While Canadian law has started to seriously grapple with questions that relate to reconciliation with Indigenous communities and laws, much of the focus is on specific, often resource-based, projects. As a result, there has been relatively little attention paid to other aspects of reconciliation, such as how legal aspects of employment may be re-evaluated. Employment law is a useful place to start as employment is a fundamental aspect of a person’s life, providing both financial support and a contributory role in society. This paper examines how different societal values impact employment law and in particular, how Coast Salish worldviews and law may impact, facilitate, and resist, the employment legislation in force in British Columbia.

Indigenous peoples continue to challenge Canadian colonial policies through nonroutine acts of resistance. Sustained scholarly attention on the frequency and characteristics of Indigenous resistance has dropped precipitously, with the time span of this scholarship typically ending by the early 2000s. Research on more recent acts of resistance is directed to small-n case studies. This research note examines Indigenous resistance in Canada between 2010 and 2020 as reported by news articles from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to identify key characteristics of salient Indigenous resistance: What issue areas were the subject of resistance movements? Which Indigenous communities or groups contributed to acts of resistance? What strategies were employed? The research note's findings suggest that salient acts of resistance rarely result in immediate policy change from the state; instead, resistance has transformative potential to develop Indigenous governance that departs from settler-colonial state processes.

This article, grounded within the argument that liberal citizenship and recognition-based approaches to decolonization are inappropriate responses to Indigenous calls to decolonize, proposes an alternative approach premised on re-evaluating non-Indigenous understandings of invitation, belonging and rights within the Canadian settler state. I suggest that non-Indigenous peoples consider themselves “foreigners” in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands and that, as colonial denizens, non-Indigenous Canadians take up an ethos that encourages them to re-evaluate their lives and relations with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands and the settler state. Such re-evaluations would encourage settlers to question the sovereignty of the state and their daily relations, as well as encourage them to place responsibilities to others above inwardly focused rights. I contend that identifying and acting upon such an ethos can provide a way through which non-Indigenous peoples can appropriately and seriously meet Indigenous peoples’ calls for change.

As the Indigenous population in Canada ages, there is a need to recognize the role of place and culture in supporting health and resilience over the life course. This article draws on the findings of a Photovoice project about Southern Inuit experiences of transitions into aging and dementia in NunatuKavut, Labrador. Here, culture and the natural environment are prominent in descriptions of health promotion and care trajectories. These factors may contribute to healthy aging, protect against cognitive decline, and support the maintenance of identity for people living with dementia. However, significant pressures on ways of living embedded in the land are also evident. Such forces are impacting Southern Inuit older adults’ ability to age and be cared for “in place”. The findings of this research reflect a need to consider ways to support Southern Inuit older adults to age in place, which might include reflecting on culturally grounded understandings of personhood, and policy and programming which promote engagement with the nature and culture.

Reforms to Canadian sentencing law in 1996 and the Supreme Court of Canada decision R. v. Gladue [1999] opened the door to a new normative set of legal practices that endeavour to integrate racial knowledge about offenders’ collective and individual experiences of race relations and oppression into traditional legal criminal practices. One outcome of the reforms and court cases was the formation of dedicated Gladue courts for Aboriginal peoples. This paper explores the formation of Gladue courts, the legal techniques used to produce contextualized racial knowledges, how this information is admitted as evidence before the court, and how this knowledge is used to reframe legal subjects and the risk they pose.

This exploratory study aims to understand and improve the performance of Gambia Indigenous Livestock Multipliers’ Associations (GILMA – Fulladu and Saloum) as a way of enabling them to better respond to the challenges faced in fulfilling their institutional responsibilities. Using participatory institutional diagnosis, the GILMA members and experts were able to examine their associations and to stimulate collective reflection as a means of making the associations more efficient and effective. The findings of this diagnosis showed that functioning of both GILMAs was closely linked to the operations of their technical partners. This resulted to GILMAs which clearly lack defined vision and mission. Main issues to address include capacity development of GILMA's executive committee in terms of institutional management, group facilitation, participatory planning, effective strategies for partnership and ownership. Overall, this study developed pathways for revitalizing GILMAs into vibrant and self-sustaining indigenous ruminant livestock multipliers’ associations that can effectively carry out specific roles and responsibilities within the three-tier Open Nucleus Breeding Scheme of the International Trypanotolerance Centre.

Guaranteeing “certainty” (for governments, business development, society, etc.) is often the goal of state land rights settlements with Indigenous peoples in Canada. Certainty is also often seen as an unequivocally desirable and positive state of affairs. This paper explores how certainty and uncertainty intersect with the challenges of decolonization in North America. I explore how settler certainty and entitlement to Indigenous land has been constructed in past colonial and current national laws, land policies, and ideologies. Then, drawing on data from fieldwork among activists against land rights, I argue that their deep anger about their uncertainty regarding land and their futures helps to reveal how certainty and entitlement underpin “settler states of feeling” (Rifkin). If one persistent characteristic of settler colonialism is settler certainty and entitlement, then decolonization, both for settlers and for jurisprudence, may therefore mean embracing uncertainty. I conclude by discussing the relationship between certainty, uncertainty, and decolonization.

To engage in the question of what it means to decolonize law, we must ask by what authority a law has the authority to be invoked and to govern. In this paper, I describe the conditions necessary for the exercise of Canadian law as being the work of jurisdiction, and I call into question Canada’s legality and legitimacy in making jurisdictional claims. Decolonizing law means deconstructing the state’s grounds to inaugurate law on lands acquired through colonial settlement. By critically examining law’s geography and scope I call into question the modern definition of territory itself. Further, I draw attention to jurisdiction as a conceptual framework for understanding the specificities of settler colonialism; illustrate jurisdiction as a historical concept, distinct from territory and sovereignty; and show some of the ways in which jurisdiction is enacted to govern across multiple scales and issues.

This article advocates for the inclusion of intercultural dispute-resolution principles in Canadian courts to resolve conflicts between Indigenous communities and the Canadian state. These principles include judges' opening themselves up to discomfort, emotion, and unsettling in listening to Indigenous testimonies; facilitating ongoing processes for negotiation; and engaging the moral imagination to make court procedures more culturally appropriate for Indigenous testimonies. The author argues that by implementing these principles, courts can contribute to the creation of more respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Health promotion and participatory research present challenges and opportunities for extending the benefits of science to populations who have not fully benefited from innovations available through self-care and mutual aid. This paper illustrates some of the strengths, weaknesses, issues and problems in applying the approaches of health promotion and participatory research with First Nations populations for purposes of arthritis self-management. We suggest ways in which these experiences apply to the elderly. Preliminary results from our First Nations Arthritis Self-Management study illustrate participatory research and promising outcomes. The adaptability of these health promotion strategies in the First Nations community can be generalized to the elderly in the general population based on their common experience with arthritis and the advantages of participatory planning with distinguishable demographic groups who share a common identity.

The demographic aging of the Registered Indian population suggests that the social, economic, and health conditions of older Registered Indians will be increasingly important for communities and policymakers. We have adapted the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index using data from the Census of Canada and the Indian Register to measure whether improvements seen in the knowledge, standard of living, and health of the Registered Indian population between 1981 and 2001 are also observed among Registered Indians of older ages. The absolute levels of well-being of older Registered Indians were found to have improved, but gaps with other older Canadians had widened, particularly in terms of income and male life expectancy.