Ande Somby

Apex courts and regional human-rights tribunals decline to recognize the legal claims of indigenous peoples far more often than they accept them. The rare judgments in which they do are celebrated as constitutional landmarks, and are often followed by sustained administrative inaction rather than implementation. This article re-describes that compliance gap as a _semiotic translation failure_. It situates the gap as the second movement of a single semiotic process whose first movement is the more common failure of recognition itself. The argument draws on Patrick Glenn’s chthonic legal tradition, Mattias Åhrén’s critique of Westphalian sovereignty, Robert A. Williams Jr.’s genealogy of conquest discourse and recovery of indigenous treaty visions, Juri Lotman’s semiosphere, and Roberta Kevelson’s Peircean account of legal semiosis. Together these show that the state administrative apparatus operates within a sign-system not built to receive the relational, place-based signs of indigenous law. The article identifies four coordinated mechanisms by which state institutions arrest the semiotic growth of court rulings: hyper-narrow literalism, temporal drag, the re-assertion of the “smooth system,” and discursive re-conquest. It illustrates them through four landmark cases: Fosen (Norway, 2021), _Sarayaku v. Ecuador_ (IACtHR, 2012), _Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia_ (Canada, 2014), and the African Court’s Ogiek decision (2017, with reparations in 2022). Decolonizing law cannot be achieved through favourable judgments alone; it requires restructuring the state’s administrative sign-system, of which the treaty-vision tradition offers an articulated indigenous example.

Even after colonial legal doctrines are formally rejected, their underlying structures of meaning often persist as “legal survivals.” This article argues that these survivals cause the failure of legal pluralism not only at an institutional level but also at an interpretive one. The core problem is that the signs through which Indigenous peoples express their legal systems—their land relations, jurisdiction, and authority—are not permitted to signify as law within state-based legal frameworks. Drawing on legal semiotics and postcolonial jurisprudence, the analysis combines semiotic theory with a comparative legal analysis of Australia, Canada, and Norway to trace how each nation has confronted the legacy of colonial legal frameworks that erase Indigenous sovereignty. The analysis reveals three divergent semiotic trajectories: Australia’s revolutionary but fractured re-signification, Canada’s evolutionary functional adaptation of title, and Norway’s semiotic reversal. This regression is exemplified by the 2024 Karasjok decision of the Norwegian Supreme Court, which reactivates a colonial sign system described here as the “doctrine of insignificant presence”. By examining how legal meaning is constructed and denied through signs, this article demonstrates that meaningful legal transformation depends not only on new rules, but on developing the capacity to read and legitimize the signs of other legal orders.