudence .............................................................................................................. 102 The Marshall Court and the Invention of Indian Title ...................................................... 104 The St. Catherine’s Milling Case: Indian Title Comes to Canada ..................................... 133 4. The Legal Positivist Era ........................................................................................................ 147 Legislation and the Indian Civilization Program ................................................................ 152 Case Law and Court Action .................................................................................................. 162 Treaties: R. v. Syliboy ............................................................................................................. 178 Self-Government and Sovereignty: Logan v. Styres ............................................................ 187 Aboriginal Law in the Legal Positivist Era ......................................................................... 193 5. The New Era of Inherence .................................................................................................... 198 Treaty Jurisprudence at Mid-Century ................................................................................ 202 The Modern Principles of Treaty Jurisprudence ................................................................ 207 The Installation of Inherence: Calder, The Constitution Act, 1982, and Sparrow ............. 217 Reconciling the Law’s Irreconcilabilities ............................................................................. 238 6. Taming Inherence and the Constitution .............................................................................. 242 Another Look at the Installation of Inherence .................................................................... 243 Objects of Continuing Legal Governance: Extinguishment and Infringement ............... 274 The Duty to Consult: Under the New Legal Ethics, a Profound Ambivalence ................ 292 iv The Managerial Ethic ............................................................................................................ 311 7. The Aboriginal Cultural-Legal Subject ............................................................................... 314 Creating Cultural Rights ....................................................................................................... 317 The Casuistry of Culture: The Arbitrary, the Specific, and the Indeterminate .............. 337 Culture in Title and Treaty Jurisprudence ......................................................................... 361 Looking Back at Culture ....................................................................................................... 371 8. Aboriginality and the Symbolic Order of the Liberal Settler State .................................. 376 Horse and Badger: Private Property and Treaty Rights .................................................... 377 Commercial Aboriginal Rights ............................................................................................. 384 Commercial Treaty Rights .................................................................................................... 402 Liberal State, Illiberal Doctrines .......................................................................................... 416 9. The Moral Authority of the Dispossessed ............................................................................ 419 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 434 Legislation ............................................................................................................................... 434 Jurisprudence ......................................................................................................................... 435 Works Cited ...........................................................................................................................
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