“Aboriginal Title: Travelling from (or to?) an Antique Land?”

Abstract

This brief comment is about time and its involvement with the Canadian jurisprudence of Aboriginal title. It starts from a simple proposition so basic it can be overlooked or factored out of thought processes even as that activity is displaying this essential everyday quality: A human community lives in time. All things human are subject to change, including the way in which we conceive objects, rules, relationships, traditions, and past events. Historicity-our communication of our sense of living in time and the acknowledgement of the inherent mutability of our world-is part of the human condition. Human life is infused with temporality. All the things that human beings create, materially or intellectually, even those carved like Ozymandias out of marble in seeming defiance of the passage of time, can only be artifacts of their time.