Aboriginal oral history evidence and Canadian law

• Main Author: Etinson, Adam Daniel
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: English Studies; Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/116071

The establishment of distant historical facts and the articulation of aboriginal understandings of such facts are both vital to the legal cases of First Nations that confront the Canadian government with specific land claims as well as rights claims. This has made the appearance of oral history testimony a practical necessity for aboriginal claimants. Not only does oral history contain the aboriginal understanding of the past, it also refers to distant historical events for which little or no documentary evidence exists. Such testimony, however, has brought to the fore deep anxieties on the part of the Canadian judiciary regarding the rules of evidence and the value of oral accounts of history. The Canadian judiciary has made significant efforts to be fair and open towards oral history testimony, taking into consideration the unique difficulties of proving aboriginal rights and title cases, most notably in the 1997 Supreme Court decision, Delgamuukw. However, despite such efforts, the need to stretch oral histories to the limits of their reliability, the prevalence of suspicion and distrust between Native and non-Native parties, and the textual "bias" of the Western styles of doing history have led to the undermining of oral history evidence in court. What emerges from this survey of the history of the legal reception of aboriginal oral history testimony in Canada is a sharper sense of the psychological and cultural damage that can result when folk tradition becomes an instrument of economic, legal and political interests. Dans les affaires juridiques où la population des Natifs oppose au gouvernement canadien des revendications de territoires spécifiques ainsi que des droits, il est primordial à la fois d'établir certains faits historiquement lointains mais aussi d'énoncer la compréhension que la population indienne a de ces mêmes faits. Par ailleurs, de telles réclamations ont mis les revendicateurs natifs devant la nécessité de formuler un témoignage oral de leur histoire. Non seulement l'histoire orale ...