In The Problem of Justice: Tradition and Law in the Coast Salish World Bruce Miller confronts complex, shifting, and often elusive understandings of traditional law and contemporary justice. He provides a welcome contribution to the field of legal anthropology as he delves into the efforts of Coast Salish nations to reinstitutionalize the past in order to shape the future. As he does so, Miller questions the capacity of alternative dispute resolution, court diversion, healing discourses, and harmony ideologies to meet Coast Salish desires for community autonomy.

Miller’s aim “is to historicize the current discourses and to move beyond disempowering, essentializing dialogues in order to help provide a basis for redirecting justice discourses and practices toward localized problems of power relations within communities” (p. 22). He locates the problems of justice in Coast Salish communities divided by the international border but united by shared socioeconomic origins and intermarriage to probe the differing location of aboriginal justice within two state systems of law and justice. Working through three ethnographic case studies--Upper Skagit Justice in the United States and the Stó:lö Nation and the South Island Justice Project in Canada--he examines ten issues in order to delineate the ways discourses of tradition and indigenous justice intersect with current practices and legal circumstances: (1) the ways each system articulates with other aspects of life in the context of each band or tribe, (2) relationships of new justice systems to constituent family groups,(3) the justice models presented as underlying practice, (4) the law-justice concept, (5) ways in which the justice systems are tied to spiritual practices, (6) how “culture bearers” are incorporated into justice processes, (7) paths to the creation of law or code, (8) how systems articulate with the outside world, (9) the “reach” of the systems, and (10) the nature and manner of internal critiques (pp. 38-40).

Before addressing his cases, Miller turns to the “landscape of ideas” (p. 34) to probe the play of three central concepts--tradition, culture, and the sacred--in current justice discourses. Miller shows that the deployment and reception of these concepts vary not only between communities and between communities and the dominant state powers, but also between individuals of the same community. Justice practices emerge with, shape, and are shaped within colonial contexts by primordial narratives and the varied landscape of ideas that has led to internal differentiation along fractures and social divisions varying from and intensifying those of the precolonial eras. Webs of fragmentation place individuals in contrary legal statuses as they seek justice as gendered individuals, spouses, family members, community residents, and citizens of nations and tribes.

Miller’s treatment of the three cases illustrates his central arguments. First he argues that precontact processes of differentiation have been exploited by the colonial state and have become explosively divisive. Second, differentiation has led to wide-ranging views on justice and is reflected in new power relations. Third, justice narratives are grounded in conservative, often Edenic, discourses of the past. Fourth, as tribes present themselves as nations they take on qualities of the state yet fail to allow for meaningful internal critique. Fifth, justice discourses are outward looking and grounded in misleading binary oppositions to the white society. Finally, Miller argues for “sovereignty broad enough to allow not only internal critique but also diversity and change in the understanding and practice of culture” (p. 12). He concludes that primordial narratives obscure individual and family tensions and that healing narratives fail to recognize the relationship of families to tribal governance. This, in conjunction with a lack of community consultation, led to the failure of the South Island Justice Project. The broader scope, wider jurisdiction, and incorporative approach of the Upper Skagit court system, in contrast, provide greater flexibility as it melds narratives of tradition within a new legal code and integrates elders as culture bearers with other justice staff and institutions. Nonetheless, Miller finds “slippage” as elders express personal fears of inadequacy in comparison to the powers extraordinary individuals wielded in the past. The newly instituted Stó:lö Nation’s justice system draws on Maori models operating at the level of the nation while it struggles to respond to demands for family autonomy and privacy. Its potential is unclear as it seeks a path moving it beyond its particular links with Social and Family and Child Services.

The Problem of Justice is a refreshing look at aboriginal justice. Miller’s ethnography is sensitive and nuanced and challenges the discursive underpinnings of aboriginal justice and state practices. Justice takes on new meanings as he links it to power and place and reveals the weaknesses of healing strategies when individuals, women in particular, are asked to submit personal well-being to the collective good in order to resolve social tensions. In sum, aboriginal justice is not a simple matter; in turning to tradition communities confront internal divisions and power struggles that seep into the social, sacred, and mundane realms of everyday life. Efforts to reestablish community harmony can, as with the South Island Justice System, erupt in new tensions and engage the community not in justice but in new struggles to define, control, and act on “true” definitions of culture and tradition. As these struggles move from the internal to the external, from issues of state power and community subordination to tenuous affirmation of internal differences, communities coalesce in and dissolve larger governing units. The ways in which justice workers, anthropologists, and state workers comprehend and respond feed back into the communities themselves. Miller alerts us to the implications of embracing justice dialogues and to the lingering impact of idealistic and primordial narratives that seek harmony in the past and demand such harmony in the face of contemporary diversity and change.