This article analyzes the issue of water contamination in Kashechewan, Ontario, Canada. Through an inquiry into the way in which water contamination in one Aboriginal community was handled by the local and federal governments, this article examines processes of ongoing colonialism in Canada. Drawing on an array of sources, this article explores three features pertinent to this water crisis: historical forms of legal violence, symbolic forms of representation concerning the relationship between nationalism and the governance of race in liberal democracies, and the importance of the case study approach when examining legalized forms of violence. By examining connections between race, nationalism, and legal violence, this article explores the ways in which biopolitical forms of racial governance require an analysis that links legal violence and structural violence to historical and symbolic forms of representation.

The Criminal Code of Canada contains a sentencing provision aimed at offering alternatives to incarceration for Aboriginal peoples. One of the intentions of this provision is to take national responsibility for the over-incarceration of Aboriginal peoples. Using official documents, the objective of this article is to address the possible meaning of national responsibility that is shaped by the emergence of this legal intervention. The objective is to explore how even as it attempts to address national responsibility in law, the nation remains fundamentally committed to an understanding of colonial history in which it is not guilty of wrongdoing and hence arrives at an official stance that suggests that the Canadian state is not responsible for the continued ramifications of colonialism. This article also demonstrates that the practices of control and containment which are central to the criminal justice system require cultural difference paradigms as their ideological impetus.

L’article 81 de la Loi sur le système correctionnel et la mise en liberté sous condition permet aux collectivités autochtones de superviser le soin et la garde des délinquants autochtones. Bien que l’article 81 ne décrive pas comment les collectivités autochtones doivent s’y prendre, la prestation de garde et de soin prend communément la forme de centres de guérison, communément appelés pavillons de ressourcement. Cette loi a le potentiel de permettre aux collectivités autochtones, dans tout ce qu’elles entreprennent, de configurer leurs propres accords en vertu de l’article 81 de façon à ce qu’ils correspondent à leurs capacités et à leurs besoins spécifiques. Malgré le potentiel de l’article 81, peu de programmes de cette nature sont offerts aux femmes autochtones détenues dans des prisons fédérales. Cet article présente les résultats de deux séances d’engagement communautaires avec des femmes autochtones et des chefs de diverses communautés autochtones du Manitoba au sujet des femmes autochtones détenues dans des prisons fédérales qui purgent leur peine dans leur collectivité. L’article décrit les connaissances et les points de vue des communautés qui ont participé aux séances d’engagement et démontre la nécessité de faire appel à l’expertise autochtone et de mieux comprendre sur le plan local les obstacles, les possibilités et les limites de l’article 81.

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Canada’s Criminal Code contains unique sentencing provision known as the Gladue principle. This provision requires consideration of the social and contextual factors that bring an Indigenous person before a criminal court. With reference to Sherene Razack’s “ethics of accountability,” this article explores a set of recent sentencing and bail decisions of an Ontario judge who has been hailed as a compassionate moral crusader assisting Indigenous people. I argue that the Gladue process reveals and contains a reparative logic—an ontological and temporal framework that ultimately structures discourses of human/racial difference for Indigenous people in the criminal justice system.