Dominant Discourse in Indigenous Consultations

Abstract

In Canada, consulting with Indigenous communities over recourse projects, the Crown sometimes avoids critical engagement with them, holding to the same arguments and counterarguments through regulatory and hearing stages. Such hollow moves, produced under the Crown’s rules, become embedded in the dominant argumentative discourse and pass unnoticed. To detect them, I apply Argument Continuities (ac s) – a new category of argumentative discourse analysis. ac s are a set of the same arguments and counterarguments repeatedly produced/reproduced by the dominant arguer through an adversarial reasoning process to dismiss opposing arguments. ac s have a specific life cycle – a chain of reasoning dynamics developing in a path-dependent fashion and increasing the cost of adopting a certain argument/counterargument over time. I test ac s in two institutionally diverse cases of Indigenous consultations and argue for the contingency of ac s upon the rules of consultations in reasoning exchanges. Determining the evidence availability and allocating the burdens of proof in consultations, rules make it more or less likely for a dominant arguer to rebut opposing arguments with acs.