Details

Subject(s)

• Thomas, David—Trials, litigation, etc [Browse]
• Indian courts—Canada [Browse]
• Indigenous peoples of North America—Legal status, laws, etc—Canada [Browse]
• Indigenous peoples of North America—Canada—Politics and government [Browse]
• Indigenous Studies [Browse]

Series

• Terra incognita (Peterborough, Ont.) [More in this series]
• Terra Incognita

Summary note

We are not You starts with a 1992 court case, Peters v. Campbell, in which Joseph Peters sued fellow members of his Coast Salish people who, at his wife's instigation, forced him to undergo traditional ceremonies in order to resolve various marital difficulties. In the hands of Claude Denis, the case becomes a focal point of interpretations of difference set against the political landscape of Canada's highly charged conflicts of nationalisms.Observing the ruling and reasoning of the court (which found in favour of Peters), and the way in which that ruling was reported through the national media, this book is an exploration of the language of power and authority, of individual and collective rights, and of the politics of difference.What guidelines should we follow when the laws of the modern state and the laws of Aboriginal peoples collide? What do such cases reveal about the underlying spiritual and material orientations of aboriginal and dominant societies? What do they have to say about the corrosive issue of relativism? The author tackles all these questions with insight and perception-explores as well the dimension of gender, which sheds light both on this case and on the more general issues from a different angle.Denis starts from a single fascinating case study, but in the end his aim is to put modernity itself into question. There is something to be learned from a case like this, from the aboriginal side, about modernity's own limitations and shortcomings. But more fundamentally, the book interrogates modernity's claim that society's political self making can and will bring about human emancipation.

Notes

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Aug 2019)

Language note

English

Contents

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Joseph Peters, in the court of public opinion
• 1. Nationalisms
• 2. Colonialism
• 3. Individual freedom
• 4. Self-government
• 5. Gender equality
• 6. Pluralisms
• 7. Limit-experience
• Conclusion: Expect aurora borealis
• Bibliography
• Index

Show 11 more Contents items

ISBN

1-4426-0307-0

OCLC

• 243573216
• 1114831712
• 1380746312

Doi

• 10.3138/9781442603073

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