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In recent years, Taiwan's Indigenous community has been actively demanding the repatriation and reburial of ancestral remains, seeking historical justice for colonial wrongs, asserting the community's rights to traditional territories, and pushing for recognition of their long‐standing existence and legal status as Indigenous peoples. In 2022, archeologists consulted and cooperated with the Siraya people, proposing "The Siraya Indigenous Archaeological Action Plan." The aim is to re‐balance the power relations between archeologists and Indigenous peoples, seek a diversity of voices and methods, and put the social practice of archaeology at the trowel's edge into practice. The action plan was carried out within the Siraya Soulangh abandoned settlement, with the Siraya people joining the investigation and excavation work, physically touching important parts of their ancestral cultural heritage. Other efforts include reviving the traditional Siraya systems of the male age‐set organization and the national assembly, consolidating the ethnic identity of the contemporary Siraya people, and sustaining their societal and cultural systems. These endeavors have helped fill the huge historical gap left by colonizers, empowering the Siraya people to claim ownership over the abandoned settlement cultural heritage that has a direct cultural connection with their community, push for recognition of their long‐standing and continuous existence in Taiwan, and acquire legal status as Indigenous peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many questions, fears, concerns, and hurdles when we are faced with engaging with a legal order other than our own. For the most part, we want to be respectful of other peoples and their laws. However, we experience hesitations and sometimes paralysis about where to begin, how to learn, and how to work across plural or multiple legal orders. I am suggesting that we can create both macro and micro frameworks to theoretically and practically beginning to understand the law of others. For example, what are the conditions and standards of law, and how do people reason through the resources of law to solve problems. The reality is that even if we cannot yet see the foundations, operations, and institutions of law in another society, one starts with knowing they are there, then we build our intersocietal capacities. To provide examples, I set our law and legal process drawn from the Gitxsan legal order, one Indigenous people in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code directs sentencing judges to exercise restraint in the use of incarceration 'with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders.' In R v Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada interpreted this as a remedial provision aiming to reduce the incarceration of Indigenous people. That has made it appear to be a failure by its own lights. Yet to write off section 718.2(e) and the Gladue principles would be to fail properly to understand their moral foundations and structure. Judges are called upon to reduce the incarceration of Indigenous people neither by working backwards from prison demographic targets nor merely by combating implicit bias. Rather, Gladue requires judges to open their minds to hitherto unappreciated reasons that many Indigenous offenders should be afforded mitigation, restorative justice, and community-based accountability. One reason, we argue, relates to the unfair criminogenic disadvantages disproportionately faced by Indigenous offenders. Another reason is that the Canadian state's complicity in such disadvantages calls into question its legitimate authority and its standing to blame Indigenous offenders. In sum, Gladue calls upon our courts to widen the horizon of fairness in their treatment of Indigenous people. This matters for its own sake in each and every case, whether or not it brings about an appreciable reduction in Indigenous incarceration in the aggregate. Our reconstruction of Gladue not only rescues it from cynical dismissals but also helps to solve the central doctrinal puzzles surrounding it: how Indigenous offenders' unique life circumstances must be connected to their offences to be mitigating; how Gladue principles should apply differently to more and less serious offences; how a variant of Gladue principles should be extended to members of other disadvantaged groups such as Black Canadians; and how judges should weigh the interests of Indigenous victims when sentencing Indigenous offenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code directs sentencing judges to exercise restraint in the use of incarceration 'with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders.' In R v Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada interpreted this as a remedial provision aiming to reduce the incarceration of Indigenous people. That has made it appear to be a failure by its own lights. Yet to write off section 718.2(e) and the Gladue principles would be to fail properly to understand their moral foundations and structure. Judges are called upon to reduce the incarceration of Indigenous people neither by working backwards from prison demographic targets nor merely by combating implicit bias. Rather, Gladue requires judges to open their minds to hitherto unappreciated reasons that many Indigenous offenders should be afforded mitigation, restorative justice, and community-based accountability. One reason, we argue, relates to the unfair criminogenic disadvantages disproportionately faced by Indigenous offenders. Another reason is that the Canadian state's complicity in such disadvantages calls into question its legitimate authority and its standing to blame Indigenous offenders. In sum, Gladue calls upon our courts to widen the horizon of fairness in their treatment of Indigenous people. This matters for its own sake in each and every case, whether or not it brings about an appreciable reduction in Indigenous incarceration in the aggregate. Our reconstruction of Gladue not only rescues it from cynical dismissals but also helps to solve the central doctrinal puzzles surrounding it: how Indigenous offenders' unique life circumstances must be connected to their offences to be mitigating; how Gladue principles should apply differently to more and less serious offences; how a variant of Gladue principles should be extended to members of other disadvantaged groups such as Black Canadians; and how judges should weigh the interests of Indigenous victims when sentencing Indigenous offenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ilanoli isht unowa. We tell our own stories. A single historical event has many stories. Although this nation's official chronicle expected and even hoped for Indigenous peoples to fade away, we are still here. Our histories are marked by resistance, survival, sovereignty, and renaissance. Only now, in the later stages of the American experiment, do our histories have the chance to matter in new forms and spaces. How much these stories matter within contemporary contexts depends upon where they are spoken and more importantly, who is listening. On the pages of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion, what stories are told can make all the difference between advancing age-old rights and defending the very right to exist. In almost all Supreme Court opinions dealing with tribal nations, the stories from outsider perspectives dominate the narratives, affecting the construction of facts and the application of abstract legal principles. When beginning with a contrived image, it comes as no surprise that the lens of law will only further exaggerate those inaccuracies through a judicial opinion. The stories of tribal nations found in judicial opinions are like a fun house mirror--a misrepresentation of them. This warped version of Indigenous history is the American Mythology from which the federal common law derives its conceptualization of Indian tribes. But Supreme Court opinions need not continue this tradition of misrepresentation. They could instead detail history from Indigenous viewpoints, wherein Indigenous stories take on new relevance and legal import. This Article offers a methodological solution as an alternative to the Court's current approach and provides evidence from recent opinions for why this option is more than wishful thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has brought global efforts by settler colonial states to provide healing and justice for past and ongoing harms against Indigenous communities. Many of these efforts have manifested in the creation of truth commissions, nonjudicial entities which seek to establish a reliable historical record of harm, promote reconciliation, and foster healing by providing harmed parties the opportunities to share their stories and--in some cases--to confront their perpetrators. To date, these commissions have been established by various settler colonial states, including Canada and Greenland. Most recently, however, Scandinavian countries have turned to truth commissions to provide redress for past harms against their Indigenous peoples. In fact, within the last few years, Norway, Finland, and Sweden have all created independent truth commissions to investigate their nations' respective systemic discrimination against the Sami people and provide forms of healing and pathways to reconciliation. This Article specifically examines the creation and operation to date of Sweden's Truth Commission on the Violations of the Sami people by the Swedish state ("Swedish Sami Truth Commission"). Relying on materials issued by the Swedish Sami Truth Commission as well as interviews conducted with representatives of the Swedish Sami Truth Commission, this Article analyzes the events that led to the creation of the Swedish Sami Truth Commission, its mandate and expected goals, and the type of work it intends to engage in to facilitate truth and healing among the Swedish Sami people. Currently, there remains legislation pending in both houses of US Congress for the creation of a truth and healing commission to address the use of Indian boarding schools in the United States, at which thousands of Native American children were removed from their families, forcibly assimilated into American culture, and often sexually, mentally, and physically abused. Utilizing diffusion theory, this Article seeks to draw lessons from the Swedish Sami Truth Commission that the United States may learn from in creating its own national truth commission to address past harms against Native Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The General Crimes Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1152, is an older statute that pertains to federal criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed in Indian Country. The General Crimes Act is limited in scope as it only applies to cases where the alleged perpetrator of the crime is not a Native American but the victim is determined to be a Native American. But who decides how to label each party as “Indian” or “non-Indian” (to borrow language used in the courts)? And is ‘Indian status’ an element of the statute that the prosecution must prove or is it reserved for the defendant as an affirmative defense to rebut the prosecution? Federal appellate courts have touched on these issues in the past, but a circuit split exists over how to approach a test that may be used to determine the Indian status of the parties in all matters involving the General Crimes Act, as well as how Indian status fits within the elemental framework of the statute. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court released a decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta that dramatically affected how the General Crimes Act is interpreted. But what did the Court have to say about how to determine a party’s Indian status in the decision? Was it even on the Justices’ minds? This Note takes a closer look at the circuit split over what may be thought of as an ‘Indian status test’ as it historically existed in the courts, and within different interpretations of the General Crimes Act. The Note then describes the status of the circuit split in the wake of the Court’s decision in Castro-Huerta. This Note concludes with predictions on how the Castro-Huerta decision may affect future cases involving the General Crimes Act and where, if applicable, an ‘Indian status test’ may be invoked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study divided the various chronicles of Nueva España into two periods (the conquest period, the mexican colonial period), and analyzed the characteristics and changes of each period, focusing on three themes (America, indigenous peoples, and history of conquest). The chronology of the first period began from the perspective of european supremacy based on christian centralism. The Americas were the object of conquest and looting under the pretext of christian propagation, and the natives were merely inferior species object to labor exploitation. Some chronicles took the lead in protecting indigenous peoples by informing the outside world of this reality. However, entering the second period, chronology became a tool of colonial authorities to redefine theological and legal status of indigenous peoples and justify spanish conquest and domination. Chronicles from mestizo also appeared, but they could not break away from the mainstream tone centered on christian denominations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous and local communities (ILCs) are special right-holders under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Since 2010, the CBD parties have been called upon to adopt the terminology 'Indigenous Peoples and local communities' (IPLCs) to better reflect the international human rights development, especially with respect to Indigenous Peoples. The CBD parties agreed to this terminological change in 2014. The very recent CBD decisions and voluntary guidelines have reflected this commitment. This analysis suggests that the inclusion of the term 'Indigenous Peoples' in the CBD framework may seem like a victory for Indigenous Peoples' rights advocacy, but it really is not because important human rights implications have been blocked via complicated restrictions on treaty interpretation. Instead, it indicates a growing divergence in the understanding of the rights of IPLCs in international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The claims for the restitution of legal estate by the Indigenous peoples are often without the benefit of a written agreement when they have to prove a spatial and temporal connection with ancestral lands. The witness testimony from a storyteller who is keeper of the historical records is in the absence of documentary evidence and the court has to be convinced of the probative value of the evidence before the oral testimony is admissible as an exception to the rule against hearsay. This presents immense obstacles to Indigenous litigants, who are governed by customary laws and whose narratives regarding the claims on land are conveyed intergenerationally. The court structures based on common law exclude such evidence as hearsay, which has prevented claims on land in North America, and in Norway, which has a Eurocentric court structure. There is a need for a framework in the procedural codes of the common law courts and by extension of all courts where Indigenous people own lands or exercise rights over them to formalise the reception theory of evidence. This will contextualise the terminologies, expressions and idioms that are included in Indigenous story testimony and their authenticity can be framed in protocols which courts could resource before ruling whether the narrative testimony is admissible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Constitution was written in the name of the "People of the United States." And yet, many of the nation's actual people were excluded from the document's drafting and ratification based on race, gender, and class. But these groups were far from silent. A more inclusive constitutional history might capture marginalized communities' roles as actors, not just subjects, in constitutional debates. This Article uses the tools of legal and Native history to examine how one such group, Indigenous peoples, argued about and with the U.S. Constitution. It analogizes Native engagement to some of the foundational frames of the "Founding" to underscore the significance of such engagement for current constitutional discourse. Like their Anglo-American neighbors, Native peoples, too, had a prerevolutionary constitutional order--what we here dub the "diplomatic constitution"--that experienced a crisis during and after the Revolution. After the Constitution's drafting, Native peoples engaged in their own version of the ratification debates. And then, in the Early Republic, Native peoples both invoked and critiqued the document as they faced Removal. This Article's most important contribution is proof of concept, illustrating what a more inclusive constitutional history might look like. Still, some of the payoffs are doctrinal: broadening the "public" in original public meaning, for instance. But the more significant stakes are theoretical. As this Article contends, by recognizing Indigenous law and constitutional interpretations as part of "our law"--in other words, the pre- and postconstitutional legal heritage of the United States--Native peoples can claim their role as co-creators of constitutional law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the socio-geographic assertions of regional resource rights by indigenous people in a demarcated indigenous region in north-east India. It analyses local media content to gain insights into the process of discursive (de)legitimation targeting three mining regimes. The results uncover (de)legitimation attempts using multiple themes that are grounded in the physical and institutional features of the region. These themes are flexibly deployed to advance the overarching discourses of protective separation and developmental integration. Further, the results demonstrate how the process of discursive (de)legitimation influences, and is influenced by, significant internal disparities, leading to varying degrees of indigenous convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years ago Canadian legal history was very much in its infancy. What little had been published was in equal measure antiquarian, descriptive, and hagiographic. The field has undergone a profound transformation in the last half-century. We now know a great deal more about all aspects of our legal past, about our institutions, our legal personnel, and the substantive law. The field has also become much more sophisticated, concerned not only with internal legal developments but increasingly with the relationships between law and other aspects of Canadian history. Social history, labour history, women's history, economic, intellectual, cultural and political history, to name but a few, have come to be central themes in legal history just as historians in those fields have integrated the law into their analyses. This article cannot survey the field over fifty years in a comprehensive way, but uses four areas to illustrate the increasing complexity, sophistication and importance of Canadian legal history. Here we examine in some detail the development of the literature in four areas: the history of Canadian courts and judges, women's legal history, Indigenous peoples and the law, and the evolution of the civil law of Quebec within the broader framework of law in Canada. Each, albeit in different ways, demonstrates both that legal history and other forms of history are now effectively inseparable if one is to have a full and nuanced understanding of each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reckoning is required on how Eurocentric laws and economic systems are biased toward Western worldviews while not accounting for Indigenous realities, legal orders, or economic perspectives. Most notably, Eurocentric laws have been instrumental in advancing non-Indigenous economic interests to the detriment of Indigenous interests, largely because Indigenous laws have not been respected. The strengthening of certain Eurocentric property and contract laws have limited Indigenous peoples' legal and economic interests and continues to constrain positive economic outcomes and advancement for Indigenous nations. This article argues that re-centering Indigenous legal traditions is a means to advance Indigenous economic interests. The principle of Two-Eyed Seeing can assist by encouraging legal actors to draw from the best of both Western and Indigenous laws and economic perspectives in Indigenous economic development initiatives and processes. This is necessary, not only to promote inclusivity, but to honor Nation-to-Nation building and to promote Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to reflect on oral history interview data provided by an ex-soccer star who played for Fiji and in what is now the Fiji Premier League, and reconcile his criminal past (according to town-based criminal laws) with his current village assistant headman status. The article compares and contrasts two sources of law – customary Indigenous traditions of rights and responsibilities and town-based criminal laws, which have their origins in British colonial-era laws and are now administered and enforced by the neoliberal Bainimarama government. Because the soccer star's jewellery store robberies were of Fiji Indian-owned stores, it is difficult for them to penetrate into the world of 'village-space', other than as a repressed spectre, since non-Indigenous people cannot live in Indigenous villages. For the Indigenous Fijians, 'town-space' is a place for employment, education, venturing out and partying, beyond the gaze of village elders, whereas 'village-space' is the ordered space of home and community. 'Quasi-space' is here defined as space physically in the town, but when Indigenous people are the only ones present, or a clear majority, some aspects of village understandings can dominate in that space at least for certain time periods and with variable intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text titled "Legal History Review" discusses the creation and sharing of legal knowledge in the twelfth century, focusing on the manuscript Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 673. It explores the evolution of legal knowledge in the Middle Ages, the origin and features of the manuscript, the formation of marriage according to the Sg-Codex, special language features in the Exserpta ex decretis sanctorum patrum, and more. The text provides fresh perspectives and new insights into the study of legal history. Another text, "Raum und Recht: Visualisierung von Rechtsansprüchen in der Vormoderne," examines the visualization of legal rights in the pre-modern era, including regional maps used in water regulation disputes and territorial delineation. It also explores the use of visual representations in legal proceedings, such as proof commissions and visualizations of crime scenes. The third text, "Roman law and maritime commerce," delves into the relationship between Roman law and maritime trade, covering topics such as the origins of Roman maritime trade, seafaring contracts and law, pirates' captives, and the infrastructure of maritime trade. Lastly, "Soggettività contestate e diritto internazionale in età moderna" explores the contested subjectivity and international law in the early modern period, discussing various aspects such as the condition of foreigners, rebellion and sovereignty, assassination as a war tactic, the legal status of indigenous peoples [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the discursive themes and strategies of resistance by the Lumad, the indigenous people of Southern Philippines, and civil society groups to neoliberal hegemony, the dominance of the political-economic philosophy that champions the market as the prime regulator of economic activity, in the Lumad's struggle for justice and their rights. The Lumad have been subject to killings of their leaders, militarization, red-tagging (the pernicious labeling of government critics, activists, and other members of civil society as Communists or terrorists) of their schools, and displacement from their lands. It is a study situated in the context of indigenous resistance to neoliberal globalization. It uses the critical discourse analysis approach in analyzing the discursive themes and strategies of resistance, particularly the theoretical ideas propounded by John Flowerdew founded on Foucault's theory of power and resistance. Ten purposively selected news articles and two statements published from 2017 to 2020 by the online alternative news media outfit Davao Today were analyzed in the study. The discursive themes identified were neoliberalism's dire consequences and destructive impact, [End Page 302] displacement of the Lumad, food security, red-tagging, the struggle for education, counternarrative to red-tagging, defense of the environment and Lumad ancestral lands, injustice, corporate greed, and environmental degradation and the catastrophes that result from it. The discursive strategies of resistance used were constatives, or truth claims with factual backing, regulatives, avowals, ridicule, sarcasm, rebuttal, vivid adjectives, use of words, and use of evocative phrases and sentences. These discursive themes and strategies of resistance call for an economic system that empowers and respects indigenous peoples and local communities and interacts with the environment in a positive, respectful way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyze the historical and political outcomes of the federal recognition process within the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and suggests that the BIA should eliminate the continuous existence requirement from that process. This paper also suggests that the BIA should consider ratifying state tribal recognition through an alternative criterion rather than the federal acknowledgment process. Without taking action, the current structure of recognition fails the United States' duties to its Indigenous population and underscores its role in extinguishing the continuous existence of many Indian tribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The federal government’s scattershot treatment of Alaska Natives has long created confusion over the legal status and rights of Alaska Natives and Alaska Native entities. This confusion was center stage in the recent Supreme Court case, Yellen v. Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, involving “Indian Tribe” entitlement to CARES Act relief funds. To better understand the reason uncertainty remains after more than 150 years since the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and more than sixty years after Alaska’s statehood, we must look to the unique history of Alaska Natives. Starting in the mid-1700s, this Article surveys the laws relating to the Native people of Alaska through the Russian colonial rule, the Alaska purchase, and the early territorial government, culminating with the jurisprudence of the late 19th century. This Article explains how Russian laws contributed to the framework for the unique development of Indian Law in Alaska. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The living tree doctrine of the Canadian Constitution uses the metaphor of a tree to present the Constitution as a dynamic organism which can evolve over time to accommodate new influences. This essay examines the history of this doctrine along with its possible Indigenous counterparts. In this examination, both the arboreal imagery of such doctrines and their dynamic approach to law are considered. The essay explores the benefits and disadvantages of employing a living tree approach to accommodate Indigenous legal traditions within the Canadian formal legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International human rights law and international courts have finally begun to recognize a new type of victim: local and indigenous communities. In key decisions over the past two decades, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized the violations of indigenous communities' rights by national governments. At the same time, less attention has been paid to the nature of damages available for these violations. This Note highlights the underdevelopment of damages jurisprudence in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which has mostly relied on non-pecuniary damages to compensate collective victims. It argues that the Court's approach fails to recognize the evidentiary challenges faced by collective victims, who often cannot prove the harm they suffered due to their traditional way of living or the destruction of evidence caused by the violation itself. At the same time, the approach also fails to utilize the power of equity to compensate for clearly monetary harms, especially when a lack of quantitative proof is inevitable. This Note critiques the use of the non-pecuniary approach in the context of group victims and argues (1) that violators, not victims, should assume the risks associated with the uncertain value of harms; and (2) that non-pecuniary compensation is a misguided approach because it implies that harms suffered by group victims are non-monetary in nature. Drawing on the jurisprudence of other international tribunals, this Note shows that group cases are amenable to the use of equity in calculating monetary damages based on approaches to both collective and complex individual cases. This Note concludes by suggesting that monetary damages should be approximated, perhaps with the help of experts, in human rights cases when the only barrier to proof is the lack of a concrete value for a given harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Rising nativism and political volatility worldwide threaten to undermine hard-won achievements in human rights and public health. Risks are particularly acute for hundreds of millions of migrants, minorities, and Indigenous peoples, who face disproportionately high health burdens, including HIV/AIDS, and precarious legal status (LS). While LS is receiving increasing attention as a social determinant of health and HIV, understandings are still limited to select immigrant communities. Its effects on health among stateless communities, particularly in the Global South, remain largely unknown. Moreover, widespread limitations in census measures of LS reduce its complexity to a simplistic citizen/non-citizen binary or insufficient proxies. Thailand's ethnolinguistically diverse highlander population experiences disproportionately high HIV prevalence and comprises one of the world's largest and most protracted cases of statelessness, an acute condition of precarious LS. As such, analysis of LS and health outcomes among highlanders is both critically warranted, and useful as a case study outside of the migration paradigm.Methods: Drawing on the UNESCO Highland Peoples Survey II (2010), an unprecedented and unique cross-sectional census of highlanders in Thailand, we mobilize complex measures of LS in adjusted ordinal logistic regression models to assess how parent citizenship and LS adjudication over the early life course condition adult HIV knowledge-a key protective factor against transmission (n = 8079).Results: Adjusted ordinal logistic regression on knowledge scores reveal that parent citizenship predicts odds of greater knowledge by 1.4- to 2.2-fold, depending on ethnic group. This is partially explained by divergent stages of LS adjudication between birth and adulthood, including successful birth registration and adult citizenship acquisition, along with secondary school completion. Precisely how these factors contribute to HIV knowledge varies by ethnic group.Conclusions: This study advances knowledge of LS outside of the migration paradigm, reveals heretofore unexamined connections between LS and access to public health information, and elucidates how instabilities in LS adjudication stages underlie health inequalities over the life course. Findings indicate that securing success in public health and human rights agendas requires attention to how states adjudicate and deploy LS in multiple stages across the life course to structure access and exclusion among migrant and non-migrant communities alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The indigenous justice systems were modes of resolving conflicts in Tanzanian communities for millenia before the introduction of the common law system as it was applied in England. The introduced mode, despite its success, is encumbered with a number of challenges. Apart from the challenges, the restoration of one's customs and traditions is what makes one a human. The conventional justice system being 'water' to clean off dirt, the 'baby' is celebrated for what it has so far achieved; thus, the washed baby should not have been thrown into the water because in Africa, and Tanzania in particular, no one denies how valuable a baby is to parent and the community at large. Despite Tanzania's efforts in capturing the bits of indigenous justice systems, the laws in place to a great extent roll on the bits of the conventional justice system. Protecting and preserving one's customs has caught the interest of the international and regional community. That should awaken Tanzanians to look for the baby (indigenous justice systems) and appreciate its beauty. Ratification of the convention on tribal and indigenous people is optional; its negation devalues one's customs and traditions. This paper comes with a reformatory agenda. The pumpkin in the homestead cannot be uprooted i.e. indigenous traditions must be preserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that prison art programs are central to the human rights of Indigenous detainees. It examines how these programs are most commonly understood in terms of their rehabilitative value, an approach which fails to fully capture the right of Indigenous detainees to participation in them. It argues that a human rights framework should be applied to prison art programs. This recognises the pivotal role art programs play in realising a multitude of interconnected rights, upholds the voices of Indigenous prisoners and emphasises the crucial place of self-determination in the design, delivery and ultimate success of programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States and throughout the world, there are many indigenous peoples whose culture and identity are closely connected to salmon and fisheries. Such salmon and fisheries are often dependent on maintaining adequate instream flows of water in rivers. Indigenous groups in the United States and in other countries have increasingly relied on indigenous human rights laws as a basis to keep water instream to maintain salmon and fisheries. This includes reliance on sources of international law such as the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the International Labor Organization's Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, the Declaration of Principles for the Defense of Indigenous Nations and Peoples in the Western Hemisphere and the Indigenous Peoples Water Declaration. This Article examines five case studies of how indigenous communities have attempted to use domestic and international law to ensure that there is adequate flowing water to sustain the fisheries upon which their tribal cultures depend. Three of these case studies come from the United States-the Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest, the Nooksack River in Washington and Stanshaw Creek in California-and the other two case studies come from the Saru River in Japan and the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Collectively, these case studies reveal that efforts to maintain instream flow are not only about preserving fish stocks and riverine ecosystems but can also be about preserving cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on advice given to the Department of Premier and Cabinet on the public law obligations of the State of Victoria regarding the entering into of treaty relations between the Aboriginal Peoples and people of Victoria. It makes visible and explicit the obligations that the State of Victoria has taken up in the Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Act 2018 (Vic) and considers how they might be understood as a matter of Indigenous and non-Indigenous public law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an overview of the current situation of human rights and indigenous peoples and their peoples, in the face of the ascension of the new Mexican government that is said to be left-wing and antineoliberal. The obvious contradictions, the product of structural bases on which the Mexican State has been erected, are under consideration. Our method of analysis focuses on Mexican law, beyond its state sources confronting the norm with social facts, privileging an approach to social justice and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article practices a genealogy of the two dominant legal concepts in the normative relationship to land: the right to property and territorial space as an element of the State, in order to argue the need for a decolonial thesis that gives due account to the normative status of the relationship of indigenous people with land as a right to territory, starting with the case of the Mapuche people. In this context, the purpose is also to diagnose the state of the art in the conceptualization of this right both in international law and in Latin American legal systems as well as its possible intercultural reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does "Indigenous feminist legal pedagogy" mean? This article takes up this inquiry through an analysis of interviews that were done with twenty-three professors who teach in the area of Indigenous law (Indigenous peoples' own laws) in Canada. Overwhelmingly, the professors were on board with the idea that gender matters and that it needs to be included in education about Indigenous laws, but how people were taking up gender, and the responses as they relate to Indigenous feminisms, varied. The interviews signal that there is a need for ongoing work in the area of gender and feminisms in the field of Indigenous law. This article illustrates why gendering Indigenous legal education is vital and argues for increased engagement with the idea and practice of Indigenous feminist legal pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Courts historically side with private interests at the expense of Indigenous religious rights. Continuing this trend, the Hawai'i State Supreme Court allowed the Thirty-Meter-Telescope to be built atop Maunakea, a mountain sacred to Native Hawaiians. This decision led to a mass protest that was organized by Native Hawaiian rights advocates and community members. However, notwithstanding the mountain's religious and cultural significance, Indigenous plaintiffs could not prevent construction of the telescope on Maunakea. Unlike most First Amendment rights, religious Free Exercise Clause claims are not generally subject to strict constitutional scrutiny. Congress has mandated the application of strict scrutiny to federal government action that imposes a substantial burden on religious activity through the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). However, because most courts narrowly interpret "substantial burden," it has become nearly impossible for Indigenous plaintiffs to succeed on claims involving violations of religious freedom. Moreover, RFRA does not apply to state governments, and most states-including Hawai'i-have not enacted similar protections for religious rights. This Comment suggests that the Hawai'i State Legislature should enact a state version of RFRA that would apply strict scrutiny to government actions that impose a substantial burden on religious rights. Further, this Comment urges Congress and state legislatures to enact a more expansive definition of "substantial burden" that respects the First Amendment rights of Indigenous people to practice their beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Is conservation a choice for our community or is it our duty in exchange for rights?" asked a young Adivasi from Kondingamali, a bauxite-rich hill range in the eastern Indian state of Odisha.' This brief encounter with a young Adivasi in Kodingamali brings to light that the Indigeneity embodied in India's legal regime and international law hinges on two fundamental markers: namely, their cultural attachment to land and their cultural backgrounds that make them naturally attuned to conserve. The idea of Indigeneity is transforming in India and elsewhere as forest- dwelling communities increasingly migrate to cities or engage with extractive or other economic activities. In this paper, I argue that the notion of Indigeneity embedded in this approach is removed from the everyday reality of Adivasi and forest-dwelling communities in India. Through empirical evidence from my fieldwork in the eastern state of Odisha, this article brings to light the challenges associated with rigidly framing Indigeneity in climate change law and policy. I then proceed to offer two pathways out of this bind. First, this article suggests that expanding the right to Indigenous participation in legal deliberations can act as a basis to reconfigure Indigenous involvement in the law and its implementation. Second, this article argues that the rights of future generations should be incorporated into climate change law and policy as a way to prevent deforestation beyond reliance merely on community-based conservation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article utilizes the crime of genocide's requisite elements to analyze the massacres of the Tagaeri and Taromenane Peoples (Tagaeri-Taromenane). The Tagaeri-Taromenane are Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in the Ecuadorian Amazon who are endangered by the oil and timber industries and the expansion of peasant settlements in their territory. This Article first provides a brief history of the Tagaeri-Taromenane massacres and then discusses the "intent to destroy a group" element of the crime of genocide as enumerated in international human rights jurisprudence. In concluding, the authors propose that the oil industry's public and private actors' direct control over the events that led to the massacres could establish criminal liability for those actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times when intricate concerns for social and ecological justice are becoming ever more prominent in global environmental discourses, conflicts between minorities' rights and environmental policies present delicate trade-offs that demand ingenious balancing by regional human rights courts. Such conflicts tend to boil down to oppositions between 'indigenous' or 'traditional' practices set against 'modern' ideals, thereby displaying and performing important normative, epistemic and political implications. To legitimise and strengthen their cases, parties resort to expert interventions. While the involvement of experts speaking on behalf of minorities can bolster the communities' legal protection, the shared assumptions, rhetorical style and professional sensibility of intervening experts can trigger unintended consequences for the identity and (self-)perception of the peoples they represent. The case-law analysis presented here instantiates how networks of experts with shared institutional ties intervene before courts, use specific discursive strategies to further their representatives' claims and reinforce the normative salience of their interventions through cross-jurisdictional and cross-cultural referencing. Drawing on insights from discourse analysis, (legal) anthropology and cultural geography, the article develops a critique of the politics of expert-based approaches to conflict management in regional human rights settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the notion of 'citizenship as shared fate' as a potentially inclusive and real-world responsive way of understanding Indigenous citizenship in a non-ideal world. The paper draws on Melissa Williams' work on 'citizenship as shared fate,' and assesses some of the benefits and drawbacks of using this notion to understand citizenship in Indigenous and modern state contexts. In particular, the paper focuses on the challenges that existing non-ideal circumstances – past and enduring injustices and unequal power relations – bring to the understanding of 'citizenship as shared fate', and the normative constraints for realizing such citizenship in our contemporary world. By developing this notion in light of Indigenous claims for justice, the paper proposes three side constraints to the notion of 'citizenship as shared fate,' including its openness to different views of history, the role of history in shaping the future, and acknowledging – and countering – prevailing power relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The paper concludes by looking at some of the implications of the reconceptualized notion of 'citizenship as shared fate' for the shaping of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in the Nordic/Sápmi context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, a majority of UN member states adopted a declaration regarding the rights of indigenous people. The declaration acknowledged a series of indigenous rights but failed to provide a concrete definition of who is indigenous. As a result, the term remained vague, open to interpretation and manipulation, and led to confusion and controversy. In Israel meanwhile the indigenous concept found a foothold in public discourse. The Israeli Supreme Court (ISC) first encountered the concept when Negev Bedouin citizens claimed indigenous land rights. Two years later, the ISC applied the same concept in a series of judgments regarding the status of the permanent residents of East Jerusalem. The article examines the way the international indigenous discourse has penetrated ISC rulings and analyzes the phenomenon in light of the judicial activism discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drivers of mass extinction today are societal processes (including economic and legal systems) inherited from European imperialism and embedded in the international state system. Their path dependencies demand that we engage in decolonial work. This work centrally involves countering land abstraction – the rendering instrumental of lands, waters, and skies for the sake of national territory, capitalist profit, or industrial resource use. Much Indigenous law is centred on moral relations with lands, internalising 'ecological reflexivity' within Indigenous society in highly articulated ways not present in the social memory of nation states. Prudential reasons thus support decolonising Indigenous lands, making room for the sovereignty and jurisdiction of Indigenous law. Such reasons are not exclusive but rather add to already evident reasons of justice in support of Indigenous decolonisation which have for some time been urgent calls for concern. This paper provides new reasoning for decolonisation concerning the practical relations between the disestablishment of our inherited colonial order and the curtailment of now alarming rates of extinction threatening the current order of life on this Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discute opiniones del autor sobre las luchas y protección socioambiental en Argentina, los derechos humanos de los pueblos con un enfoque en el derecho ambiental e indígena de las comunidades indígenas de Andalgalá, Argentina. El artículo también aborda temas relacionados con la importancia de las normas legales de las comunidades indígenas, el sistema federal, el poder judicial y la preservación de los ecosistemas.

Can we reject a monstrous act without rejecting the actor as a monster? This is the question occupying Hadley Louise Friedland, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Alberta, in The Wetiko Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization. Speaking broadly, the book is dedicated to identifying and examining Indigenous laws for guidance on how Indigenous communities can deal with high rates of interpersonal violence in Indigenous communities today, particularly violence against children. The innovation in Friedland's work is her creative use of source material: She takes as her starting point traditional Cree and Anishinabek stories about wetikos, or cannibal giants, which she positions as vestibules of Indigenous law. In Friedland's view, wetiko stories contain legal principles and practical resources that can help First Nations manage community members who act violently toward others. It is her task, as a scholar, to examine those stories through a legal lens and mine them for solutions to a rarely acknowledged problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly. There are technologies available that fulfil several tasks better than humans can and even behave like humans to some extent. Thus, the situation prompts the question whether AI should be granted legal person- and/or agenthood? There have been similar situations in history where the legal status of slaves or indigenous peoples was discussed. Still, in those historical questions, the subjects under study were always natural persons, i.e., they were living beings belonging to the species Homo sapiens. We analyse the situation from moral-ethical and practical perspectives. The final conclusion is that the currently existing AIs are still so far removed from humans that there is simply no need to think seriously about legal person- or agenthood. Doing so would mean imposing obligations on the AI to follow. This, in turn, would mean that certain rights in relation to those obligations would have to be granted as well. By all evidence, this is something that humans are not ready to do yet and might never get that far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this special issue of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal is on identifying holders of rights which are recognized and affirmed by section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. While Canadian and provincial governments and industry proponents have assumed that Indian Act bands are section 35 rights-holders, Kent McNeil's analysis of the relevant jurisprudence reveals that this issue is to be resolved with reference to Aboriginal peoples' own laws. As such, the assumption that a section 35 rights-holder must possess an overarching governance structure is unwarranted if the relevant Aboriginal people's own laws are not grounded in positivism. Naiomi Metallic's incisive critique demonstrates that the reasoning in R v Bernard was captured by precisely this type of positivist assumption when the court held that smaller Mìgmaq collectives--as opposed to the larger Mìgmaq nation--must be the rights-holder because the larger Mìgmaq nation lacked a 'Super Chief'. Gordon Christie identifies another form of capture within the section 35 jurisprudence: Aboriginal peoples are presumed to be socio-cultural bodies and not political bodies, and Aboriginal rights are presumed to be cultural activities and not governmental powers to exercise jurisdictional authority. Both presumptions are captured by liberalism and neither is supported by the text or by a purposive interpretation of section 35(1). Sara Mainville's article uncovers a conflict between Canadian and Indigenous law in the context of a Kelly order, which courts characterize as a practical solution to the dilemma of how to identify the rights-holder on an interlocutory motion. Mainville demonstrates that the adversarial effects of a Kelly order contravene the Anishinaabe legal principle of consensus-building. Perhaps unsurprisingly given these various conflicts between Canadian jurisprudence and Indigenous laws, Paul Chartrand argues that the identity of rights-holders should be decided through political negotiations between political actors, and not by the courts. Similarly, Jason Madden argues that the Supreme Court of Canada's jurisprudence entails a duty on Canadian and provincial governments to negotiate with an Aboriginal people to identify the proper rights-holder when a prima facie Aboriginal right exists. In these ways, the articles in this special issue make valuable contributions to ongoing discussions about identifying section 35 rights-holders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]