In a series of thematically linked essays, Ronald Niezen discusses the ways new rights standards and networks of activist collaboration facilitate indigenous claims about culture, adding coherence to their histories, institutions, and group qualities. Drawing on historical, legal, and ethnographic material on aboriginal communities in northern Canada, Niezen illustrates the ways indigenous peoples worldwide are identifying and acting upon new opportunities to further their rights and identities. He shows how - within the constraints of state and international legal systems, activist lobbying strategies, and public ideas and expectations - indigenous leaders are working to overcome the injuries of imposed change, political exclusion, and loss of identity. Taken together, the essays provide a critical understanding of the ways in which people are seeking cultural justice while rearticulating and, at times, re-dignifying the collective self. The Rediscovered Self shows how, through the processes and aims of justice, distinct ways of life begin to be expressed through new media, formal procedures, and transnational collaborations.

Ronald Niezen is the Katherine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy at McGill University. He has published widely in the area of indigenous peoples and human rights and is the author, most recently, of Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law (2010) and The Rediscovered Self: Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice (2009).

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