‘Bite-sized explication’
Indigenous Rights in One Minute: What You Need to Know to Talk Reconciliation
by Bruce McIvor
Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing (Nightwood Editions), 2025
$22.95 / 9780889714885
Reviewed by Linda Rogers
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Canada was preoccupied with the premises argued in Hugh MacLennan’s post-Second World War novel Two Solitudes, as his fictional character debated the two points of view, French and English Canada, inhabiting his main character. This conversation paved the way for the Canada Council and decades of defining our national character through art and social discourse, minus a significant speaker. That deficit was, there was little voice given to our founding peoples silenced by the Doctrine of Discovery, a strange Christian notion, common law, and The Indian Act.
It is actually a national joke, and the joke is on those who thought they could pull the bluff and get away with it by layering on a system of law and social norms that silence the voice of the land. And all First Peoples could do was laugh at the compromised ways of a conquering nation with a capitalist philosophy that went against the laws of nature: righteous pilfering, what our former “good neighbours” called American exceptionalism in their century of global plunder.
I was recently conversing with an Indigenous rights lawyer about his new side date with stand-up comedy. We agreed the laugh line is always a reversal of the conventional wisdom, an essential skill in debate and law as we attempt to redress inequities, graffiti written on bleeding rock, the foundation of matriarchy. Oh, what a relief it is when Canada laughs, but we do have serious issues and the greatest relief is justice for all, an almost impossible, but reasonable, goal for rational Canadians.
As a poet from a family of lawyers, I have given a lot of thought to the intersections of holy and civil law, about poetry as prayer and the mitigating power of carefully chosen wording. It falls on the shapers of language to lift us out of darkness, all kinds, and that is what the author of Indigenous Rights in One Minute intends. If we respect the law and expect it to function, then it is incumbent upon us to understand exactly what it means and how it works for everyone involved.
When we open our mouths to laugh or protest, pain escapes. Word arrangement is the function of holy fools, a phenomenon that is understood in Bighouses across this land burdened with injustices as legal minds engage in the imperfect solutions that continue to confuse in courtrooms that are, thanks to the expansion of legal faculties to include Aboriginal law and the training of Indigenous lawyers, attempting to sort out the impact of settler injustice.
Bruce McIvor, a Métis lawyer and professor, attempts in this book to simplify the words that define “the intersection of law, history and Indigenous rights.” What he promises to explain in one minute is bite-sized explication of laws and treaties and the language they are couched in, so the lay person can begin to comprehend how and why we find ourselves in a phase we call reconciliation that is more aptly described as confusion.
It is not fast food, the concerned person’s law for dummies, but a rationally set out reference book to be read in a piece and then referred to as various questions arise in our quest for justice for all.
“Whether you’re completely new to Indigenous rights, have a basic understanding, want a refresher on key principles or are hoping to win an argument with a friend, family member or co-worker, I hope you find Indigenous Rights useful and informative,” he writes in his preface.
This book is a tool kit, neither poetry, nor the story inversions that alleviate the pain of living in post-colonial society, but a logical overview from a sympathetic perspective. Its author also recommends Indigenous fiction because reality is the foundation of fiction as stories sit on the furniture of real life. His language is spare and considered, his contents well organised. I would only wish the publishers provided a larger type font, given the density of its spare but robust intention.
“If reconciliation is going to be about substance instead of process, it needs to extend beyond the duty to consult. It needs to begin with recognition, including recognizing First Nations’, both treaty and non-treaty, decision making authority.” Starting with that premise, it is essential to be conversant with the language framing rights and privileges. To that end, he has provided a useful bibliography and glossary as we consider various laws and decisions and the sources of information that keep us abreast with change.
Courts have limited the transformation of unjust decision-making because traditional laws differ from settler laws and they have ruled on that premise. “If they try to enforce their own Indigenous laws and exercise their Aboriginal title, they’re criminalized by the Canadian court system and end up in jail.” Simple arithmetic tells us the proportion of Indigenous vs non-Indigenous in jail (and reason explains that Aboriginal people are vulnerable when they come from a culture that, although it inculcates responsible behaviour directed to the common good, depends on the wisdom of knowledge keepers and traditions like grabbing (Cowichan) for re-education and correction rather than punishment), is explained by trauma.
Having witnessed infractions as innocent as asserting hunting and fishing rights in my own experience as a prison story facilitator, and knowing how much anti-social behaviour has come out of inhumane child-snatching, this reviewer, as a sympathetic reader of the book, understands the author’s cynicism about settler justice. McIvor, aware of the ironies, attempts redress through clarification of the Byzantine machinery in our legal system as we reject the lie of the Doctrine of Discovery and “accept that Indigenous nations have law-making authority over their own lands.”
“Reconciliation requires exposing, disrupting and uprooting these attitudes throughout the systems, policies and laws that dominate, marginalize and disentitle current and future generations of Indigenous people.”
What this document provides is guidance in comprehending those differences and, with respect to ancient precedent, finding common ground, where the rights of founding peoples are respected and upheld. That includes rights to hunting, fishing, trapping and child raising, as in the Sparrow decision about net fishing the Fraser River and many others that contravene or support common sense about traditional food gathering.
This grammar of the new language of reconciliation is a foundational primer to protect our freedoms from the exploding meth lab beneath us, where human rights are a dispensable notion, rights and privileges are denied, and the dignity of founding nations is extinguished in egregious acts like the expunging of heroes, including the Navajo coders, from their national cemetery, crimes from which Canadians are not exempt “because the crowns initial claim of control and ownership of Indigenous lands was based on unfair, dishonourable conduct with no basis in law.”
On the inversion side, when truth subverts the canny system of settler injustice, the law is a joke because it was written to justify amoral behaviour, the subjugation of a nation that already existed. With this in mind, McIvor reaches the why and how to re-calibrate that system in the spirit of reconciliation while restoring dignity and sovereignty to an ancient way of life.
Few of us are going to make the decisions that determine the future of jurisprudence in our country, but we can weigh in and we all have the responsibility to stay informed. We must stand on guard, and that includes understanding the premises, including the duty to consult and fiduciary duties on which our alleged freedoms are based. To that end, this book is essential reading.
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Linda Rogers is a third generation settler, writer, daughter and sister of lawyers on the good team, who has enjoyed the privilege of living alongside First Peoples, learning the egalitarian world view and using her actor training (ie. lying her face off) to subvert racism among RCMP and Wildlife officials while living on a fishing river and midden between two reserves. Among her books Queens of the Next Hot Star, Say My Name, Mother, the Verb and others address the issues in fiction and poetry. Her most recent book, published by Studio 123 after subversive assaults by the patriarchy, is Masks Off, Finding Balance, memoir of her friend Chief Tony Hunt. [Editor’s note: Linda has reviewed books by Cheryl Troupe & Doris Jeanne MacKinnon (eds.), Adrienne Gruber, Peyman Vahabzadeh, Michael Elcock, Marion McKinnon Crook, and Tim Schouls for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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