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Indigenous languages and laws need bodies to live in. When we bring language back to life, it becomes a medium for developing human relationships. Likewise, when laws are written on people's hearts, they are truly revitalized. Otter's Journey employs Anishinaabe storytelling to explore how Indigenous language revitalization can inform Indigenous legal revitalization. In this book, Otter journeys across the globe to compare Indigenous struggles toward self-determination. This journey reveals that the processes, philosophies, and standards of decision making held within Indigenous languages and laws can emerge from the layers of nation-state laws, policies, and language to guide contemporary life.
Storytelling has the capacity to address feelings and demonstrate themes – to illuminate beyond argument and theoretical exposition. In Otter’s Journey, Borrows makes use of the Anishinaabe tradition of storytelling to explore how the work in Indigenous language revitalization can inform the emerging field of Indigenous legal revitalization. She follows Otter, a dodem (clan) relation from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation, on a journey across Anishinaabe, Inuit, Māori, Coast Salish, and Abenaki territories, through a narrative of Indigenous resurgence. In doing so, she reveals that the processes, philosophies, and practices flowing from Indigenous languages and laws can emerge from under the layers of colonial laws, policies, and languages to become guiding principles in people’s contemporary lives.
For six weeks in 2012–13, Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence undertook a high-profile ceremonial fast to advocate for improved Canadian-Indigenous relations. Framed by the media as a hunger strike, her fast was both a call to action and a gesture of corporeal sovereignty. Life against States of Emergency responds to the central question she asked the Canadian public to consider: What does it mean to be in a treaty relationship today? Arguing that treaties are critical and vital matters of environmental justice, Sarah Marie Wiebe offers a nuanced discussion of the political environment that caused treaty relations in Attawapiskat to break down amid a history of repeated state-of-emergency declarations. This incisive work draws on community-engaged research, lived experiences, critical discourse analysis, ecofeminist and Indigenous studies scholarship, art, activism, and storytelling to advance a transformative, future-oriented approach to treaty relationships. By centring community voices, Life against States of Emergency cultivates a more deliberative, democratic dialogue.
Can Indigenous and non-Indigenous people live in a treaty relationship despite over 200 years of social, cultural, and political alienation? This is the challenge of reconciliation – and its beautiful promise. Twenty-five years after the Ipperwash crisis, writer and social activist Heather Menzies showed up in Nishnaabe territory in Southwestern Ontario, near where her forebears settled, hoping to meet her would-be treaty kin. She was invited to help document the broken-treaty story behind the crisis, as remembered by Nishnaabe Elders and other community members involved in reclaiming their homeland at Stoney Point. But she soon realized that even the most sincere intentions can be steeped in a colonial mindset that hinders understanding, reconciliation, and healing. In this thoughtful, sensitive, nuanced account, Heather Menzies shares her own decolonizing journey. Her story shows how a settler, through respectful listening, can learn what being in a treaty relationship might mean, and what changes – personal and institutional – are needed to embrace genuine reconciliation.
For the Anishinaabeg people, who span a vast geographic region from the Great Lakes to the Plains and beyond, stories are vessels of knowledge. They are bagijiganan, offerings of the possibilities within Anishinaabeg life. Existing along a broad narrative spectrum, from aadizookaanag (traditional or sacred narratives) to dibaajimowinan (histories and news)—as well as everything in between—storytelling is one of the central practices and methods of individual and community existence. Stories create and understand, survive and endure, revitalize and persist. They honor the past, recognize the present, and provide visions of the future. In remembering, (re)making, and (re)writing stories, A...
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. 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. Contributors include Andrée L...
Providing rare insights into the doodem tradition and the concept of council fires, this book explores Indigenous law and the Anishinaabe's holistic approach to governance, territoriality, family, and kinship structures.
This book shows how the flawed orientation forming Immanuel Kant’s philosophical project is the same from which the discipline of International Relations (IR) becomes possible and appears necessary. Tracing how core problems in Kant’s thought are inescapably reproduced in IR, this book demonstrates that constructive critique of IR is impossible through mere challenge to its Kantian traditions. It argues that confrontation with the Kantian character of IR demands fundamental withdrawal from their shared aims. Investigating the global limits inherent to epistemological and ontological commitments of Kant’s writings and IR, this interdisciplinary study interrogates the racism, sexism, col...
Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition critiques ways of approaching Indigenous texts that are informed by the Western academic tradition and offers instead a new way of theorizing Indigenous literature based on the Indigenous practice of life writing. Since the 1970s non-Indigenous scholars have perpetrated the notion that Indigenous people were disinclined to talk about their lives and underscored the assumption that autobiography is a European invention. Deanna Reder challenges such long held assumptions by calling attention to longstanding autobiographical practices that are engrained in Cree and Métis, or nêhiyawak, culture and examining a series of examples of Indigenous ...
In Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds, Didier Zúñiga examines the possibility for dialogue and mutual understanding in human and more-than-human worlds. The book responds to the need to find more democratic ways of listening to, giving voice to, and caring for the variety of beings that inhabit the earth. Drawing on ecology and sustainability in democratic theory, Zúñiga demonstrates the transformative potential of a relational ethics that is not only concerned with human animals, but also with the multiplicity of beings on earth, and the relationships in which they are enmeshed. The book offers ways of cultivating and fostering the kinds of relations that are needed to maintain human and more-than-human diversity in order for life to persist. It also calls attention to the quality of the relationships that are needed for life to flourish, advancing our understanding of the diversity of pluralism. Pluralist Politics, Relational Worlds ultimately presses us to question our own condition of human animality so that we may reconsider the relations we entertain with one another and with more-than-human forms of life on earth.