Ánde 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.