E Pluribus Plures
In much of the world, colonialism has gone hand in hand with the deliberate suppression of Indigenous peoples’ values and the legal orders by which they governed themselves. In light of the marginal social conditions and threats to their future cultural survival that the imposition of colonial sovereignty has produced for Indigenous peoples, pressure has been rising in recent decades for states to recognize the right of Indigenous peoples to be governed by their own diverse laws and normative orders. To be effective, formal efforts to mediate the discourse between those norms and state laws will need to be capable of accommodating fundamental differences between Indigenous and state understandings of governance and of law. Drawing on Indigenous arguments for the revitalization of their laws as well as the insights of legal pluralism, this chapter sketches out a framework by which one might assess the adequacy of mechanisms that mediate between state and Indigenous norms. Our discussion will focus on Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand, two countries where the issue of legal pluralism has recently taken center stage.