The Form and Substance of Aboriginal Title: Assimilation, Recognition, Reconciliation

This chapter highlights law’s participation in the colonizing projects that initiated the establishment of the Canadian constitutional order. Imperial and subsequently Canadian law deemed legally insignificant the deep connections that Indigenous peoples had with their ancestral territories, and imposed alien norms of conduct on diverse Indigenous ways of life. In doing so, law legitimated the manifold political, social, and economic acts of dispossession and dislocation that collectively bear the label of colonialism. The constitutional entrenchment of Aboriginal and treaty rights in 1982 formally recognized a distinctive constitutional relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. The judiciary has begun to see the purpose of formal constitutional recognition to be a process of substantive constitutional reconciliation of the interests of Canada and Indigenous peoples. This chapter argues that constitutional reconciliation can only commence by comprehending Aboriginal rights and title as protecting Indigenous interests associated with culture, territory, treaties, and sovereignty in robust terms.