Title: White Man's Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence, Sidney L. Harring (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1998)
Abstract: After repeatedly seeing a threatening wendigo around a Sabascon settlement for months, Machekequonabe, one of eight Ojibwa men on sentry duty, shot at what he believed was the dangerous spirit, killing instead his foster father, Peskawakeequic, another of the sentries.The ensuing case, R. v. Machekequonabe, came to be one of the best known indigenous law cases in the common law world and provided the foundational tenet that colonial law applied to indigenous peoples even though they had no knowledge of the law or its principles.Machekequonabe was quickly found guilty of manslaughter, and a string of wendigo cases followed in the central Canadian legal system.The case brought forth to non-native society much of the intricate cultural and legal worlds of Ojibwa-Cree societies; likewise, it also demonstrated the extent to which Canadian legal authorities would go to impose their own legal system upon Native peoples.