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AbstractBuried within the everyday deployment of business vehicles by Indigenous governments as a seemingly neutral way to pursue economic development are also legal notions of corporate personhood and representation. While it is occasionally suggested that corporate law is itself part of the problem of colonialism, the idiomatic notions of "representation," "legal personhood," and "business as neutral" form an opaque curtain that hides colonizing tendencies within the legal structures used by Indigenous peoples. This article explores these colonial tendencies at play in Canadian corporate law, showing how corporate law's deployment of the "legal person" sits at odds with Indigenous juridical orders.

Recent work on political liberalism attempts to find ways to bring divergent cultural practices under a single rubric. This article examines one of the limits of the cultural commensurability of modern liberal legality. It argues that Western forms of evidentiary proof are not amenable to oral history testimony given by indigenous litigants. Current anthropological research on oral history and indigenous culture shows that oral history is not simply a "record" or "chronology" of events, but is a particular cultural practice that draws its members into the fold – and this is an event of its own. Western forms of evidence, however, traditionally treat testimony as "reporting" or as "creating a record" of a prior set of events in time. This article suggests that the distance between these two conceptions of "events" and "record" is significant enough to warrant rethinking the place of traditional trial practices in the treatment of oral history. It also suggests that the Western form of legality is grounded in an understanding of temporality that eschews any other way of thinking about events and their occurrence, a legality oriented against orality.

The essay sheds light on Aristotle's understanding of friendship and its relation to political life.The author challenges the usual view that Aristotle postulates three distinct kinds of friendship. Instead the author argues that Aristotle understood there to be only one kind of friendship, and that other "friendships" were to Aristotle "unfinished" and thus not friendship at all. Aristotle shows that the relation between friendship and politics is grounded in friendship's possibility for human beings, and not as something cherished for its actuality. By looking at proper friendship as possibility and not actuality, we could only ever interpret the infamous statement attributed to Aristotle—"my friends, there are no friends"—not as illuminating of what friendship is but rather as a nostalgic diagnosis of the decay of the possibility of friendship, and hence of politics. By extension, and more poignantly, interpreting Aristotle's work on friendship in this light, we stand ready to reinterpret the mobilization of Aristotelian friendship for contemporary understandings of democratic practice.