The alt is the Indigenous Domain – that preexists European arrival and generates sovereignty without the grant of imperial legislatures.

In Canada, the Indigenous domain continues to be part of the supreme law of the land. 41 Canada’s constitution recognizes and affirms Aboriginal and treaty rights. 42 The SCC has affirmed that Aboriginal peoples’ constitutional rights are collective, communal, or group rights. 43 The constitutional rights generate the Indigenous domain, a metaphor for a holistic source of these rights. The Indigenous domain reveals the interrelated manifestations of the spiritual realm that generates diverse Indigenous lifeworlds. 44 These spiritual forces of nature have inspired and guided Indigenous peoples’ knowledge. 45 The Indigenous domain’s creativity and expressive modes have generated Aboriginal sovereignty, inherent powers, rooted constitutionalism, persuasive laws, and consensual treaties. 46 The Indigenous domain, which in Latin is called ex proprio vigore or sui generis, was vested in the Indigenous nations by the law of nations at the critical date when the British sovereign asserted jurisdiction over Indigenous territories. 47

The Indigenous domain has always been grounded in the ecologies that operate as the Indigenous peoples’ education system, just as nature is the Eurocentric public domain’s source. Their experiences with biotic and abiotic forces shaped their knowledge systems. The Indigenous domains have many Indigenous keepers and generators of knowledge, so that families continually generate distinctive heritages, identities, and landscapes. 48 The oral traditions and symbolic literacy of Indigenous peoples reveal the continent’s embodied and teaching ecologies, investing their ancestors’ knowledge, imagination, and experiences. This enduring spiritual process of generating knowledge, stories, and artistic media that makes people live right has never ceased; they have been a method of “survivance.” 49 It has survived the linguistic violence of colonialism and forced assimilation.

These intergenerational dialogues creatively reconstruct the central aspects of the Indigenous domain through oral tradition and written literature and genres such as film and photography. The intertribal pow-wow seasonal circuit in North America is the most beautiful and creative manifestation of the contemporary Indigenous domain.

The inherent Indigenous domain is an immanent legal order—a legal order that existed before European presence and the imperial treaties. These inherent rights and benefits of the Indigenous domain are not dependent on explicit grants from the British sovereign or the imperial or Canadian legislature. 50 They are based on collective and inherent sovereignty that pre-existed at the critical date and survived. 51 They are the inherited collective arrangements and routines of Indigenous civilizations—the language, routines, and ceremonies of the structure of these nations, societies, tribes, and peoples. Since the critical date, most of the vested Aboriginal rights have not been surrendered or transferred by treaties from Indigenous peoples to the British sovereign or extinguish by clear legislative acts. 52 Indigenous peoples have the inherent right to reserve and regulate the transmission of their holistic heritages, knowledge systems, and languages. 53 These manifestations have never been transferred to the British or Canadian legal domains.