Why New Laws Alone Won't Yield Indigenous Economic Autonomy

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the debate over modifying the Indian Act based formal property law regime operating on reserves in Canada. I argue that by recognizing both law and property as inherently relational activities, we come to see that by zeroing in on the question of legislative reform this debate misses the much wider field of social interaction in which the normative conditions of economic activity in reserve-based communities are being shaped. The arguments in this essay comprise one piece in a larger theoretical framework for an empirical study that will be aimed at providing a thick, localized description of “property law-making” within particular Indigenous collectivities. The focus of that research will be on identifying and describing those sites and modes of norm generation both in conjunction with, in resistance to, and separate from the formal, official law-making process. The aim of this essay, then, is to provide an orientation to such a study.

Keywords: property, law, Indigenous economic development