The Court's Exercise of Plenary Power: Rewriting the Two-Row Wampum

This paper focuses on the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Mitchell v. M.N.R., [2001] S.C.R. 911, as an illustration of what is wrong in contemporary jurisprudence on Aboriginal rights. The concurring judgment of Binnie J. is discussed as a potential preview to the Court's approach to claims of Aboriginal self-determiniation. This paper digs into the ruins of Aboriginal law, to make sense of the doctrine of sovereign incompatibility, to come to some sense of how the field of Aboriginal law has come to trap Aboriginal peoples. The paper closes with suggestions about how Aboriginal rights might be resurrected from the ruins of Aboriginal law.