Halifax

Back to the Future: The Confederation Treaties and Reconciliation

MacKay Lecture Series, Part I

7:00pm
Thursday October 4 2012

Canadian anthropologist Michael Asch, FRSC, has worked untiringly on the issue of finding just resolution of relations between Aboriginal Peoples and Canada. Dr. Asch will speak on some of the powerful arguments in his forthcoming book We are all Here to Stay: Between Canadian Sovereignty and First Nations’ Self-Determination (University of Toronto). In his new book he unpacks the history of legal, political, and knowledge relations between newcomers to Canada and Indigenous Peoples, and offers an empirically-sound proposition for the reconciliation of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, following a path that “offers an opportunity for Canadians to come to terms, honourably, with our settlement in what we used to call the New World.”  Dr. Asch argues that his proposition is grounded in a common capacity and common will to enter into committed peaceful political relations in shared lands — by way of deeply rigorous enactment of treaty as a practice of living reciprocal obligations among peoples. His discussion goes directly to the idea of mutual responsibility in reconciliation, and expanding relations around that principle into the future.
 
Speaker Bio:  
Dr. Asch worked with the Northern Dene over the 1970s and 80s, aiding them in treaty-based land claims when they were facing the prospect of Alaskan Pipeline development through their territories, and in the 1990s was Senior Research Associate for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.  He is recipient of the Canadian Anthropology Society’s Weaver-Tremblay Prize in Applied Anthropology and an Honorary Doctorate from Memorial University; author of the landmark book Home and Native Land: Aboriginal Rights and the Canadian Constitution (1984) among other books, as well as many articles and chapters on the history of Anthropological, Legal, and Political thought and their effects for Indigenous peoples relations with Canada. 

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