Shiri Pasternak has taken on the real issues that Indigenous people confront in Canada by studying the situation of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake.
The incessant use of “bait-and-switch” and "divide-and-conquer” tactics that we are not able to observe in plain sight begs the question of how one-sided an attack it has become to reframe the legal approach that was previously taken towards First Nations' sovereignty and land rights (p. 133, p. 30).
Pasternak has shown how regulatory standards have been set, which never would have been met anywhere in Canada, and that these same regulatory standards would be equally unattainable for non-Indigenous Canadians. She uses the word “invisibilised” to describe how the original systems based on First Nations’ pre-existing sovereign status have been hidden to weaken the authority necessary for actual Indigenous jurisdiction and the defence of land rights (p. 121).
My own interest in invisibilising social injustice finds its example in the absence of cause and effect reasoning, when ongoing land dispossession is ignored and “the government refuses to explicitly name its core mandates” (p. 148). The “legal reconciliation” technique is revealed to be more about outsiders forcing through the opposite of what they say (p. 146). Pasternak has succeeded in showing us what we are really looking at.