Humans

The constitutional duty to consult has become one of the central principles governing Crown–Indigenous relations in Canada. Although constitutional and administrative law scholarship has extensively analyzed the duty’s doctrinal framework, this article asks how Indigenous treaty philosophies can illuminate its jurisprudential purpose as an expression of continuing relationships. This article explores that question by examining how Indigenous relational understandings of treaties illuminate the development of consultation jurisprudence. Through an analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in Haida Nation v. British Columbia (Minister of Forests), 2004, Taku River Tlingit First Nation v. British Columbia (Project Assessment Director), 2004, and Mikisew Cree First Nation v. Canada (Minister of Canadian Heritage), 2005, it argues that, despite arising in markedly different legal contexts, these decisions converge in recognizing that Indigenous relationships with traditional territories persist beyond reserve boundaries and continue to generate reciprocal obligations on the part of the Crown. Read through Indigenous treaty philosophies, consultation emerges as more than a procedural doctrine regulating governmental decision-making. It can also be understood as a contemporary legal expression of the enduring relationships established between Indigenous nations and the Crown. Rather than suggesting that Canadian courts have adopted Indigenous understandings of treaties, the article argues more modestly that Indigenous treaty philosophies reveal an interpretive dimension of consultation jurisprudence that helps illuminate how the duty to consult may be understood more consistently with the constitutional commitment to reconciliation.

As death in the United States is increasingly managed within biomedical institutions, end-of-life doulas (EOLDs) have emerged as non-medical practitioners who support dying people and their families through education, advocacy, companionship, ritual, and vigil care. Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews with practicing EOLDs across the United States, this qualitative study examines how these doulas conceptualize a good death, navigate emotionally intensive care work, and sustain themselves in a largely unregulated field. These interviews suggest that EOLDs challenge dominant biomedical models of dying by organizing care around client autonomy, relational presence, and personalization of treatment rather than cure, intervention, and control. According to the interviews, central to their practices are death-positive worldviews, emotionally intimate approaches to care, and strong peer networks. For these EOLDs, lower reported burnout and compassion fatigue were linked not only to self-care, but to a broader relational framework in which death is understood as a meaningful life passage rather than a professional defeat.

Documented skeletal collections provide many of the samples necessary for forensic anthropological research, including the creation and validation of skeletal analytical methods. Although modern collections are considered more representative of the current living population, they often differ significantly from each other by geographic location, organization, and procurement strategies. As these factors influence which donors are included in a particular collection, they also create collection-specific sample bias. This research aims to identify how that bias impacts skeletal variation across collections and whether it obscures normal patterns of human skeletal variation. Craniometric and demographic data were collected from a sample of individuals from eight modern United States-based documented skeletal collections (n = 1161). The results indicate that collection-specific sample bias influences average cranial morphology, but to a lesser extent than sex or population. Across analyses, samples consistently and preferentially clustered with individuals from similar population and sex groups rather than with individuals from the same collection of origin. These analyses suggest that normal patterns of human variation are not obscured by collection origin and that documented skeletal collections therefore remain valid and reliable sources of data for understanding population diversity and sex differences, even when some level of collection-specific bias is present.