Aboriginal Justice in Canada and the Double-Meaning of Self-Government: Technologies of the Self and Liberal Discourse.

This paper explores restorative justice for Aboriginal offenders in Canada as a contested terrain key to the promise of self-government. There are two key strands in this paper. Firstly, I consider the theoretical double-meaning of "self-government", both as Foucauldian technologies of the self and as an expression fundamental to liberal rights discourses. The second strand of this paper considers restorative justice as a kind of "case study" of self-government's double meaning. Restorative justice is an important site to contemplate self-government for two reasons. On one hand, restorative justice itself has increasingly been critiqued in the scholarly literature as a mode of governmental regulation of a "risky" population, which involves the inculcation of technologies of self. On the other hand, restorative justice is discussed as an expression of "authentic" and "traditional" Aboriginal law. Liberal discourses of self-government name law as a central site of self-determination (e.g., self-legislation). It appears, therefore, that discourses of restorative justice and self-government contain the seeds of both governmentality and liberalism. This discursive matrix is further complicated by the Canadian state's tenacious interest in managing Aboriginal affairs. My "case study" considers how the Canadian state insists that restorative justice measures operate within the Canadian state's justice system, threatening to render restorative justice a mere chimera of autonomous law. Therefore, while governmentality and liberalism tensely co-exist in restorative justice and self-government discourses, the colonial state and the First Nations struggle over the operationalization of these discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]