Writing on Canadian law and Indigenous peoples.
Op-eds, essays, and short practice notes on Indigenous rights and the Canadian legal system. New work arrives by email, when there’s something worth saying.
Fast and furious project approvals a missed opportunity to build real economic power in partnership with First Nations
Instead of trying to cut First Nations out of projects in their own territories and fast-tracking risky projects without proper oversight or due diligence, governments must bring First Nations to the table and make it clear that it is partnerships, not shortcuts, that will keep the economy growing.
No, Indigenous people are not coming for your privately owned land
Politicians, lawyers and pundits have been stoking fears among property owners that Indigenous people are coming to take their land. The Cowichan decision says nothing of the kind — and the people invoking it know that.
The Indigenous incarceration crisis demands a bolder response: Decarceration
Canada has crossed a terrible threshold: 50 per cent of all women in federal prisons are Indigenous. The solution is not more policy tinkering. It is decarceration — the intentional and directed reduction of the number of Indigenous people in jails as a policy goal in itself.
Stop using the 'rule of law' as a weapon against Indigenous peoples
The invocations of the rule of law are not innocent pleas to neutrality and lawfulness — they are self-serving calls to once again disenfranchise Indigenous people so that settlers won't have to be inconvenienced.
Staggering number of Indigenous people in jail is a Canadian crisis
To call these incarceration numbers a crisis would be the understatement of the century. We cannot as a society be okay with this, and we cannot be okay with moving on from this, as we do with so many other headlines, without taking real action.