“Not a Lawless People”

Sylvia McAdam is one of the four lawyers who began the Idle No More Movement in 2012. In Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems, she offers an unprecedented look at nêhiyaw (Cree) law and, in doing so, lays plain why she was destined to start a movement that could change a country. She explains in clear English what every news story on the topic has failed to communicate—that before colonial reconciliation can happen in Canada, worlds must be rebuilt. Songs, political arrangements, legal systems and the thousand other edifices that once upheld each of the First Nations must be recovered and restored. And we have barely begun.

Putting her shoulder to one specific reconstruction project, the nêhiyaw legal system, McAdam demands: “in the spirit and intent of Indigenous sovereignty and treaty … non-­Indigenous people must begin supporting and...