Chris Andersen

Governing aboriginal justice in Canada: Constructing responsible individuals and communities through ‘tradition’

In recent years, Aboriginal justice projects have gained in popularity in such places as Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. However, these programs have remained relatively insulated from external critique, particularly as it relates to the problem of grafting “traditional” principles onto non-traditional forms of social organization. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this shortcoming in the context of examining the relationship between newly emerging neo-liberal discourses about personal responsibility and the function of “community” as a domain of freedom, in Aboriginal restorative justice programs in Canada.

Underdeveloped identities: the misrecognition of Aboriginality in the Canadian census

Abstract After more than a century of enumerating Aboriginality as a form of ethnic ancestry, in 1986 Statistics Canada added an Aboriginal ‘self-identification’ question to the census, effectively creating two populations: one based on ‘Aboriginal ancestry’, the other on ‘Aboriginal identity’. This paper argues that the legitimacy of the new Aboriginal ‘identity’ population stems not from its ability to measure Aboriginal identity more accurately than previous enumerative strategies, but from the fact that its ‘self-identification’ categories better produce the kind of data used by officials to implement development-based policies in their attempts to improve Aboriginal quality of life in Canada. Using interviews from Aboriginal census field agents, the paper explores how and why such policy classifications have come to be so deeply misrecognized as exhaustive or acontextual categories of identity and the kinds of Aboriginal sociality they potentially foreclose upon in doing so.