Search results

In this chapter, the author explores the conditions of sexualised, gendered violence against Indigenous women and girls. The author asks how various responses to this violence have shaped the present-day legal personhood of Indigenous women and girls from two perspectives: an Indigenous legal perspective and a Canadian legal perspective. To avoid the troublesome pan-Indigenous generalisations of legal personhood, the author focusses on one Indigenous society, the Gitxsan people from northwest British Columbia and their legal order and laws.² The author examines several specific questions about how the Gitxsan legal tradition historically defined the legal personhood of Gitxsan women and girls, and how this has changed with colonisation. The author takes up specific aspects of the operation and structure of Gitxsan law and legal institutions and analyse the ways that they are gendered.

Purpose – To provide an update on recent intensifications of commoditization among the North (Amoamo) Mekeo (Central Province, PNG) and to assess the extent to which in this context contemporary villagers qualify as “dividuals,” “individuals,” or “possessive individuals.”Methodology/approach – The empirical data presented in this chapter were collected by means of participant observation techniques conducted over a 40-year period. Here those materials are analyzed through a juxtaposition of the “partible” or “dividual” type of personhood foregrounded in the “New Melanesian Ethnography” (Strathern, 1988; Wagner, 1991) and models of the “individual” and “possessive individual” in Macpherson’s (1962) formulation of “possessive market societies.”Findings – Contrary to the canonical assumptions of “individualism” and “possessive individualism” which underpin most social-scientific theories of modernization, globalization, development, etc. in the non-Western world, North Mekeo villagers’ most recent intensive post-contact engagements with capitalism have tended to reproduce indigenous “dividual” patterns of partible personhood and sociality which incorporate seemingly “individualist” practices as momentary parts of overall, total “dividual” persons and processes.Research implications – Explanations of the globalizing spread of capitalism among non-Western peoples must pay heed to indigenous notions of personhood agency if they are to avoid ethnocentric distortions arising from presuppositions of the ubiquity of Western notions of individualism.Originality/value of chapter – This chapter demonstrates the analytical benefits of the New Melanesian Ethnography – particularly its key notion of partible personhood – and the advantage of focused long-term ethnographic fieldwork in accounting for processes of social change.

Purpose – This chapter aims to understand how the Bugkalot, or the Ilongot, as they are known in the previous anthropological literature, engage with capitalism in ways that are deeply shaped by their indigenous idioms of personhood and emotion.Methodology/approach – Long-term intensive fieldwork including five weeks of pilot visits to Bugkalot land in 2004 and 2005, and fifteen months of residence from 2006 to 2008.Findings – The development of capitalism in the Bugkalot area is closely linked with the arrival of extractive industry and the entry of Igorot, Ilocano, and Ifugao settlers. Settlers claim that they have played a centrally important role in developing and “uplifting” the Bugkalot, and that before their arrival the Bugkalot were uncivilized and didn’ t know how to plant (irrigated) rice and cash crops. However, the Bugkalot deny that they are at the receiving end of the settlers’ tutelage. Rather, they perceive the acquisition of new knowledge and technology as initiated by themselves. Envy and desire are identified by the Bugkalot as the driving force behind their pursuit of a capitalist economy. While the continuing significance of emotional idioms is conducive to the reproduction of a traditional concept of personhood, in the Bugkalot’s responses to capitalism a new notion of self also emerges.Originality/value of chapter – Different notions of personhood are intertwined with local ideas of kinship and economic rationality. The Bugkalot’ s attempt to counter the politics of development with their own interpretation of economic change highlights the importance of indigenous agency.

The indigenous peoples of the Philippines have had to struggle against historical injustices for centuries. They fought against colonization and the subjugation of their cultures and ways of life. Over the decades, their next generations are confronted with exclusion, discrimination, and encroachments on their ancestral domains which have resulted in social and economic disadvantages. An obvious case in point is the lack of sympathetic and affirmative policy directives for the culture-based education of indigenous children and youth. This paper reflects on the policy development processes undertaken to institutionalize inclusion and social justice in indigenous peoples education policies within the K to 12 Basic Education Program. Using the method of narrative inquiry, the stories of reform are told from the point of view of those who facilitated the crafting of these policies. Three narratives demonstrate that contextualized and empowering education strategies and processes transform not only policy but also the policy makers.

This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.

Indigenous education in New Mexico has a long and disappointing history, but with current movements in the reformation of a more equitable system, there is hope for a constitutionally sound and appropriate education for New Mexico's students. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historical overview of the New Mexico Indian Education Act of 2003 and examine the scope of this state legislation in the 2018 court decision in Yazzie/Martinez vs. the State of New Mexico. This court ruling has directly affected schools and students in New Mexico. Specifically, there are legal and operational ramifications to school districts and implications for curricular and classroom decisions that address inequities in public education for vulnerable student populations. To provide context, I share my testimony as a witness in the legal proceedings. I also argue that curricular development opportunities in critical literacy and critical awareness for education practitioners will prove to be important responses to the findings of the lawsuit. I share findings from qualitative research on the implementation of the New Mexico Indian Education Act prior to the Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit and the resulting changes to the legislation resulting from the court findings.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century, the US Federal and Supreme Courts heard several cases on the legal status of ships. During this period, Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story determined that a ship was a legal person that was capable to contract and could be punished for wrongdoing. Over the nineteenth century, Marshall and Story also heard appeals on the illegal slave trade and on the status of fugitive slaves crossing state lines, cases that raised questions as to whether enslaved peoples were persons or property. Although Marshall and Story did not discuss the ship and the slave together, in this chapter, the author asks what might be gained in doing so. Specifically, what might a reading of the ship and the slave as juridical figures reveal about the history of legal personhood? The genealogy of positive and negative legal personhood that the author begins to trace here draws inspiration and guidance from scholars writing critically of slavery. In different ways, this literature emphasises the significance of maritime worlds to conceptions of racial terror, freedom, and fugitivity. Building on these insights, the author reads the ship and the slave as central characters in the history of legal personhood, a reading that highlights the interconnections between maritime law and the laws of slavery and foregrounds the changing intensities of Anglo imperial power and racial and colonial violence in shaping the legal person.

This paper aims to set the scene for an emerging conversation on the Rights of Nature as articulated by a philosophy of law called Earth Jurisprudence, which privileges the whole Earth community over the profit-driven structures of the existing legal and economic systems.

The study used a wide range of thought from literature relating to philosophy, humanities, environmental economics, sustainable development, indigenous rights and legal theory to show how Earth Jurisprudence resonates with two recent treaties of Waitangi settlements in Aotearoa New Zealand that recognise the Rights of Nature.

Indigenous philosophies have become highly relevant to sustainable and equitable development. They have provided an increasingly prominent approach in advancing social, economic, environmental and cultural development around the world. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Maori philosophies ground the naming of the Te Urewera National Park and the Whanganui River as legal entities with rights.

Recognition of the Rights of Nature in Aotearoa New Zealand necessitates a radical re-thinking by accounting researchers, practitioners and educators towards a more ecocentric view of the environment, given the transformation of environmental law and our responsibilities towards sustainable development.

This relates to the application of Earth Jurisprudence legal theory as an alternative approach towards thinking about integrated reporting and sustainable development.

This chapter studies a political rationale by which colonial law forged socially assigned individuals as criminally accused persons. Focussing on archived documents of a preliminary examination that took place in 1883 in the North West Territories (now Alberta), it highlights how an accused person was moulded as a culpable individual. Arranged by a justice of the peace, and member of the North West Mounted Police, the investigation in this case reveals how colonial law unleashed an individualising force that obscured power relations behind the settlement it aimed to further. The unequal ways in which certain distinctions of person were legally recognised and individualised may be traced to long-standing western uses of social hierarchies as ‘masks’ from which law unequally recognised persons. Challenging such approaches to personhood, the analysis works off Naffine’s ‘legalistic’ ideas of persons as fictions, calling for a retelling of the fictions around accused persons. By pointing out the possibility of accusing relational rather than individual constructions, it concludes with a brief insinuation of legal forms directed at ‘collective persons’, interrupting a key political logic of colonial criminal law with allied promises of social justice beyond colonisation.

In Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa), bicultural education has reinforced the privilege of settler colonial knowledge with te reo Māori, the language of Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, used as decorative labels to create a bicultural étagère. Similarly, for inclusive education ableist notions of personhood have maintained approaches that attempt to assimilate the person into the educational hood. In this chapter, research findings from a doctoral case study highlight the intersecting nature of ableism and racism in the foundations of the Aotearoa education system. The author argues that Indigenous knowledge and customs in a bicultural Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program that prepares early childhood educators promote positive constructions of inclusion. Using the tenets of DisCrit and the Alaskan Cultural Standards as tools of analysis, key bicultural practices that support inclusion are identified and discussed. In addition, the inclusive opportunities and the fragility of meaningful intentions are highlighted.