Suchergebnisse

The many Coast Salish groups distributed on both sides of the United States-Canada border on the Pacific coast today face significant obstacles to cross the international border, and in some cases are denied passage or intimidated into not attempting to cross. The current situation regarding travel by Aboriginal people reflects the "hardening" of the border by United States officials following the events of "9-11." A bureaucratic environment has become increasingly hostile to the interests of Aboriginal groups in favor of security. In addition, the problems encountered by individual Aboriginal travelers at the border reflect a transformed American impression of Canada, now commonly treated politically and administratively as a state from which enemies of America are positioned to harm American interests. These new perceptions create an environment that enables Homeland Security officers to regard Aboriginal peoples who seek to cross the border as suspect, although they do so under legal conventions that allow passage of Aboriginal peoples. Officers then act on their own received, stereotypical notions of what a "real Indian" looks like, and deny passage to those they consider to be fakes. These border issues reflect a larger pattern of the denial of Aboriginal rights and challenges to tribal sovereignty by the American state and its citizenry. Data for this work comes from interviews with Coast Salish people and the case of a Coast Salish man who was detained and prosecuted for attempting to cross the border. A justice summit held in 2003 provides direct insight into official American approaches to the border as they concern Aboriginal people, while reporting by the Seattle Times reveals local responses to 9-11.

Native Canadian Anthropology and History: A Selected Bibliography (revised edition), by Shepard Krech III, University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. 212 pp. Reviewed by Bruce G. Miller, University of British Columbia Department of Anthropology and Sociology.

"What happens behind the scenes at a Canadian human rights tribunal? And why aren't human rights tribunal processes working for Indigenous people? Witness to the Human Rights Tribunals opens the doors to the tribunal, revealing the interactions of lawyers, tribunal members, expert witnesses, and Indigenous litigants. Bruce Miller provides an in-depth look at the role of anthropological expertise in the courts, and draws on testimony, ethnographic data, and years of tribunal decisions to show how specific cases are fought and how expert testimony about racialization and discrimination is disregarded. His candid analysis reveals the double-edged nature of the tribunal itself, which re-engages with the trauma and violence of discrimination that suffuses social and legal systems while it attempts to protect human rights. Grounded in expert experience, this important book asks hard questions. Should human rights tribunals be replaced, or paired with an Indigenous-centred system? How can anthropologists support an understanding of the pervasive discrimination that Indigenous people face? It definitively concludes that any reform must consider the problem of symbolic trauma before Indigenous claimants can receive appropriate justice."--

"Thoroughly documented and clearly written, Oral History on Trial is sure to become a leading work in the field. It discusses the standards considered authoritative when undertaking research about Aboriginal peoples and it scrutinizes the way in which law and the courts deal with Aboriginal oral narratives. Raising and resolving key issues about the admissibility and weight of evidence in courtrooms, it is an invaluable resource for judges, lawyers, and legal scholars, as well as anthropologists, historians, and Indigenous rights researchers"--J. Borrows (review, publisher's website)

Brings together the views of Aboriginal leaders, anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and linguists about how Coast Salish lives and identities have been reshaped by two colonizing nations and by networks of kinfolk, spiritual practices, and understandings of landscape. This book provides a different view of the Coast Salish world.

Beginning with his own work along the northwest coast of North America and drawing on contemporary examples from South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, Bruce Granville Miller examines how national governments classify, govern, and control the indigenous populations within their boundaries through administrative, judicial, and economic means. One telling consequence of such regulation strategies is that certain indigenous peoples become unrecognized-their ethnic identities and heritages fail to find legal register and thus empowerment within the very state organizations that manage other aspects of their lives. In the United States alone reside two hundred thousand unrecognized indigenous individuals, some members of indigenous communities that were dropped from the roster of tribes and others whose ancestors were overlooked. Miller also considers some important differences between the fluid nature of ethnic identity for some indigenous peoples and the more rigid notion of identity encoded in many state regulations.

Abstract
US and Canadian approaches to tribal legal orders have taken different paths, and here I argue that the Canadian model should move towards free-standing Indigenous courts as they currently exist in the United States. The Canadian approach has focussed on the issue of over-incarceration of Indigenous prisoners, but even newer efforts have stopped short of recognising at least partial criminal and civil jurisdiction. The Canadian approach fails to support Indigenous jurisdiction and community rebuilding and leaves Indigenous peoples vulnerable to non-Indigenous judges, who fail to accommodate Indigenous approaches to justice. Early attempts at shared jurisdiction have been naïve regarding Indigenous internal social processes and the struggle over what constitutes proper cultural practices. My data come from my own work with Coast Salish tribes, where I have studied tribal histories and legal practices on both sides of the international border as well their views of federal policy in both Canada and the United States.

Abstract In this paper I consider if the BC human rights tribunal holds promise for Indigenous peoples or is best understood as Trojan horses that absorb the energies of people who have experienced discrimination and as state-centered institutions which are unable to engage with Indigenous values and practices. The data are derived from an examination of all decisions given by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal to sort out those brought by or against Indigenous people, interviews with tribunal members and human rights lawyers with tribunal experience, an examination of a seminal case, Radek, and published studies of Indigenous awareness of and attitude towards tribunals. I argue that the tribunal process fails Aboriginal peoples on several grounds and very few cases result in final decisions. But, significantly, the tribunal allows for transformational cases that substantively change the circumstances for Indigenous people of the province.