Mi’kmaw Oral History as Law: Narrative Authority and Indigenous Legal Sovereignty

In this article, I examine Mi’kmaw oral histories as living sources of law that ground Mi’kmaw sovereignty, governance, and collective memory. Within Mi’kmaw legal traditions, stories are not simply historical accounts but forms of legal narration transmitted through relationships between storytellers and witnessing communities. Narrative authority arises through protocols: who can tell the stories, how ancestral memories are shared, and why there can never be one interpretation of a story. While elders are central in the transmission of oral histories, other knowledge keepers also carry the legal teachings embedded within stories. And while Canadian legal institutions privilege written records as authoritative legal texts, Mi’kmaw legal traditions have long been transmitted through oral narratives, storytelling, songs, ceremony, and land-based teachings. Drawing on Mi’kmaw narrative traditions and Indigenous legal scholarship, I explore how oral histories function as authoritative laws that encode principles of jurisdiction, environmental stewardship, and relational responsibility. Stories connected to figures such as Kluskap and the cosmological narrative of Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters illustrate how governance protocols and ethical obligations are embedded within narrative form and transmitted through oral pedagogy. I also examine how Canadian courts treat oral histories as evidentiary supplements rather than authoritative expressions of law, reinforcing epistemic barriers that marginalize Indigenous knowledge systems. Situating Mi’kmaw storytelling within broader debates about oral history and Indigenous sovereignty, I argue that oral histories are active sites of legal interpretation.