Courts and the Configuration of Indigenous Spiritual Identities
This article presents a comparative portrait of how spirituality is mobilized in legal context by the Indigenous peoples of Canada and the Aborigines of Australia. In the light of a series of judgments handed down by the courts, our goal is to establish to what extent the specifics of the normative regime of each country influence: 1) the way this spiritual dimension is ethnographically represented by the native parties, 2) the legal qualification by which it is introduced and justified, and 3) the appreciation reserved for it by the courts. Through the similarities and differences that it reveals, this comparison points out the need for Indigenous peoples and Aborigines to modulate, even distort the representation of their spiritual particularisms to render them compatible with the ideological and normative canons guiding the courts, and consequently the limits of the current normative frameworks to receive and appreciate indigenous cultural particularisms.