First Nations and the colonial project
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(Published version)
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2016
Authors
Watson, I.
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Inter Gentes, 2016; 1(1):30-39
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Abstract
The colonial project has embodied a centuries-long, ongoing campaign to annihilate, define, subordinate and exclude the ‘native’, and an arsenal of tools has been applied to these ends. Mast-headed with the Christian mission to ‘civilise’, First Nations laws were deemed non-existent and, for more than 500 years, the colonialist construct of an absence of law in First Nations’ territories was supported by its idealised notions about the ‘savage’ and ‘backward native’. European constructs of backwardness and savagery continue to prevail in contemporary times, but First Nations continue to survive, live, practice and assert a law-full2 way of being in the world, one which is different to the European way of being, but no less valid and perhaps more critical to the future of life on earth.Many appeals made for recognition under international law by First Nations have failed because international law has been created by colonial nations and in the interests of colonialism itself. International law grew out of the distinctions made between civilized and non-civilized states, and those distinctions confirmed that international law applied only to a civilized ‘family of nations’. Anghie argues that colonialism was not an example of the application of sovereignty, but that sovereignty was constituted through colonialism. With the shaping of international law by colonialism, we are left to consider the question: is it possible to reconstruct international law so that it is liberated from its colonial origins? The subject is made more complex by the fact of the many First Nations confined to the ‘domestic paradigm’, immersed within an occupying settler state, and the state policies which aim at their complete annihilation. This paper will explore the possibility of freedom beyond the domestic paradigm and the absorption of First Nations into the universal ‘civilization’ of Europe.
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Copyright 2016 the author