Braiding Legal Orders is a compilation of essays by legal professionals of various areas of expertise who offer a unique insight into the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and how to take it from a non-binding international instrument and into a legal principle fully integrated with domestic legal systems.
The most obvious concept here is of course that to truly integrate Indigenous governance, they must actually carry legal weight, and have distinct jurisdictional authority. This is of course simpler said than done, and this is where the real disappointment was for me with these essays – it was heavy on trying to sell the reader on the idea that UNDRIP is important and should be taken seriously, and very light on how to accomplish this.
This is confusing to me for two reasons. First, I cannot fathom why anyone who does not already recognize the potential that UNDRIP has would even open this book. Perhaps even more confusingly, while the book makes effort after effort to convince the reader that Canada should implement UNDRIP, it makes no compelling argument for its implementation to someone who is not already convinced that the way Indigenous people have been treated in Canada has been terrible and that the remedy for this mistreatment must take the form of new jurisdictional authority. Again, I am not taking issue with the arguments being made, I simply don’t understand who this book is for – is it people who know nothing, and therefore need to be convinced of points that are taken for granted in this book, or is it for people who are already on side and are therefore not getting much value from the read?
Then there is the practical issue. There are a couple off hand references to places where attempts are being made to implement UNDRIP, high level nods to ideas that the author has for specific ways in which UNDRIP could be applied, but the most detail is actually in the footnotes, and it is only referring the reader to other reports which have ostensibly done what I was expecting to see coming into this book. No context, no analysis, no identification of the obstacles such application may encounter in Canada and ideas for how to handle such obstacles.
There are interesting points made here, I just wish there was more meat on the bone. The authors definitely have points of view, ideas, and for whatever reason, it feels like I’m just reading the introduction to each of their own books, but I don’t have the rest of it.