Table Of ContentABORIGINAL TITLE
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Aboriginal Title
The Modern Jurisprudence
of Tribal Land Rights
P.G. MCHUGH
ReaderinLawattheUniversityofCambridge
andFellowofSidneySussexCollege
1
3
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For Olivia, Louisa, Frankie, and Andrew
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Preface
The book profiles a transformative court-based jurisprudence that burst into
prominence and controversy during the final quarter of the twentieth century
(and with which I have been associated as close-quarter witness and sometime
participant, though in a minor way). Almost overnight, judicial recognition of
common law aboriginal title upturned national politics and gave tribal peoples
unprecedentedandimmenselegalleverage.Whilstitwasprimarilyaphenomenon
oftheAnglocommonlawjurisdictionsofCanada,Australia,andNewZealand,the
emergenceofthecommonlaw—thatistosay,judge-made—doctrineofaboriginal
law commanded international attention and influenced the formation of interna-
tional law during the 1990s and after as well as spreading to other national legal
systems in the new century. This book is an intellectual history of the rise and
reception of the doctrine. It traces that emergence from a post-War stalemate in
whichAnglo-settlerjurisdictionsfacedthesevereplightoftheirindigenouspeoples
andproposedpoliciesoflegalreformbasedonthepolicyofassimilation.Thetribes’
vocalrejectionofthosepolicies,comingintherisingtemperatureofthecivilrights
era and courts’ conceptualization of a less deferential role for public law, led to
nationalmovementsforstatutorylandrights.Thoselandclaimsencompassednot
onlythecallforvastlystrengthenedlegalprotectionofextanttribaluserightsand
longstandingcustomarypracticesfromstate-licenseddisruptionbutalsocalledfor
statemeasuresofrestitutionandrecompenseforlandshistoricallytakenbycolour-
able means. Common law aboriginal title was the courts’ response to the political
branches’slowreactionto,indeedinactionon,thoselandclaims.Itfirstappeared
inwesternCanadaduringthe1970sasanunformedlegalargument,butprogres-
sivelytookwiderrootreceivingfulleracademicattentionandameasureoftraction
insomenationalcourts.Bythe1980stherewasagroundswellofscholarshipand
deepening intellectual acceptance of the doctrine, which set the stage for the
breakthroughjudgmentsofpeakcourts.Toimmensecontroversyandgovernment
unease, these judgments (chiefly in the decade spanning the mid-1980s to mid-
1990s) recognized aboriginal title as a proprietary interest cognizable at law and
enforceableagainsttheCrown.Almostovernight,thecourts’wholeheartedaccep-
tance of the doctrine changed the tribes’ terms of engagement with governments
who,untilthen,hadbecomeaccustomedtowhattheyperceivedastheembedded
legal position by which those relations had been a non-justiciable ‘political trust’.
Suddenly the tribes’ land claims had legal propulsion, and addressing them accel-
erated up the national agendas withsudden urgency. From that breakthrough era
there formed,especially in Canada andAustralia, national jurisprudences of com-
monlawaboriginaltitle.
The book opens (Chapter 1) with a general historical outline of the post-War
legalism surrounding tribal peoples. It then gives (Chapter 2) an account of the
intellectualprovenanceofthedoctrineleadingtothebreakthroughcasesinthekey
viii Preface
jurisdictions of (in order of reception) Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Chapter 3 looks at the subsequent pathways of doctrinal development in the
most prominent and busiest jurisdictions, Canada and Australia, noting how, as
the case-law developed, the courts resiled from their early interventionism. The
patternofjudicialevolutionofaboriginaltitlebecamemorecautiousascourtsfilled
in the detail of the property right. The early boldness was replaced by more
constrained, indeed constrictive, judicial reasoning. Chapter 4 looks at what
happened meanwhileandas that municipal detailingoccurred through the 1990s
andintothenewcentury:boostedbythathigh-profiledomesticlegalism,interna-
tionallawdevelopedacloserinterestinindigenouspeoplesasdistinctrights-bearers
holdinglandandterritorialrights.Asthisinternationalattentiongrew,increasingly
tribes wrapped the cluster of rights that had come to be termed adjectivally as
‘aboriginal’ in the more politicized master-right of autonomy and self-determina-
tion.Nonethelessland,andassociatedissues,remainedattheheartoftheirclaims.
In the new century, aboriginal title surfaced in fraternal jurisdictions of Africa,
Belize, New Zealand (dramatically resurgent), and Malaysia as well as rippling to
otherlegalsystems,showingagainitscapacitytodiscomfortgovernmentsandspark
controversy(inanerawherehumanrightsmonitoringbodiesaugmentedmunici-
pallegalism).Finally,Chapter5considersthedisciplinarypracticesthatintersected
withcommonlawaboriginaltitleandthatweredrawnintoitslegalism,especially
anthropology and history. These disciplines not only gave important evidentiary
inputtothelegalprocessesbutalsotheirinvolvementrequiredtheirpractitionersto
address fundamental questions of professional method and ostensible claims to
detachedobjectivity,particularlythosearisinginanadversarialsetting.Thearrival
ofaboriginalrightsalsoattractedmajorpoliticalphilosopherswhosoughttojustify
or critique those national processes of land-rights recognition, reparation, and the
widerimplicationsofconstitutionalandlegalclaimsthatwerenowbeingprefaced
andpresentedasaboriginalincharacter.
Fewlegaldoctrineshavehadsuchamajorimpactonthecutofnationalpolitics
ascommonlawaboriginaltitle:itstartedasanidea,onethatspread,andasittook
hold,shookthenationallegalsystemsintoaneweraofdialogueandaccommoda-
tion.Theadjustmentwasnotaneasyorgood-temperedone.Itbecameafumbling
andinsomewaysfetishisticjurisprudencepreoccupiedwith(andsocompromised
by)itsadversarialmannerofbirthandthegeneticimprintofaproprietaryright.It
spawned explosively from a notion of the national common law, the intellectual
appealofwhichseguedintootherlesscontroversialjuridicalfoundations(notably
theNativeTitleAct1993inAustralia,and,inCanada,section35oftheConstitu-
tionAct1982).Itwastheoutsetofwhatbecamearampantlegalism(‘lawfare’)that
boundedintoandnowricochetswildlyaboutmosttribes’affairs.Itmademodern
legalhistory.Itisstillmakingit.
Iopenandclosethebookwithanacknowledgementofthestrugglesofindige-
nouspeoplesbefore,during,andaftertheadventofaboriginaltitle;butIalsostress
that this book is not a history inside their culture and those struggles (and beside
whichthisnarrativedimsconsiderably).Rather,itisanaccountofhowinthelast
quarter of the twentieth century Anglo intellectualism, its legalism especially,
Preface ix
absorbed and responded to the tribes’ plight. This book is set in the house of
whitefella’sthought.Whenthecourtsusedcommonlawaboriginaltitletoseizethe
initiative and break the irresolution of the political branches, the tribes’ relations
with the state took what seemed an important and positive turn. Those relations
werenowtobeframedinthelanguageoflawwheretribeswererights-bearersinside
aproprietaryparadigm.Gone,or ratherdisappearing,wasthevaguenessofunfet-
teredexecutivediscretioninaneweraofcourt-monitoredrelations.Thatturnwas
no bad thing (compared to what had gone before), but the jury is still out on
whetheritisandwhatitbroughtwasagoodthing.
Thisbookisaconventionalintellectualhistoryinthatitfollowstheemergenceand
lifetime (to date) of common law aboriginal title in a mostly chronological manner.
Ihavetriedtokeepthenarrativeinthetextasdirectaspossible,althoughthefootnotes
areample,bristlingwithsub-issuesandsmallerbushfires.Ihavestatedthelaw,asfaras
Ican,to31August2010,althoughrevisionhasallowedsomeupdatinginplaces.
Thisbookhasbeenwrittenbothasatributetoandcritiqueofthecommonlaw
enterprise.Itiswrittenbothasparticipantandobserver,andasapersonaltributeto
those who have been on this journey for as long as me or, indeed, in some cases,
longer. A few who particularly shaped my own thinking, sadly, have left us:
including my father, Judge AG ‘Chick’ McHugh; the inspirational Lord Robin
Cooke(whoshowedimmensekindnesstomeasayoungscholarinthe1980s);the
heroicMichaelTaggartatatragicallyyoungage;theprairiesagesRogerCarterQC,
urbane and kind, plus Howard McConnell, compassionate raconteur; and the
dogged ‘Jock’ Brookfield, all generous in their encouragement and disagreement
andcommonlawyersintheirsinewsandtotheirmarrow.
In the legal quarters in which I circulated from the very early 1980s, a new
golden jurisprudence—or national series of them—seemed to be dawning. That
decade seemed ripe with potential. It is impossible to write a history of common
lawaboriginaltitlewithoutstressingthatsenseofhighexpectationandrecapturing
elements of one’s own youth. I was lucky enough to be at a particular place—the
CollegeofLawintheUniversityofSaskatchewan1980–81—wheretheintellectual
fervourwasconsiderableandwheremajorfigureswereattheoutsetoftheircareers
(Brian Slattery—my inspirational LLM supervisor who for over thirty years has
commanded this field with deep scholarship and compassion—and Kent McNeil
especially, alongside others including Richard Bartlett, Howard McConnell, and
Eric Colvin). In the two decades that followed those hopes were less dashed than
dowsed with greater realism and apprehension of the inherent limitations of the
adjudicativeprocess.Toomuchhadbeenhopedfor,thecourtshadbeenoverladen
withanexpectationonwhich,inretrospect,theycouldneverhavedelivered.These
constraints were plain by the millennium and after a decade of judicial cogitation
and decision-making fleshing out the proprietary paradigm, accompanied as that
was by sideline coaching andbarracking from the academics, journalists, activists,
and others with strong opinions on what the courts should—or should not—be
doing. As court intervention became a new feature of the political landscape of
tribes’ relations with governments, attitudes formed as to its effectiveness. Some
remained starry-eyed about the potential, seeing judicial activity in a Dworkinian
