RECONCILIATION IN TRANSLATION: INDIGENOUS LEGAL TRADITIONS AND CANADA’S TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION

Abstract

One of the key elements of reconciliation identified in the recent final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC] is the revitalization of Indigenous law and legal traditions. Indeed, the practices of the TRC itself have attempted to embody this principle. However, a concern about state-sponsored reconciliation is that the recognition of Indigenous legal traditions is an empty gesture without a robust engagement with them. This article offers one possible method for outsiders to engage with Indigenous traditions in a way that goes beyond lip service and beyond the limitations of superficial forms of recognition in which equivalence is too quickly assumed. By paying attention to the ways that Indigenous principles and practices are embedded in a network of ideas about the world, a picture of a whole “legal sensibility” emerges that, through comparison, shows the dominant legal sensibility to be one alternative among many. In this way, reconciliation is approached as a process of “unsettling” what is taken for 4granted in mainstream understandings of reconciliation and law.