Indigenous Courts Self Determination And Criminal Justice

In New Zealand, as well as in Australia, Canada and other comparable jurisdictions, Indigenous peoples comprise a significantly disproportionate percentage of the prison population. For example, Maori, who comprise 15% of New Zealand’s population, make up 50% of its prisoners. For Maori women, the figure is 60%. These statistics have, moreover, remained more or less the same for at least the past thirty years. With New Zealand as its focus, this book explores how the fact that Indigenous peoples are more likely than any other ethnic group to be apprehended, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated, might be alleviated. Taking seriously the rights to culture and to self-determination contained in the Treaty of Waitangi, in many comparable jurisdictions (including Australia, Canada, the United States of America), and also in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the book make the case for an Indigenous court founded on Indigenous conceptions of proper conduct, punishment, and behavior. More specifically, the book draws on contemporary notions of ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’ and ‘restorative justice’ in order to argue that such a court would offer an effective way to ameliorate the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous peoples.

Justice, Indigenous Peoples, and Canada: A History of Courage and Resilience brings together the work of a number of leading researchers to provide a broad overview of criminal justice issues that Indigenous people in Canada have faced historically and continue to face today. Both Indigenous and Canadian scholars situate current issues of justice for Indigenous peoples, broadly defined, within the context of historical realities and ongoing developments. By examining how justice is defined, both from within Indigenous communities and outside of them, this volume examines the force of Constitutional reform and subsequent case law on Indigenous rights historically and in contemporary contexts. It then expands the discussion to include theoretical considerations, particularly settler colonialism, that help explain how ongoing oppressive and assimilationist agendas continue to affect how so-called "justice" is administered. From a critical perspective, the book examines the operation of the criminal justice system, through bail, specialized courts, policing, sentencing, incarceration and release. It explores legal frameworks as well as current issues that have significantly affected Indigenous peoples, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, human rights, resurgence and identity. This unique collection of perspectives exposes the disconcerting agenda of historical and modern-day Canadian federal government policy and the continued denial of Indigenous rights to self-determination. It is essential reading for those interested in the struggles of the Indigenous peoples in Canada as well as anyone studying race, crime and justice.

Indigenous peoples in Canada are striving for greater economic prosperity and political self-determination. Investigating specific legal, economic, and political practices, and including research from interviews with Indigenous political and business leaders, this collection seeks to provide insights grounded in lived experience. Covering such critical topics as economic justice and self-determination, and the barriers faced in pursuing each, Wise Practices sets out to understand the issues not in terms of sweeping empirical findings but through particular experiences of individuals and communities. The choice to focus on specific practices of law and governance is a conscious rejection of idealized theorizing about law and governance and represents an important step beyond the existing scholarship. This volume offers readers a broad scope of perspectives, incorporating contemporary thought on Indigenous law and legal orders, the impact of state law on Indigenous peoples, theories and practices of economic development, and grounded practices of governances. While the authors address a range of topics, each does so in a way that sheds light on how Indigenous practices of law and governance support the social and economic development of Indigenous peoples.

Aboriginal Justice and the Charter examines and seeks to resolve the tension between Aboriginal approaches to justice and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. David Milward asks why Aboriginal communities seek reform and identifies some of the constitutional barriers in their path. He identifies specific areas of the criminal justice process in which Aboriginal communities may wish to adopt different approaches, tests these approaches against constitutional imperatives, and offers practical proposals for reconciling the various matters at stake. This bold exploration grapples with the difficult question of how Aboriginal justice systems can be fair to their constituents but still comply with the protections guaranteed to all Canadians by the Charter.

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.

In Canada, sentencing has been the target of reforming the criminal justice system with a view to alleviating the over-representation of indigenous people in the criminal justice system and the historic injustice perpetuated against indigenous communities through colonialism. My thesis explores how sentencing decisions from the Nunavut Court of Justice construct and shape Inuit identity in Nunavut. My research analyzes the sentencing decisions of the Nunavut Court of Justice since its creation in 1999. Using selected sentencing decisions as case studies, I interrogate how the Court uses notions of Inuit, Inuit culture, and Nunavut, both implicitly and explicitly. I show how rather than a tool for alleviating the historic injustice perpetuated against indigenous people through colonialism and systemic racism, the sentencing process perpetuates historic injustice through constructing binary, essentialized notions of Inuit identity. The consequences affect both the criminal justice system and the realization of indigenous self-determination. I conclude that as a result the Nunavut Court of Justice exemplifies an intractable dilemma facing the criminal justice system for indigenous people that sentencing reforms cannot solve. I suggest new ways of imagining criminal justice and indigenous self-determination that provide hope for a way out of the intractable dilemma.

Indigenous Criminology is the first book to comprehensively explore Indigenous people’s contact with criminal justice systems in a contemporary and historical context. Drawing on comparative Indigenous material from North America, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it addresses both the theoretical underpinnings to the development of a specific Indigenous criminology, and canvasses the broader policy and practice implications for criminal justice. Written by leading criminologists specialising in Indigenous justice issues, the book argues for the importance of Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to criminology, and suggests that colonialism needs to be a fundamental concept to criminology in order to understand contemporary problems such as deaths in custody, high imprisonment rates, police brutality and the high levels of violence in some Indigenous communities. Prioritising the voices of Indigenous peoples, the work will make a significant contribution to the development of a decolonising criminology and will be of wide interest.

Canadian Law and Indigenous Self-Determination demonstrates how, over the last few decades, Canadian law has attempted to remove Indigenous sovereignty from the Canadian legal, social, and political landscape.