CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 20Indigenous Peoples' Rights and LawIndigenous Cultures and HistoryPolitical Philosophy and Ethics

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index, and 1 are not checked yet.

Collective Self-Determination, Territory and the Wet'suwet’en: What Justifies the Political Authority of Historic Indigenous Governments over Land and People?

Open access
Luoma, Michael·2022·Canadian Journal of Political Science
DOI 10.1017/s0008423921000913
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

This article examines the Wet'suwet’en people's struggle for territorial control over their traditional homeland from the normative perspective of collective self-determination. I focus on two interlocking philosophical questions that arise in examination of the case: the justification for a group's right to control territory and the justification for the right of political institutions and officials within those institutions to make and enforce law for the occupants of the territory. I argue that, pursuant to the collective self-determination theory of territorial rights, the legitimate representatives of the Wet'suwet’en people must reflect the people's shared will. After describing the traditional governance system of the Wet'suwet’en people, I argue that there is nothing in principle preventing the hereditary chiefs from reflecting the shared will of the Wet'suwet’en people (as I argue electoral democracy is not always necessary for collective self-determination). I illustrate several reasons why hereditary leaders could reflect the shared will of Wet'suwet’en people better than alternative political authorities, while demonstrating that the political authority of any Wet'suwet’en governance system depends upon the actual endorsement of Wet'suwet’en people themselves.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1017/s0008423921000913

Cites

24 of 25 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 25 references

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Mills, 2001, Sacred Land and Coming Back: How Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en Reincarnation Stretches Western Boundaries, Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 21, 309
  2. Moore, 2019, Who Should Own Natural Resources?
  3. Alfred, 2001, Deconstructing the British Columbia Treaty Process, Balayi: Culture, Law, and Colonialism:, 3, 37
  4. Press, Canadian . 2021. “Wet'suwet’en Rights, Title Talks Has Moved Slower than Parties Would Have Liked.” Globe and Mail, September 3. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-wetsuweten-rights-title-talks-has-moved-slower-than-parties-would-have/.
  5. Napoleon, 2013, Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, ed. René Provost and Colleen Sheppard. Vol. 17 of Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice
  6. Borrows, 2016, Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism
  7. Morin, 2011, Niwhts'ide’nï hibi'it’ën = The Ways of Our Ancestors: Witsuwit'en History and Culture throughout the Millennia

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Luoma, M.
Affiliations
Queen's University (CA)
Corresponding author
Luoma, Michael
ORCID
Luoma, Michael
Venue
Canadian Journal of Political Science
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2022-02-23
Volume
55
Issue
1
Pages
19-39
ISSN
  • 0008-4239 (ISSN-L)
  • 1744-9324
DOI
10.1017/s0008423921000913
OpenAlex
W4214751577
Cited by
18
References
25
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 3
FWCI
24.68
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Canadian Journal of Political Science (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Law › Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Law
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Indigenous Cultures and History
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Political Philosophy and Ethics
Keywords
collective self-determination, Wet'suwet'en, territorial rights, indigenous political authority, hereditary chiefs, Indigenous governance, electoral democracy, Indigenous land claims, political legitimacy

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review