[SA'KE'J] What we encountered in the constitutional battles in Canada
is that when we wanted to apply human rights to Indigenous people,
the government said,
"You don't have human rights because you're the wrong kind of people."
And that stood as a shock,
but it's part of the discrimination
that we've had to endure.
So we had to go to the [United Nations] General Assembly,
and what we had to do was
get a declaration that basically said that Indigenous people
have the same human rights as any other people.
[JOHN] Canada's current legal landscape
in relationship to Indigenous peoples is complex.
There's one story that is about the
denial of Indigenous place and governance in this land.
When Indigenous peoples first encountered Europeans
there was a nation-to-nation relationship,
a meeting of equals where there was
mutual respect and the pursuit of common goals.
As we went through the nineteenth century,
we found that those goals were eroded
and the nature of the relationship was one of
sovereign-to-subject.
[JOSHUA] And that places Aboriginal peoples in Canada
in a subject-to-sovereign relationship
much in the same that citizens, under the Charter,
in relationship to the federal government as their sovereign.
Yet the theory explaining how this works
in both these cases becomes quite different,
because the history of Indigenous peoples
is not collapsible to the history of citizenship in Canada.
[LARRY] Canada has never yet recognized
an Aboriginal right to self-government,
unlike, for example, in the United States.
And the reason is because the court has interpreted
Aboriginal rights so narrowly —
has to be a custom, tradition or practice —
and that an argument that you have an Aboriginal right
to self-government is seen as too broad
in scope for the court to be prepared to recognize
because they've defined the rights so narrowly.
[JOHN] UNDRIP changes
Canada's relationship with Indigenous peoples
in terms of the duty to consult by saying that
the honour of the Crown, which is part of the legal duty to consult,
must involve the free, prior
and informed consent of Indigenous peoples.
What that means
is that when the Crown
is exercising its powers to develop,
that it has to ensure that honour involves
the free will,
or the participatory actions
of Indigenous peoples in that goal.
[AIMÉE] So UNDRIP is a mechanism for recognizing
self-determination of Indigenous people.
This has been a long-fought effort
to have states acknowledge that Indigenous peoples
have governance, have laws,
have relationships with their lands and territories,
and have never given up
those laws or governance systems
or special relationships with lands, territories and waters.
[SARAH] And I think that's really what the Declaration
is seeking to do.
It's just creating space
for Indigenous people to be able to
live according to their own legal traditions
and make decisions about their lives
in a way that best reflects
their individual needs.
[KERRY] The harder part
is what the federal government, in particular,
should continue to do or should not continue to do,
in light of the fact that the United Nations Declaration guarantees
a right of self-determination
entitling Indigenous communities, properly organized,
to govern themselves
in whatever fashion suits them best.
[JOSHUA] But it is to their advantage, in my mind,
to look to the UN Declaration
as a means of placing renewed emphasis on
that very old struggle
and to try to,
in a certain sense,
leverage the arguments that are built within that document
as a set of norms that move away from
the colonial heritage of the Canadian constitutional order
and how it's built in
and give us means to critique
and point to the problems in our constitutional order
that have become hidden in plain sight.
[SA'KE'J] And that's what's important about the Declaration.
It lays out for states and state governments and other humans:
this is what Indigenous people
want to be respected for.
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