Gender, Power, and Representations of Cree Law

Gender, Power, and Representations of Cree Law
Author: Emily Snyder
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2018-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780774835701

Drawing on the insights of Indigenous feminist legal theory, Emily Snyder examines representations of Cree law and gender in books, videos, graphic novels, educational websites, online lectures, and a video game. Although these resources promote the revitalization of Cree law and the principle of miyo-wîcêhtowin (good relations), Snyder argues that they do not capture the complexities of gendered power relations. The majority of these resources either erase women’s legal authority by not mentioning them, or they diminish their agency by portraying Cree laws and gender roles in inflexible, aesthetically pleasing ways that overlook power imbalances and other forms of oppression.

Gender, Power, and Representations of Cree Law

Gender, Power, and Representations of Cree Law
Author: Emily Snyder
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774835710

Drawing on the insights of Indigenous feminist legal theory, Emily Snyder examines representations of Cree law and gender in books, videos, graphic novels, educational websites, online lectures, and a video game. Although these resources promote the revitalization of Cree law and the principle of miyo-wîcêhtowin (good relations), Snyder argues that they do not capture the complexities of gendered power dynamics. The majority of the resources either erase women’s legal authority by not mentioning them, or they diminish women’s agency by portraying them primarily as mothers and nurturers. Although these latter roles are celebrated, Snyder argues that Cree laws and gender roles are represented in inflexible, aesthetically pleasing ways that overlook power imbalances and difficult questions regarding interpretations of tradition. What happens when good relations are represented in ways that are oppressive? Grappling with this question, Snyder makes the case that educators need to critically engage with issues of gender and power in order to create inclusive resources that meaningfully address the everyday messiness of law. As with all legal orders, gendered oppression can be perpetuated through Cree law, but Cree law is also a dynamic resource for challenging gendered oppression.

Creating Indigenous Property

Creating Indigenous Property
Author: Angela Cameron
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 148753213X

While colonial imposition of the Canadian legal order has undermined Indigenous law, creating gaps and sometimes distortions, Indigenous peoples have taken up the challenge of rebuilding their laws, governance, and economies. Indigenous conceptions of land and property are central to this project. Creating Indigenous Property identifies how contemporary Indigenous conceptions of property are rooted in and informed by their societally specific norms, meanings, and ethics. Through detailed analysis, the authors illustrate that unexamined and unresolved contradictions between the historic and the present have created powerful competing versions of Indigenous law, legal authorities, and practices that reverberate through Indigenous communities. They have identified the contradictions and conflicts within Indigenous communities about relationships to land and non-human life forms, about responsibilities to one another, about environmental decisions, and about wealth distribution. Creating Indigenous Property contributes to identifying the way that Indigenous discourses, processes, and institutions can empower the use of Indigenous law. The book explores different questions generated by these dynamics, including: Where is the public/private divide in Indigenous and Canadian law, and why should it matter? How do land and property shape local economies? Whose voices are heard in debates over property and why are certain voices missing? How does gender matter to the conceptualization of property and the Indigenous legal imagination? What is the role and promise of Indigenous law in negotiating new relationships between Indigenous peoples and Canada? In grappling with these questions, readers will join the authors in exploring the conditions under which Canadian and Indigenous legal orders can productively co-exist.

Indigenous-Industry Agreements, Natural Resources and the Law

Indigenous-Industry Agreements, Natural Resources and the Law
Author: Ibironke T. Odumosu-Ayanu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-12-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0429012853

This edited collection is an interdisciplinary and international collaborative book that critically investigates the growing phenomenon of Indigenous-industry agreements – agreements that are formed between Indigenous peoples and companies involved in the extractive natural resource industry. These agreements are growing in number and relevance, but there has yet to be a systematic study of their formation and implementation. This groundbreaking collection is situated within frameworks that critically analyze and navigate relationships between Indigenous peoples and the extraction of natural resources. These relationships generate important questions in the context of Indigenous-industry agreements in diverse resource-rich countries including Australia and Canada, and regions such as Africa and Latin America. Beyond domestic legal and political contexts, the collection also interprets, navigates, and deploys international instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in order to fully comprehend the diverse expressions of Indigenous-industry agreements. Indigenous-Industry Agreements, Natural Resources and the Law presents chapters that comprehensively review agreements between Indigenous peoples and extractive companies. It situates these agreements within the broader framework of domestic and international law and politics, which define and are defined by the relationships between Indigenous peoples, extractive companies, governments, and other actors. The book presents the latest state of knowledge and insights on the subject and will be of value to researchers, academics, practitioners, Indigenous communities, policymakers, and students interested in extractive industries, public international law, Indigenous rights, contracts, natural resources law, and environmental law.

Turbulent Times, Transformational Possibilities?

Turbulent Times, Transformational Possibilities?
Author: Fiona MacDonald
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1487588348

In Canada and elsewhere, recent political, economic, and social shifts have brought gender to the forefront of politics as never before, from gender-based analyses and “feminist budgets” to the #MeToo, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter movements. Detailing these gendered and turbulent political times, this book features state-of-the art scholarship from diverse contributors that encompasses both contemporary challenges as well as avenues for change now and into the future. This collection represents a complex treatment of both gender and politics, in which gender is examined in light of other collective identities and their intersections and politics refers to both institutional and movement and countermovement politics.

Women's Health and the Limits of Law

Women's Health and the Limits of Law
Author: Irehobhude O. Iyioha
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1351002368

Despite some significant advances in the creation and protection of rights affecting women’s health, these do not always translate into actual health benefits for women. This collection asks: 'What is an effective law and what influences law’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness? What dynamics, elements, and conditions come together to limit law’s capacity to achieve instrumental goals for women’s health and the advancement of women’s health rights?' The book presents an integrated, co-referential and sustained critical discussion of the normative and constitutive reasons for law’s limited effectiveness in the field of women’s health. It offers comprehensive and cohesive explanatory accounts of law’s limits and for the first time in the field, introduces a distinction between formal and substantive effectiveness of laws. Its approach is trans-systemic, multi-jurisdictional and comparative, with a focus on six countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa and international human rights case law based on matters arising from Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Peru and Bolivia. The book will be a valuable resource for educators, students, lawyers, rights advocates and policymakers working in women’s health, socio-legal studies, human rights, feminist legal studies, and legal philosophy more broadly.

Decolonizing Freedom

Decolonizing Freedom
Author: Allison Weir
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2024
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0197507948

Freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization. Yet in western thought and practice, freedom has been defined through opposition to the unfreedom of most of the world's people. Allison Weir draws on Indigenous political theories and practices of decolonization in dialogue with western theories, to reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world.

Feministing in Political Science

Feministing in Political Science
Author: Alana Cattapan
Publisher: University of Alberta
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2024-05-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1772127329

Focusing on the discipline of political science, this collection examines what is at stake in contesting the boundaries of the contemporary university. As the study of politics and political life, the mainstream of the discipline has examined power in the institutions and processes of government. But if the personal is political, political science is about much more than what happens in those institutions. This collection draws together personal essays, pedagogical interventions, dialogues, and original research to reflect on how "feministing" as an orientation and as an analytic can centre experiential knowledge and reshape our understandings of political science. Collectively, these contributions lay bare the ways that power moves in and through the academy, naming the impacts on those who are most structurally precarious, all while pointing to potential futures made possible by refusal, solidarity, and hope. Contributors: Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Julianne M. Acker-Verney, Kelly Aguirre, Jeanette Ashe, Nicole S. Bernhardt, Amanda Bittner, Alana Cattapan, Elaine Coburn, Jamilah A.Y. Dei-Sharpe, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, Alexandra Dobrowolsky, Nick Dorzweiler, Tammy Findlay, Mariam Georgis, Emily Grafton, Joyce Green, Genevieve Fuji Johnson, Kiera L. Ladner, Lindsay Larios, Manon Laurent, Fiona MacDonald, April Mandrona, Kimberley Ens Manning, Sarah Munawar, Nisha Nath, Michael Orsini, Stephanie Paterson, Tka C. Pinnock, David Semaan, Gina Starblanket, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, Melanee Thomas, Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay, Ethel Tungohan, Nadia Verrelli, Leah F. Vosko, Chamindra Weerawardhana.

Indigenous Legal Traditions

Indigenous Legal Traditions
Author: Law Commission of Canada
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2008
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0774855770

The essays in this book present important perspectives on the role of Indigenous legal traditions in reclaiming and preserving the autonomy of Aboriginal communities and in reconciling the relationship between these communities and Canadian governments. Although Indigenous peoples had their own systems of law based on their social, political, and spiritual traditions, under colonialism their legal systems have often been ignored or overruled by non-Indigenous laws. Today, however, these legal traditions are being reinvigorated and recognized as vital for the preservation of the political autonomy of Aboriginal nations and the development of healthy communities.

Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act

Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act
Author: Martin J. Cannon
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2019-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774860987

Canada’s Indian Act is infamously sexist. Through many iterations of the legislation a woman’s status rights flowed from her husband, and even once it was amended to reinstate rights lost through marriage or widowhood, First Nations women could not necessarily pass status on to their descendants. That injustice has rightly been subject to much scrutiny, but what has it meant for First Nations men? Martin J. Cannon challenges the decades-long assumption of case law and politics that the act has affected Indigenous people as either “women” or “Indians” – but not both. He argues that sexism and racialization within the law must instead be understood as interlocking forms of discrimination that have also undercut the identities of Indigenous men through their female forebears. By restorying historically patriarchal legislation and Indigenous masculinity, Men, Masculinity, and the Indian Act makes a significant contribution to a transformative discussion of Indigenous nationhood, citizenship, and reconciliation.