ABSTRACT
Although the negotiation of aboriginal land claim agreements in northern Canada appears to have much in common with land restitution processes elsewhere in the world, these Canadian agreements are not in fact supposed to be about land restitution at all. Rather, they deal with the cession of land held under aboriginal title to the federal government. In this article, I focus on the negotiation of Kluane First Nation’s (KFN’s) land claim agreement in Canada’s Yukon Territory. I examine talk that took place at the negotiating table and some of the legal and administrative mechanisms negotiators used to negotiate landownership. I show that political inequalities among the parties transformed what was in theory a process of land cession, in which KFN granted lands to the federal government, into one of restitution, in which the government gave lands to the First Nation. Reframing the process in this way gave the federal government a degree of control over the land claim process that was unjustified by the legal theory that gave rise to the negotiations in the first place.
