The Quest for Justice: Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Rights

James Pritchard is a history professor at Queen’s University and
author of Louis XV’s Navy, 1748-1762: A Study of Organization and
Administration.

This volume is a sequel to Pathways to Self-Determination: Canadian Indians and the Canadian State, published in 1984, and is intended to develop more deeply the issues raised there. The editors intend us to understand the present and future obstacles to resolving the aboriginal rights issue, and they succeed in showing just how complicated, and difficult to obtain, any solution will be. The many voices presented here make clear that not only is there no single concept of aboriginal right, but that the term has come increasingly to include or mean aboriginal title and Indian self-government, which in turn is a synonym for escape from government control.

While the Canadian Constitution of 1982 recognized the existence of three aboriginal peoples — Indians, Inuit, and Métis — and their rights, it defined only the former. Moreover, by introducing the provinces into negotiations concerning the latter, the same constitution changed the rules of the game. The editors have focused unerringly on the most critical issue facing Canada’s aboriginal peoples. They have organized this collection of 24 papers into five sections. The first contains political and philosophical perspectives by seven aboriginal leaders; the next three, loosely organized about constitutional, judicial, and political processes, focus on strategies to achieve aboriginal rights; and a final section discusses aboriginal rights and self-government.

It is astonishing how little time has elapsed since Indian policy was wholly determined by special (non-aboriginal) interests acting through the federal government and how dead federal Indian policy is. Today aboriginal influence is the sine qua non of government policy, but as aboriginal leaders make clear, to the degree that rights find their origins in the creator, there can be no national discussion of their existence. This book is a valuable contribution to understanding how different and how difficult will be the resolution of the issue.