Legal and political anthropology, race and colonization, human rights, indigenous rights and sovereignty, First Nations and the Canadian state, injury, trauma and reconciliation.

My book, “Beyond Rights: The Nisga’a Final Agreement and the Challenges of Modern Treaty Relationships” (2021), examines the legal, political and cultural consequences of treaty making in Canada. While the recent report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools identifies the treaty relationship as key to meaningful reconciliation, First Nations treaty signatories have very different ideas about how and why a treaty can reconcile their relationship with Canada than do the federal and provincial governments. For most Indigenous people treaties are a sacred covenant and that should create relationships of mutual respect and obligations between treaty partners. This is only possible, however, when they are implemented beyond a limited, contractual understanding of rights obligations.

I am currently developing a project to examine the development and implementation of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, Bill 41, passed into law by the BC provincial legislature in November 2019.  Bill 41 requires the provincial government to bring its laws into alignment with the articles of UNDRIP. My research will examine the process and effects of this alignment and the potential space it makes for Indigenous law in BC. My research is also concerned with how the implementation of Bill 41 may strengthen or interfere with existing constitutionally protected treaty rights.  In this respect my research is interested in the relationship between different modalities of rights.

My previous SSHRC funded research examined the litigation that former residential school students brought against Canada and the major Christian Churches who partnered with the federal government to run residential schools. This litigation resulted in the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. My research traced the multiple dimensions of injury that were presented and fought over in the residential school cases. I look in particular at the problematic role of trauma and psychiatric disorders as evidence of harms that are not just physical and emotional but political in nature.

Journal Articles

2019 “The Treaty Relationship and Settler Colonialism in Canada” . In Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism: Unfinished Struggles and Tensions, edited by Dittmar Shorkowitz, Ingo Shroeder and John Chavez. Pp. 415-435. Palgrave MacMillan.

2012 “Culture Loss and Crumbling Skulls: The Problematic of Injury in Residential School Litigation.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 35(2):288-306.

2009 “Differentiating Indigenous Citizenship: Seeking Multiplicity in Rights, Identity and Sovereignty in Canada.” American Ethnologist 36(1):66-78.

2007 “Producing Legitimacy: Reconciliation and the Negotiation of Aboriginal Rights in Canada.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(3):622-638.

2005 “Searching for Guarantees in the Midst of Uncertainty: Negotiating Aboriginal Rights and Title in British Columbia.” American Anthropologist 107(4):586-596.

Books

2000 “Harvest of Souls:” The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632- 1650. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.  Shortlisted for the Raymond Klibansky Book Prize, Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada.

Legal and political anthropology, race and colonization, human rights, indigenous rights and sovereignty, First Nations and the Canadian state, injury, trauma and reconciliation.Associate Professor, Sociocultural Anthropology

Legal and political anthropology, race and colonization, human rights, indigenous rights and sovereignty, First Nations and the Canadian state, injury, trauma and reconciliation

Phone: 604-822-2303

Email: blcarole@mail.ubc.ca