ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the role of land stories within the constitutionalism of nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) people. The agency of the land and its inhabitants displayed in these stories causes us to consider their animacy in our legal ordering. Thus, land stories are a vital decolonizing vehicle.
The recognition of human obligations to well-being of non-human beings within these land stories raises the question of how this view of nêhiyaw âskiy (Plains Cree territoriality) has been lost in northern prairie governance. This chapter explores this in three parts. First, it examines a story about the creation of lands and waters within the nêhiyaw narrative tradition to highlight the agency of lands and the legal obligations that flow from it. Second, I observe how the colonial logics of abstraction, mainly through common-law land tenure concepts, have obscured or subsumed nêhiyaw views of the land, and thus nêhiyaw legal ordering. Finally, I examine how a broadened view of constitutionalism can re-bundle our legal ordering on the northern prairies in a manner that is mindful of nêhiyaw obligations to the well-being and good living of the land.
