Master of Arts in Indigenous Governance

"Indigenous Foundations," University of British Columbia. Covers:
Aboriginal rights;
Aboriginal title;
Precedent-setting court cases:
R v Calder [1973]
R v Guerin [1984]
R v Sparrow [1990]
R v Van der Peet [1996]
R. v. Powley [2003]

Colonialism, as distinguished from imperialism, is generally defined as the appropriation, occupation, and control of one territory by another.

Critical race theory is a body of radical critique against the implicit acceptance of White supremacy in prevailing legal paradigms and in contemporary law.

Critical theory proceeds from the view of mankind as the creator of history and society; it seeks a society of free actors that transcends the tension between, and abolishes the opposition to, the individual's purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality and the results of his or her labor.

Indigenous governance refers to the myriad ways in which these peoples continue to formulate, organize, and actualize their self-governance in formal and informal settings.

This article presents an overview of the environmental values, knowledge, and subsistence strategies of indigenous peoples both in their traditional contexts and in the contexts of colonialism and globalization.

Local knowledge refers to people's knowledge of their own circumstances and lived experiences, whether those be community residents for whom public policies are being legislated or the legislators' staff members or the implementors of public policies (or any other setting).

Unlike more traditional minority studies programs in sociology or archaeology, Native American Studies/American Indian Studies/First Nations studies, both in the United States and Canada, are multidisciplinary.

A central feature of anticolonial and postcolonial thought is the recognition that colonization is a sophisticated and multileveled ideological process, which operates both externally and internally. In reality, colonization is not restricted to physical deprivation, legal inequality, economic exploitation, and classist, racist, and sexist unofficial or official assumptions. [It includes a psychological dimension wherein] the colonized become their own oppressor, in that they exert the colonizers' imaginary suppositions of inferiority upon their own self-esteem...the objectification and dehumanization of the colonized.

One is self-governing when one obeys only those laws, rules, or norms of which one is the author, or can reasonably endorse in some way. A city, state, or group is self-governing when it is free from external domination, and thus free to pursue its own chosen ends of its own will

"Sovereignty encompasses three aspects. The first is institutional: Sovereignty is tightly linked to the emergence of the modern state and the peculiarities of the powers it exercises. The second [is that] Sovereignty operates as a legitimizing concept depending on who is deemed to be the holder of sovereignty. Finally, the legal dimension of sovereignty refers to the limits of power exercised by the holders of sovereignty."

Tribal governance is the myriad of ways in which these communities of indigenous peoples have been, and continue to be, governed, autonomously and via external management.

A worldview is a set of conceptual lenses through which to view the surrounding environment without “seeing” itself.