Aboriginal Rights in Canada: Indigenous Strategies for Relative Autonomy Within the Canadian State.

Abstract

The aboriginal rights developments in Canada over the two decades from the mid-1960s to today constitute one of the most sustained attempts to date to redefine the place of distinct minority native peoples within the structures of an existing nation state. These developments have important implications for the efforts in other developed capitalist liberal democratic nation states, suggesting the potentialities and limitations of redefinition within the constraints of an encapsulating state established under the laws and structures of a dominant immigrant majority population. This report is a brief survey and a partial analysis of these developments. A central question is the types of leverage and sources of power available to indigenous minorities within the state. This paper demonstrates a range of such sources, each providing limited but not insignificant opportunities, as well as constraints, for political action. These include, the multiplicity of state institutions and interests that often do not have coherent goals nor exercise coherent power; the historical residue of ambiguities and contradictions inherent in a legal system developed over 300 years of dealing with Native peoples under significantly varying conditions; the needs and processes of state political legitimation; the complementary development of necessarily multi-vocal and ambiguous public political cultures within the populaces; and the need of the state for the support or at least the acquiescence of always incompletely governed and administered populations.