The recognition of Indigenous law — not just its legitimacy, but its mere existence — has been at the heart of the most vexing conflicts between the Crown and…
Terry Glavin: Canadians have known about unmarked residential school graves for years. They just kept forgetting
In the Gitxsan-Wet’suwet’en case, the judge was the late Allan McEachern, chief justice of the British Columbia Court of Appeal between 1988 and 2001. McEachern’s 1991 ruling in Delgamuukw, a preposterous dismissal of the very idea that Indigenous people had established sophisticated systems of law and land tenure prior to colonization, was quite properly thrown out by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997.
A statue of B.C.’s first chief justice, Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, seen in a file photo, was removed from the foyer of the Law Society of B.C.’s offices in a “truth and reconciliation effort” in April 2017. The law society membership later voted to revisit the reasons for the removal, but there the matter still sits.But here’s where the story goes sideways.
The most obscene assault on Indigenous customary law in Canadian history was the infamous “potlatch law,” which outlawed the central institutions of governance, resource rights and dispute-settlement among dozens of First Nations across the country. The potlatch law was in effect between 1885 and 1951 — except for the six years following Begbie’s ruling in the Hamasak case of 1889, when Begbie ruled that the law was an arbitrary nonsense, and was thus unenforceable.
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