Weiss, Joseph Julian Ziems

Preliminary Abstract: This project investigates the consequences of the 'co-existence' of multiple regimes of political belonging in an Aboriginal community in Western Canada. It focuses on the territory of Haida Gwaii, an island chain off Canada's northwest coast that is currently subject to two simultaneous sovereignty claims -- the assertion by the Canadian state that Haida Gwaii is Crown land, and the competing claim that the islands are (and always have been) the ancestral territory of the Haida Nation. Despite the fact that these claims are formally mutually exclusive, Canada and the Haida Nation have recently begun a 'Reconciliation process' with the stated goal of developing a 'more respectful approach to co-existence' between Canada and the Haida Nation (Kunst'aa guu - Kunst'aayah Reconciliation Protocol 2009:1). This project seeks to understand how this uneasy co-existence and the competing claims to political belonging it represents are refracted through the constitution of everyday life for the people of Haida Gwaii. It proposes in turn that the questions posed by co-existence on Haida Gwaii form part of a larger political 'problem-space' in Canada in which the relationship between sovereign authority and the political community itself has been unsettled and new understandings of politics and community are emerging