Thinking Differently: Creating Spaces of Autonomy for the Revitalization of Indigenous Legal Traditions in the Context of Copyright

There is an urgent need to think differently. Colonialism, in its settler variant, has developed new and particularly dangerous strategies to advance its dual imperatives of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the erasure of Indigeneity as a politicized identity construct with a legitimate claim to law. This goal is advanced today through rights frameworks, which have generated a worrisome platform to support the logic of elimination by drawing Indigenous calls for autonomy, self-determination, and sovereignty into a settler colonial framework of authority. In this chapter, we highlight how these strategies function in the context of Canadian copyright law. Canadian copyright law is deeply implicated in a number of issues that matter greatly to Indigenous peoples today. One possible response by Indigenous peoples to the role played by copyright in relation to these issues is to work within the copyright system: to either engage with the system as structured or to seek to reform the copyright system to make it more responsive to Indigenous concerns. While protections may be secured through either of these methods, this chapter highlights a few of the risks associated with these approaches, in particular how they draw Indigenous peoples into the settler colonial framework of authority potentially resulting in a diminishment of Indigenous sovereignty. This argument suggests that in seeking to protect Indigenous modes of expression, we should be wary of reliance on rights. Instead, we should seek to create spaces of autonomy for the revitalization of Indigenous legal traditions.