Questions for Consideration

Our Laws Arise from the Land is intended to support BC Indigenous Nations who are articulating their laws and legal traditions in relation to the specific claims process. Here we offer a series of questions, developed by specific claims practitioners, to facilitate community discussion on how Indigenous laws can be enacted within processes to address historical wrongs.

PRINCIPLE 1: Creating equal space for a plurality of legal traditions

What are the important stories of your people about how disputes involving land or resources are resolved?

Do your people have historic treaties or protocols with other Indigenous peoples?  What do they say about what are important considerations in resolving disputes among Indigenous Nations?

PRINCIPLE 2: Recognizing the ongoing nature of resolution

What have been the costs to your community of a failure to protect or reserve areas or resources? 

How has this impact been felt across generations?

Given that cost, what sorts of steps would you see as being necessary to start to heal that wound?

When you envision ways of fixing that harm, do you see a solution that lasts over generations?

PRINCIPLE 3: Expanding acceptable forms of restitution

How do your community’s legal traditions speak to issues of healing and restitution?

How could these traditional remedies affect the resolution of your community’s specific claims?

PRINCIPLE 4: Understanding Indigenous worldviews and understandings of loss

How do the losses that give rise to your Nation’s specific claims continue to impact your community?

Would your community see a benefit in speaking directly about the losses they have experienced on your own territory?

What would the benefits be to your community of having community members speaking about the historical issues that continue to affect them?

Would your community’s protocols support meeting directly with the people reviewing your specific claim on your territory? At what point in the process should this occur?

PRINCIPLE 5: Undertaking shared deliberations and decision-making

What ways can you see of incorporating your own laws or ways of achieving justice into a discussion of specific claims?

What are the features of your community’s traditions that reflect the principle of shared decision-making?

PRINCIPLE 6: Expanding what constitutes valid evidence

What types of evidence would be helpful to support your specific claims if evidence based in your own traditions and or traditional knowledge was honoured?