Litigating identity: the challenge of aboriginality

Abstract

In Aboriginal rights litigation in Canada, claimants must demonstrate continuity with ‘pre-contact’ peoples and practices. This is a daunting task for communities, such as mine, whose encounter with Europeans commenced nearly four centuries ago. As a child, my grandmother told me that hers was the Otter clan. When my Great-great-grandfather signed treaties in the nineteenth century, he signed by drawing an Otter, his totem. It is my thesis that totemic identity is the crucial link in the Anishinabek chain of continuity. In Anishinabek culture, people reckon their kinship from a other-than-human progenitor traced patrilineally. In seeking to understand totemic identity, I have traced a path from clans, to marks, to souls; from geography to a sacred landscape; from genealogy to Anishinabek cosmology. It remains to be seen whether this totemic system, with its implications for territorial claims, can be made intelligible to the Canadian legal imagination.