The limits of advocacy: exploring relationships between ethnoecology and acknowledging and affirming Aboriginal rights in the Canadian Court System.

In this paper I explore concerns over the applications of ethnoecological research within Aboriginal rights cases in the Canadian Court system. I examine the tension between presenting research within an epistemological framework of Western social science while remaining an advocate for the affirmation of Aboriginal rights and Indigenous ways of knowing. While transforming traditional plant knowledge into the language of academic social science serves as a bridge to cross-cultural understanding, by doing so, ethnoecologists are also forced to exclude knowledge that is not cognizable within the Canadian court system, thereby potentially perpetuating colonial views of the paramountcy of Crown sovereignty. It also tends to emphasize specific practices over more substantive rights to stewardship of significant landscapes. Further, the narrow historical context within which the court demands these rights be presented serves to freeze relationships to species and places in an ethnographic past that overlooks two centuries of alienation and dispossession.