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strategic reason-giving of a sort that may both misrepresent their identity and jeopardize
democratic discourse. An approach that privileges cultural identity is either unfair
because it recognizes only some of the important reasons why people engage in a practice
or because it recognizes the reasons in ways that don’t reflect what people think they are
doing when they engage in a practice.
For example, Dorothy Van der Peet might have been selling salmon because she
needs the money to buy clothes or get her car fixed. She might view salmon as a good
thing to sell, not because she thinks that selling salmon is important to her ‘identity’, but
because she knows she can sell it, she has access to it, it makes ‘sense’ to her to sell it.
She might also feel a connection to her community or the way of life of the Sto:lo as she
engages in this practice. But that’s not why she does it. To ask of her that she justify the
practice because it is important to her identity is to ask her to reconsider what it is she is
doing in terms that others can accept. It is to ask her to employ a strategy that defends her
actions in a way that speaks to the majority’s sensibilities, in this case the sensibilities of
the Canadian state, about what counts and what does not count as a good reason to revise
the laws in a way that accommodates her practices. In this way, once again, an approach
that focuses on assessing identity imports a form of inauthenticity to how people relate to
their identity or how to understand the practices in which people engage.
Van der Peet might also have been selling fish because she wants to challenge
Canadian sovereignty over the Sto:lo nation. Another objection to focusing on identity is
that because an identity approach focuses on practices rather than whole cultural
conceptions or ways of life, it inappropriately narrows the focus of such conflicts and
specifically obviates the underlying agenda of self-determination often pursued by
Convention