ABSTRACT
The following two chapters will be historical dossiers-“that is to say, a case, an affair, an event that provided the intersection of discourses that differed in origin, form, organization, and function” (Foucault, I, Pierre Riviére, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother…: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century x)—of indigenous legal activism in the white settler states of Australia and Canada. The reason for adopting such an approach is to:
Draw a map, so to speak of those combats, to reconstruct these confrontations and battles, to rediscover the interaction of those discourses as weapons of attack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge [and subjectivity]. (Foucault, I, Pierre Riviére, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother…: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century xi)
Dossiers attempt to present a wide range of documentary evidence, without a scheme of classification, without subjecting the documents to direct interpretation, and with a selection of accompanying theoretical essays. Why adopt such a research strategy? In the following pages this question will be answered in reference to the relation between the dossier form and genealogy, dossiers and the subject matter under study, and finally, some specific objections to the dossier format will be addressed.
