Content area
Full text
Grace Woo, Ghost Dancing with Colonialism: Decolonization and Indigenous Rights at the Supreme Court of Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012. 360 pages. ISBN 978-0-7748-1888-9. $34.95 paperback.
This book offers a remarkable and unique evaluation of Indigenous/Canadian legal discourse as set out in major Supreme Court of Canada decisions on Aboriginal issues and rights spanning three decades of high court jurisprudence. Woo has undertaken a massive study and compiled a valuable resource to measure the court's progress towards the decolonization of Indigenous legal status in or rather "with" Canada. The book offers some remarkable and original insights into political and legal thought concerning the place of Indigenous peoples in Canada and why there continues to be resistance to the recognition of Indigenous legality, which is a necessary pre-requisite to full decolonization. Importantly, Woo notes that the Supreme Court has "deviated from the part of British tradition that recognizes cultural differences and supports multicultural tolerance" (227). The court's reasoning Woo states, has "relied on a colonial construct that ignores the identities of the original nations as well as the diversity of their post contact experience" (227). Ultimately, Woo's project is as much a book about Euro-Canadian/Indigenous relations generally as it is an assessment of the particular contribution the Supreme Court of Canada has made to furthering a just relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples.
The book begins with a historical review of Aboriginal/Canadian legal relations, including major watershed moments in the history of Aboriginal contact with Euro-settler peoples. This discussion then moves to a brief review of paradigm shift theory and how it relates to Aboriginal rights jurisprudence. Woo recognizes that much of the resistance to decolonization can be explained by theories concerning paradigm shifts in scientific and legal thought. In other words, much can be explained by the tendencies of the mind to resist change or to see or acknowledge different ways of conceptualizing the world other than the worldview one is socialized into. This blindness of the court is dramatically revealed when Woo raises the question of "how the Canadian state gained jurisdiction over unrepresented Indigenous peoples" (136). She goes on to explain that this failure
[mjight have happened in part because Canadian lawyers are educated only in Anglo-Canadian law and are not required to...