ABSTRACT
Western critical legal scholarship has steadily exposed the dissolute functions of the common law tradition, and transgressed its ‘deference’ to closed logic and doctrinal assumptions of ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’. First Nations theorists have led sophisticated critiques of Western research methodologies and their potential to colonise Indigenous culture, beliefs, property, minds, bodies, and being. First, ‘history is important’. This insight accords with Professor Edward Said’s observation that appeals to the past are a common strategy in analyses of the present and future, involving questions about what the past was and, more significantly, whether it is really past or continuing though in a different form. ‘Racial’ analyses offer a basis to challenge the idea that there are natural racial identities, because identities are socially constructed and shaped by, and in turn shape, other features socially attributed to identity, such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality.
