Cis Dideen Kat - When the Plumes Rise : The Way of the Lake Babine Nation

Winner of the 2013 Washington State Book Award in Poetry. This book examines the Lake Babine Nation in north central British Columbia, considering its traditional legal order and the way that order determines the people’s identity and the nature of their involvement in current treaty negotiations. Changing relations between the Natives and the Canadian state have resulted in a new awareness of customary legal orders. While such orders are often seen as a process by which the state can accommodate diverse approaches to judicial fairness and social justice, they also offer the means by which aboriginal nations can maintain their identity by sustaining a moral order in a viable, self-defined, and self-governed community. For the Lake Babine Nation, this moral order is defined by and lived through the feasting complex known as the bahlats, or potlatch system. This book, the first to be written about the Lake Babine Nation in north-central British Columbia, examines its traditional legal order, self-identity, and their involvement in current treaty negotiations.Changing relations between the First Nations and the Canadian state have led to a new awareness of customary legal orders. These orders can help the state accommodate diverse approaches to judicial fairness and social justice, and offer a way for Aboriginal nations to maintain their identity and moral order. "Through interviews with community chiefs and elders, oral histories, focus groups, and archival research, Fiske and Patrick have documented and defined a traditional legal system still very much misunderstood. Their findings include material not previously published, making this book essential reading for those involved in treaty negotiations as well as for those with an interest in Aboriginal and state relations generally."--BOOK JACKET.