American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION While attending a meeting of a Saami organization in northern Sweden, I introduced myself to an older fellow during a coffee break. ”From America?”he asked and paused. “When do you go back?” I replied that I planned to return in a couple of months. He smiled. “You’ll go back,’’ he said, ”and we will forget you were ever here.” This remark from a Saami who was old enough to remember the era of segregation, the political mobilization of northern Europe’s indigenous people, the lawsuits, the endless negotiations and promises of the Swedish government, juxtaposed the ephemeral nature of my visit and the extended encounter of a colonial endeavor. Whose memories would become history? Here I would like to explore the significance of memory in the assertion of native claims. I turn to Canada, specifically British Columbia, where claims processes have been underway for a long time. Proving the existence of aboriginal rights in common law requires a reconstruction of a people’s past presented in a way that satisfies Western legal traditions. Evidence must be internally consistent, chronological, and documented. Crucial gaps in time or knowledge must be explained. Observers of the trial and readers of the decisions rendered in Delgamuukw v. The Queen have criticized the process and outcome as expressions of colonialism and ethnocentrism. This essay does not dismiss the criticisms, but analyzes the texts of the decisions issued by the British Columbia Supreme Court and the British Columbia Court of Appeal as representations of the state’s concept of itself in opposition to societies claiming to be whole, original, and sovereign.