The Wetiko Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization by Hadley Louise Friedland (review)

"How do we protect those we love, from those we love?" (12) Few questions so succinctly distill pain, duty, hope, and the onus on legal systems called to respond. The Cree and Anishinabek tell wetiko stories to describe social responses to the horror wrought by wetiko—cannibal giants or spirits who harm other people, often their loved ones. Writing against accounts describing wetikos either as Indigenous myths or psychological disorders, Hadley Friedland argues in The Wetiko Legal Principles that the wetiko stories contain legal principles that can be used to address violence and child victimization within Indigenous societies. The book contributes to the literatures on addressing trauma in Indigenous societies and on adjudicating in a legal landscape home to Canadian and Indigenous laws. The book has three empirical anchors: an oral archive of ancient wetiko stories, written accounts drawn from scholarship, newspapers, and case law, and interviews that Friedland conducted in a northern Cree community, drawing on her twenty-five-year connection as a friend and relative.

In concert with Val Napoleon, John Borrows, and others, Friedland advocates for taking Indigenous stories as the raw material from which legal principles can be gleaned through common law reasoning. She adopts Borrows's method for rendering Indigenous legal orders intelligible to Western-trained audiences (viz: presume the reasonability of Indigenous legal traditions, concentrate on present-day application of Indigenous law, and focus on social responses to universal human problems). The practices captured in the wetiko stories therefore appear as part of a dynamic, complex, and living Indigenous law. In contrast to scholars who sequester wetikos in an Indigenous past, Friedland's wetikos bristle with contemporary relevance.

Chapter 2 posits that the wetiko is both an intellectual concept, like "citizenship," and a legal concept. This is the case, Friedland argues, because the wetiko concept, manifesting in practices related in the stories, accords with a definition of "legal concept" derived from common law jurisprudence. Chapter 3 canvasses the similarities in tactics, character, and etiology between wetikos and people who commit child abuse. Friedland asserts the legal nature of the wetiko concept by showing a close match between the dynamics and norms captured in wetiko stories and events surrounding child victimization. Chapter 4 sorts the practices found in wetiko stories into a typology of response principles, legal obligations, and legal rights, all framed by procedural rules and principles of efficacy and reciprocity. For example, decisions about responding to a wetiko are collective, open, and guided by the priority of harm prevention. People faced with a potential wetiko have duties to help and to warn. Potential wetikos have rights, like the right to be heard. On the assertion that Indigenous societies hold identifiable, fortifiable legal resources to deal with the traumas of abuse, chapter 5 concludes by imagining future directions in applying wetiko legal principles in Indigenous societies. The conclusion implies that our next step must be to contemplate Indigenous law as law, on its own terms.

Who is the "we" who need wetiko stories to be recognized as law, and how does this "we" understand law? The book tries to convince common law–trained jurists that the wetiko stories are good law, pursuant to the indicia of legality in the common law tradition. Drawing on criteria from a social science method (Gerring) and from common law theory (Hart, Postema, Fuller, and Raz), the book treats function, rules, and procedures as the appropriate indicia by which to answer the question, "Does this count as law?" Function matters most, as seen in Friedland's argument that law is found in a group's practices for dealing with human vulnerability and destructiveness, collectively making decisions and solving universal human problems, and delineating felt obligations in certain situations (15). The book says that because the wetiko stories contain these functional indicia of legality, the wetiko can be classified as a Cree legal concept. Showing wetiko to...