Construing the Ethical and Legal Concept of Cultural Safety:

Non-Domination, Epistemic Justice, and Constitutional Standards

Abstract

Redressing the lasting injustices created by the legacy of the Indian Act requires developing and implementing proper descriptive and normative tools, such as the concept of cultural safety. Rooted in concerns for decolonization, cultural safety has attracted attention from scholars and practitioners across a range of disciplines and sectors. To date, however, this growing literature has neglected to identify and theorize the ethical and constitutional foundations of the concept. Yet doing so is crucial for the concept of cultural safety to fully achieve its normative potential. Focusing on the Indigenous context in Canada, this article proposes to fill this gap by analyzing the interwoven ethical and constitutional grounds of the concept of cultural safety. It demonstrates that securing cultural safety requires non-domination and epistemic justice. This underlying ethical normativity, in turn, influences the proper interpretation of the constitutional dimension of cultural safety. This article argues that the ethical and legal concept of cultural safety thus construed entails the full recognition and implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and constitutional standards of respect for consent, self-determination, and self-governance of Indigenous people. The article thus shows that the concept of cultural safety can serve both as a diagnostic and a transformative tool towards “Reconciliation”: the concept allows us not only to track failures of cultural safety inherent in the status quo, but also to generate normativity through law and policy.