The Sto:lo people face many challenges and issues as they create a government and
justice system based on prior ways of governance and justice. Some of these challenges and
issues include the documenting and synthesizing of current understanding of judicial practices,
establishing principles of membership or citizenship, legitimizing their own institutions, and
establishing the scope and mandate of the House of Justice. The Sto:lo people are deciding what
they want their justice system to look like. They face a multitude of existing judicial models and
the importation of legal practices from elsewhere.
Members of the Sto:lo Nation negotiate their way through various levels of federal and
provincial government bureaucracy as they form relationships with these government bodies and
establish their place among them. Yet, Sto:lo members must also temper their own bureaucratic
growth with the need to remain flexible and responsive to the needs of the community.
Current understandings of Sto:lo justice practice frame the expectations the Sto:lo people
have of their own justice system. Discursive features of previous justice practices and
contemporary Sto:lo issues include the importance of elders in community decision making, the
importance of community and cohesion, the strength of the family and the desire to settle
problems internally without external interference, the importance of sharing resources, and the
Sto:lo's connection to the spiritual world.
In this paper I study the inception and growth of Sto:lo nationhood, and the creation of
one of the Sto:lo Nation's emerging institutions, the House of Justice. I refer to the
ethnonationalist literature of Benedict Anderson, Stanley J. Tambiah and John L. Comaroff
Anderson's "imagined community" is the central metaphor for this paper.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8331 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | McMullen, Cindy Leanne |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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