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Abstract:

In this presentation, I analyze the Piikani Nation’s attempts to halt the construction of the Oldman River Dam, as this struggle highlights the challenges Indigenous communities can face in attempting to assert our own forms of jurisdiction within the confines of Canadian law. Completed in 1991, the Dam faced multiple forms of opposition by Piikani members, including lawsuits, interventions within the Federal Environmental Review Process, and an attempt by community activists to divert the river around an existing irrigation weir. For this presentation, I focus on the Piikani water rights case, wherein the Piikani Nation attempted to creatively draw from the US Winters Doctrine as a means to establish a legal claim to the Oldman River rooted in treaty rights.

This presentation draws from my current research on Piikani/Blackfoot water relationships, which seeks to answer: how are Indigenous forms of jurisdiction enacted within and beyond reserve boundaries? And how do they articulate with Canadian legal systems, such as the reserve and band council systems? To answer these questions, I draw from both critical political economy and Indigenous legal scholarship, as I argue that in struggles against the capitalist reterritorialization of Indigenous places, it is through the assertions of competing legal jurisdictions that these struggles tend to find their most profound expression. Here, I draw from, and extend, the Marxian concept of articulation, suggesting this concept might be a generative reframing ‘legal pluralism’ frameworks that are often used by scholars to examine how Indigenous legal orders interact with settler law.

Bio:

Michael Fabris (he/they) is a Blackfoot scholar and Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Geography. His current research focuses on Piikani challenges to the construction of the Oldman River Dam, Piikani water rights, and articulations between Indigenous and settler forms of law.