Cis Dideen Kat

Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Washington State Book Award in Poetry. This book examines the Lake Babine Nation in north central British Columbia, considering its traditional legal order and the way that order determines the people’s identity and the nature of their involvement in current treaty negotiations. Changing relations between the Natives and the Canadian state have resulted in a new awareness of customary legal orders. While such orders are often seen as a process by which the state can accommodate diverse approaches to judicial fairness and social justice, they also offer the means by which aboriginal nations can maintain their identity by sustaining a moral order in a viable, self-defined, and self-governed community. For the Lake Babine Nation, this moral order is defined by and lived through the feasting complex known as the bahlats, or potlatch system.