ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 recounts and analyses how Indigenous peoples come to stand before the law as described in the previous case studies. It evaluates how those who deploy legal models contribute to the naturalization of Indigenous peoples by constructing linear, progressive or evolutionary accounts about Indigenous rights. I do so by retrospectively reading privileged moments that favored Indigenous peoples as beneficial. From a legal performative method, I then re-examine those accounts by considering the legal subjectivity of Indigenous peoples, especially the disciplinary features, which are here represented as a cycle of legal forms. Claiming FPIC, like claiming any right, can create and draw attention to controversy but it does not determine how others will react to those claims and thus the claim will not end the controversy. Those who claim human rights use those rights as a source of power, but only by becoming subjects of power. To keep the controversies alive requires indefinite and permanent subjection to those powers that one does not control. This chapter ends by sketching the potential problems revealed by a performative method.
