Native Indian leaders in Canada have embraced the European-Western doctrine of sovereignty as the political-legal instrumentality for achieving their version of “the good society.” This article analyzes the appropriateness and feasibility of sovereign statehood for Canada's Indians. Indian aspirations to sovereign statehood run aground on at least two counts: key ideas contained in the European-Western doctrine of sovereignty are incompatible with core values comprising traditional Indian culture: also, the Canadian government is implacably opposed to relinquishing its sovereignty over Indians. This study explores alternative models of self-determination for Canada's Indians and concludes that stateless nationhood offers the best basis on which Indians may be able to negotiate internal self-determination.

At present, the federal government is engaged in community-based self-government negotiations with a number of Indian bands and tribal groups across Canada with the objective of bringing about legislative arrangements for a limited form of self-government outside the Indian Act. An important part of these negotiations involves the federal government's promise to allow the incorporation of “customary or traditional structures,” where desired, into redesigned Indian governments. This article explores the difficulties confronting Indian leaders in their attempts to revitalize traditional governing practices within their respective communities. Through a comparison of traditional and contemporary governing practices in two plains Indian societies, the Blood and Peigan Nations, this article addresses the question of whether present Indian government, which represents an externally imposed form based on the Indian Act, has been institutionalized within these communities. If institutionalization has occurred, then a return to traditional governing practices, the author argues, is effectively precluded. After analyzing traditional and contemporary governing practices the author concludes that strong traditionalist orientations remain within these Indian communities, thus providing the opportunity for political revitalization.

No abstract

No abstract

In recent years a significant beginning has been made in the investigation into the processes of recruitment of authorities within the Canadian political system. The focus of these studies has been on elective offices at the federal and provincial levels and on party activists. Only limited research has been devoted to the processes by which local decision-makers are recruited. Other than the partial analysis of local leadership selection by Harold Kaplan in his study of Toronto politics and the cursory treatment of this subject by J.G. Joyce and H.A. Hosse in their general survey of city councillors throughout Canada, empirical data about the recruitment of Canadian local decision-makers is confined to the level of social back ground analysis. The remainder of our information about local leadership selection tends to be in the form of hypotheses derived from data generated by the more extensive research on the recruitment of city councilmen in American cities. Although these propositions are useful because of certain shared structural characteristics between Canadian urban political systems and their American counterparts, they remain largely untested in the Canadian urban context and we run the risk of ignoring possible differences in the recruitment processes caused by factors endemic to each system.