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A Country Within A Country: Redrawing Borders On The Post-Colonial Sovereign State, Suzan Dionne Balz

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Essay seeks to identify the conflict that exists between the demands for self-governance by Canada's First Nations and the interests of the Canadian state. The author elucidates this conflict by identifying two major differences between the perspectives of Canada's First Nations' demands for self-governance and the interests of the Canadian state: the privileging of the collective versus the privileging of the individual, and the two very different notions of "territory." The author concludes that the doctrine of sovereign statehood as developed out of European Nationalism stands as an obstacle to the self-determination of non-western peoples such as the First …