Customs, traditions, laws: topic A: how do customs, traditions, and laws influence our way of life?

While a teacher may want to touch on several issues in this topic area, he or she might wish particularly to introduce students to some of the issues around aboriginal traditions and land claims. The following are approaches that could be followed using the LNOL resource. Suppose a teacher set the following two objectives for this topic:

Objectives:

After completing this topic, students should be able to

* find and describe some customs and traditions of Canadian aboriginal peoples which are changing our Canadian laws

* analyze a situation in which there are competing customs, traditions, and laws

Introductory Activity

Using the LNOL Article Archives, the teacher could search under key words "land claims" and find the School's In 23:4 section "Controversy, Change, and the Nisga'a Treaty" which includes an outline of a method to research a controversial issue and to create a collage-type collection of issues or topics displayed on large poster paper.

Collage -- As described, this activity would go some ways to involve students in finding information and displaying/describing information on customs and traditions that are changing Canadian laws.

The teacher might follow the School's In section and have his or her students prepare a collage about a current local land claim situation, or the Nisga'a Treaty.

Alternatively, the teacher could use the pages from this School's In that contain quotations on land claims and the Nisga'a Treaty specifically as background material for students as a starting point for their own work. (Because this article was published after LawNow Online began with issue 22:4, it can be found in the Back Issues archive, and thus printed in the easy-to-read Acrobat Reader .pdf format)

Background for the Teacher

The teacher might, instead, decide that while this would be a good type of activity, he or she would like to broaden the range of the examination from the Nisga'a. In the Article Archive search for "land claims", the teacher would find two Aboriginal Law columns "The land was not empty", outlining the basics of the law of land claims and "The Inherent Right to Self-Government", giving more background about Nisga'a.

Then the teacher might also check the back issues, and note that LawNow, April/May 1999 The Changing Face of Canada, included articles on a variety of land claim and aboriginal customs including one about the new territory of Nunavut and one giving an overview of how aboriginal law may change laws in...