For the last twenty years and especially at the international level, we see the emergence of initiatives explicitly targeting the enhancement of oral traditions and legal cultures of the First Peoples. These initiatives seek to recognize the specificity and diversity of legal traditions and cultures and give them their rightful place as a valid source of law and as a common heritage for mankind.
In Canada and elsewhere, and during the recent decades, some legislative developments tend to question the invalidation policies and extinction of legal systems and cultures of the First Peoples. However, these new approaches rarely go far and question regimes with large prevalence to state law and its inherited forms of domination of the past, and this despite the fact that these practices are increasingly recognized as sources of instability and as bearers of injustices within states. Such circumstances make it necessary now more than ever the importance of a true reflection and a search of non-violent alternatives based on free and informed consent of First Peoples.
At the same time, there is an emergence of a new generation of researchers from the First Peoples who put forward research initiatives that can generate effective rehabilitation and operationalization of the legal traditions and cultures within their communities. This resurgence of legal cultures considered as not being valid points of reference and believed wrongly forgotten, is not without establishing new foundations of a fundamental critique of the state law intended for First Peoples.
Such context of cultural, philosophical and legislative resurgence only makes more imperative rigorous researches rooted in perspectives that First Peoples have about their history and their legal cultures. Ultimately, such researches should enable the establishment of First Peoples legislative practices and allow, in the same time, a true repair damage to historical losses and a revitalisation of the current decolonization efforts.
Managed by the Sociology Department at Laurentian University, the project's main objectives are to document and articulate the fundamental elements of the legal relationship to territory and resources, as they emerge from the Innu oral tradition, and to foster its transmission and effective implementation. The project will also seek to analyze this oral tradition to better understand the specificity of the political and legal culture it conveys within an updating and sharing perspective.
| First Integration Report on access to land and resources management: Perspectives of the Innu Law and the Quebec Law (In French) |  |
