 So for those of you who weren't here this morning, I will introduce myself again. My name is Camille Cameron. I'm the Dean at the Schulich School of Law. And we're gathered this afternoon for the second part of today's celebration. And this is a panel event which we called Reconciliation in Education. It seemed to us to be a great way to honor and to mark the honorary degree ceremony, given the commitment that Dr. Degane has had to reconciliation and education. So this was a great way, I think, to add to texture the honorary degree event. So we gathered a group of people. Some will be presenters and then some responders. We'll have our presenters talk about some aspect or some dimension of reconciliation in education. We will then take a break. And there are some responders who will respond to any one or any number of the presentations that have been made, again, keeping in mind the theme of reconciliation in education. What I think I'll do, probably more for efficiency, is to introduce now the people who will be presenting. We'll then go through the presentations. We'll then take a break. And then I can introduce the responders. And then the responders will present their comments. So now, if I may, I will tell you a little bit about who our presenters are for the afternoon. The first presenter we have, known to many of you, is Professor Douma Young. Douma Young is a Lanu Mi'kma who grew up traditionally on the Malaga Watch First Nation and was born into the Adu da Wedge Squirrel Clan for the Glee Gamuch. I got some help from Douma on the pronunciation rabbit clan. He is one of 14 children born to William F. Young and Veronica Phillips, both of the Arcova First Nation, later centralized to Escazoni. Douma has a Bachelor of Arts in Mi'kma Studies from University College of Cape Breton, a Bachelor of Laws from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Laws in Indigenous People's Law and Policy from the University of Arizona, and is presently enrolled in the SJD program at the University of Arizona. Douma is now an Assistant Professor in Mi'kma Studies at Cape Breton University, where he teaches in the areas of Mi'kma history and governance. He's also engaged in community-based research on social assistance reform in First Nation communities, two spirited resilience, and Lanu medicines. So that's Douma. Next we have Professor Michelle Williams. Michelle Williams has been the Director of the Indigenous Blacks and Mi'kma initiative at the Schulman School of Law at Dalhousie University since 2004. She's also taught at the Law School Criminal Law and a seminar on African-Nova-Scotian legal issues. She coordinates the IV&M Initiative pre-law course and is a member of the Law School's Truth and Reconciliation Implementation Committee. She's also a member of the Nova Scotia Bears to Society Race Equity Committee. Michelle also currently serves as the co-lead of Dalhousie University's Strategic Priority 5.2, which focuses on fostering a collegial culture grounded in diversity and inclusiveness. And she's involved in the Nova Scotia Judicial Mentorship Initiative. So that's Michelle. Then we will have Dr. Jane McMillan. Dr. Jane McMillan is the former Canada Research Chair for Indigenous Peoples and Sustainable Communities. That's from 2006 to 2016. And is current Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology at St. Francis Xavier University. She has worked with the Mi'kma'u Nation for over 20 years, conducting ethnographic research, policy analysis, and advocating for Indigenous treaty rights, community-based justice, culturally aligned resource regulation, and governance. As a former eel fisher, I found that quite interesting. As a former eel fisher and one of the original defendants in the Supreme Court of Canada Marshall decision, she follows with special interest the significant changes that have occurred in Mi'kma'u as a result of that decision. She was the President of the Canadian Law and Society Association and is coordinator of the Law and Indigeneity Collaborative Research Network of the American Law and Society Association and a member of the Mi'kma'u Nova Scotia Canada Tripartite Forum Justice Committee. Her book on settling justice, Mi'kma'u Legal Traditions and the Legacy of Donald Marshall Jr. will be released by UBC Press in September 2018. We then have the Honorable Grady Nicholas. The Honorable Grady Nicholas Order of New Brunswick was the 30th Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick from 2009 to 2014, becoming the first Aboriginal person to hold this office. He was born on the Tobique Reserve in 1946. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from St. Francis Xavier University in 1968, a law degree from UMB Law School in 1971, and a Master of Social Work degree from Wilfrid Laurier University in 1974. He has received four honorary degrees from St. Francis Xavier University, Wilfrid Laurier University, Mount Allison, and UNB. He was a provincial court judge from 1991 to 2009, and he was chair of Native Studies at St. Thomas University from 1989 to 1991. He worked with the Union of New Brunswick Indians as a legal counsel, chairman of the board, and president of the Union of New Brunswick Indians from 1974 to 1988. Graden was appointed to the endowed chair of Native Studies at St. Thomas University in August 2015 for a one-year term, which has since been renewed for a further two-year period. He is involved with teaching, research, and community interaction. And by the way, he's also a recipient of the Order of Canada May 2016. The Honorable Chief Justice Lawrence O'Neill. Associate Chief Justice Lawrence O'Neill is a graduate of St. Francis Xavier University, Dalhousie Law School, and completed a year of graduate studies in law at the University of Alberta. Studying in the area of energy law with a focus on the development of Canada's energy resources, he was admitted to the Nova Scotia Bar in 1979 and to the Ontario Law Society in 1992. At the time of his appointment to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, he was working as a criminal defense lawyer with Nova Scotia Legal Aid. He was appointed a judge at the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia in 2007 and associate chief justice of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia Family Division in 2011. He has extensive experience at the senior levels of government, having served in advisory roles to the Premier of Nova Scotia and the Prime Minister of Canada and as a member of the House of Commons. That's before he became a judge, by the way, but I think you could figure that out for yourself. He served as a member of Parliament representing the Northern Region of Nova Scotia, a region which included three First Nations communities. While a member of Parliament, he served on several standing committees at the House of Commons as a chair of the Regional Development Committee and the committee that was then known as the Committee of Indian Affairs and Northern Developers. After returning to Nova Scotia, he engaged in the practice of law in the Strait of Cancer region, as I said, working in private practice and then for Nova Scotia Legal Aid. And finally, for our presenters, Professor Naomi Metallic, again known to many of you. Naomi is from the list of which is the Mi'kmaq First Nation in Gaspe. She is an associate professor at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University where she also holds a Chancellor's Chair in Aboriginal Law and Policy and Naomi was the inaugural chairholder of that chair. She holds a BA from Dalhousie, an LLB from Dalhousie, an LLL from Ottawa and an LLM from Osgoode. She was a law clerk to the Honourable Michelle Basterach of the Supreme Court of Canada in 2006 and 2007. Naomi still continues to practice law with the firm of Virgil's and Halifax where she practiced for nearly a decade before becoming an academic. She's been named to best lawyers in Canada List and Aboriginal Law. As a legal scholar, she is most interested in writing about how the law can be harnessed to promote the wellbeing and self-determination of Indigenous peoples in Canada. So that completes the presenters and I wanted to read that to you so you'd get a sense of the richness and the quality of the people who are going to be presenting here. They've asked to present on some topic of reconciliation in education. It was left largely to them to pick the focus and so I think we'll pick it up with Professor Dume Young. It's really hard to see over there now. I always like to scan the room away, right? First of all, I'd like to just say it's a little bit of a homecoming for me here at the Friendship Center. And in 1988, I graduated from the WAP program here, the Wetsch-Babernier University Preparatory Program here at the Friendship Center. So the Friendship Center has always been home for a lot of unknowns coming into Halifax area. And it has been for over, I think at least 40, 50 years anyways, right? Starting from the time when it was down at the Bruntrick Street here and moved up here and hopefully within a short period of time we'll have a brand new home for this place. Because it's home for many unknowns from all over Canada and all over Mi'kma'i and all over the world, to come here, you know? And often when they arrive in the city this is the first place they go, you know? Even when the Friendship Center is closed at night, unknowns seem to come here even with the arrival here. So that's why Friendship Center is a very important thing. And the work we do as academics, as lawyers, as members of the judiciary and as when we think about legal concepts and legal thoughts and the theme of reconciliation and education, we must never ever forget that the things we do permeate down to the folks who are working in grassroots. And that's why, you know, it's particularly for me to come here and see the work we do actually become in practice. For example, Friendship Center, if you look around, has a lot of reconciliation work that's done over the years, okay? So how I like to do things is I like to tell a story. I'm a bit of a storyteller, more so than anything else right now. And all of our stories, I don't know, stories begin at some point, like with creation stories. We have creation stories, we talk about life, we talk about medicines, we talk about our laws and all of these stories, you know? Some of these stories are about contact, about the diseases that came, you know? The wars, the treaties, relief, rations. And generally, all of these stories are all about trying to live with each other as neighbors, you know? In the Mali. Some of these stories are very pleasant, numerous ones. Some are not so pleasant. Some are downright terrifying. Some are very difficult to hear. But these are all part of the stories that we need to tell as part of our reconciliation efforts, you know? Some of these stories are told with humor. Some are told with drama. Some are told with flair. Many others are told with grief and sadness, you know? Some are just told. I remember when I had a young woman in my car driving up to Cape Breton University, she was a student. And she was telling me about her encounters with the children of state. And I realized that she was telling me her story not to tell me, but it seems so crazy what happened to her that she was trying to make sense of it by repeating the story over and over again to which she finally understood it, you know, to herself. And some of our stories are like that. You tell them over and over again. Not so much that we want you to listen, but to help us understand just what happened. Many of these stories, they have no beginning. They really don't have an ending. Sometimes when one story ends, another one picks up, it begins. So that's what we're here for. We're looking at stories that are what I call Alice Kanowatasego, they're braided together to make the whole thing, right? So how did we get here? How do we get to talk about reconciliation through education? Where does this story begin? We talked a little bit. And it didn't begin when Dean Cameron and I had lunch at the university club a few months ago, I know. And she said, we're thinking about doing this. What is it that we think about? And I'm like, there's a lot we should do, there's a lot. Somebody asked me, they said, are you in some sort of leadership position? I said, no, I'm just attending your track assistant professor. I said, nobody should let me near a leadership position. I just take right over, right? Anyways, we talked about what we should do. But that story here doesn't begin there. It doesn't, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started in 2008, they started their work, but even the story doesn't begin there. I was hoping that, I saw Dr. Fred Wien here and Ayola, they were part of the Royal Commissioner on average on people. 20 years ago, they just said 21 years ago. And they had that statement of reconciliation. And the Honorable Minister, Jay Stewart, had made that statement, right, of regret. But this story doesn't begin there either, you know? It doesn't begin with the Indian Residential School settlement either. I remember being in Ottawa at the AFN when they announced that. And I quickly did some calculations and I said to percentages, you know, like contingency fee, agreements for lawyers, everything. I'm like, you know, there's a problem here. That's the thing. So, but our story doesn't begin there either, you know? It doesn't begin with the Indian Foundation either. In fact, it begins long before that, you know? It begins, it doesn't even begin with the Schubert-Atlee Residential School. Or the Indian Day Schools that I went through for eight years. And now people are starting to talk about the Indian Day Schools. It doesn't begin there, you know? But enough of that. Where does our story begin, you know? I can't tell you a whole lot of the story. Because you only have a few minutes here. But the stories need to be told as part of our reconciliation efforts. In our educational systems, you know? Here, I cannot tell you. I've got to say a couple of few things, right, you know? I see the story begins with that young woman in Meemawdi who had a dream about three bears floating on an island in Sydney in the trees. And she didn't know what that meant. And so she consulted the elders and they didn't know what it meant. But at four told the shadowing of the coming of the Europeans. That story has been told over and over again. And yes, it is cited. There's a citation, you know? It's not necessary to McGill's citation, eat the dish or anything like that. But the citation is embedded in the rocks outside of Kejim Kooja, you know? If you want to get the citation, all you have to do is learn how to read the Petroglyphs, you know? And some folks can. That's the stories right here. So it's just how we look at these things, right? So, but we have to fast forward to the time. We're doing time travel here and skipping, you know? Warp speed. I finally figured out what warp speed is hard to understand. It's time from moving from here to here, but you warp time. So instead of going along this way, you go short a distance. So that's what we're doing. In a way, we're skipping over middle ground experience the baptism of Henry Member II, smallpox blankets, the wars, the scalp and proclamations, peace and friendship treaties, the petitions to the crown, the near extermination of the O'Neill, the Ordemy Mock people, you know? The creation of Canada, the imposition of the Indian Act, extinguishment of our rights, enfranchisement, you know? The loss of land, self-determined self-government, the denial of the treaties, culture, language, and all of this stuff. And our basic humanness as O'Neill people. Can't tell a story. We're skipping that over, you know? We're skipping over that part that also deals with resilience and resistance, you know? You know those parts that we kind of hear about in our stories, but never are really taught where John Shabbat, when he landed and he planted the cross and the Mi'ma people of Gaspé resisted. They said, what are you doing, you know? And he said, oh, we just planted the cross or we can pray. What are these letters? What are these words? And what is this declaration that this lands for England or for France? Oh, don't worry about that. We are worried. But that's the story we were told. But that's not the story that's told in our education systems. You know, we're skipping the story about how Gilmour hit the Acadians. The protest of the land council of the movement of the member two on King's Road up to where it is, you know? The refusal of Wego Mount folks to move during centralization, you know? And the treaty cases of Sylla Boy, Simon, Marshall, Bernard, and others. We're not gonna tell the story about the raids on this to which, when they exercised their Aboriginal treaty rights, you know, the Nicholas Lovelace, human rights complain to King's, Canada and the United Nations. Or about Bill C-31 land claims, hunger strikes, moves hunts, burn church, I don't know more, often gas, fracking, and many other stories of resistance and resilience. We're not gonna tell those stories, you know? We're skipping all of these stories to get to the place in time here. As many of you know about Thomas King, I use his book in one of my classes in Convenient Indian, you know? And there's a chapter in here, chapter seven, I believe it is. It's called Forget About It. And how he says, we're all supposed to forget about all these things and move on to it. But we can't, you know? We say those stories over again, just like that young woman in my car who was trying to tell it over and over and over again, so it makes sense. When we look and hear about all these stories that came to us, but all that happened, none of it makes sense, you know? That's where our stories begin, you know, in a way. So when I have to think deeply about an issue, I often go to my Anuidasa book, Anuidasa World View. I wrote about it in a paper that was published. But I have to think long and clear about a particular issue and I think about it from that point. So reconciliation through education. Reconciliation, I had this conversation in chief very well a few weeks ago. And he says, how would you say that term in Mi'kmaq? I said, well, there's a couple of terms. You know, Abiksik Tuara doesn't quite get it, I do too. Ila Madokin, you know? El Pugual, El Pugual Mouk, you know? Close, comes close to it, all these words. But basically the words reflect we need to restore the relationship to what it was. To what, before what happened, you know? Before the residential school, before all these things. Basically, we almost have to go right back to 1492. For Abiksik Tuara, the three ships and stuff. Besides, that story was wrong anyways, you know? So when we had contact, when we decided to live together in Mi'kmaq, the middle ground experience where both interactions resulted in a benefit to each other. You know? But that quickly changed after, you know? So, how do we tell this story about reconciliation when quickly after contact, that story went sideways? How do we do that? So, forgiveness or Abiksik Tuara, you know, is kind of restoring the relationship to what it once was. You have a renewed relationship based on principles that have brought us together, you know? We're supposed to forget about all the impacts of colonization, the impacts of disease, the loss of our lands, the loss of wars, the treaties, denies, you know, as Chapter 70, the book says, forget about it, you know? It's a bit hard. It's a bit of a, you know, on indigenous sides, reconciliation would be a tough pill to swallow, you know, in this sense. So, we're also supposed to forget about the stories of the unknown who went to residential schools. You often hear it now, it's kind of, you know, get over it type of thing, let's move on and know all those stuff, you know? It's not that easy, you know? And we're supposed to forget the role of governments in establishing laws that force the unknown to go to residential schools. We're supposed to forget about the role of the legal system in all of this. The roles of lawyers and judges in this, of the entire residential school system, including the most recent stories about lawyers' behaviors. And some of them continue to, we continue to hear these stories, still happening. So, we're supposed to forget about the roles of our schools, you know, the educational systems and the universities in the teaching or the non-teaching of our stories. But we can't forget, you know? So, again, I'm skipping over, I don't have a lot of time and stuff like this, you know, when Thomas King says, no, you better get used to this right now. What is it that we want, you know? Most, as Thomas King says, well, let's just want to be left alone, live our lives in good ways and everything like this, but also to be able to live our lives. So, if we want to achieve reconciliation through education, and that's the theme here, we need to include these stories in what we teach in our educational institutions. At the elementary school level, junior high, middle school, high school, universities, in medium-sized studies programs, in the law schools, in the professional nursing programs, in all of our universities and educations, we need to include these stories. We just, you know, we have to tell them again and tell them from another side, another perspective. So, that's what I want us to think about. So, after we start teaching, what can we do? And so, in preparation for this, it's going to be hard work. And the hard work is not only to teach, but to incorporate, to embed all of these things into the work we all do. It's one thing to do easy stuff, the land acknowledgments, you know, the blanket exercise and stuff. And I'm not saying that those are easy by any means, but the real work of reconciliation is going to be, as you know, in the language of Cape partners, it's freaking tough. But we've got to do it. In particularly, we need to embed the legal perspective in everything that we do. In particularly, in our laws, our legal systems, our judiciary, our judgments, our regulatory and certification processes. That's where we have to put these things in. There's a number of calls to actions that are directed at the legal system, at our educational system. There's a, all of these have particular ways, right? I'm thinking about 25 to 42. That's what people say, we'll focus on zoom, zoom, mean and stuff like that. And as part of the work I do with the Federation of Law Societies, we are looking at call number 26 and call number 27. And I'm like, but what about the others? What about the other calls? Well, no, those are just directed towards what we do. That's once we need to focus on and do it. No, but there's others. At least 90 more, you know, and then some, right? So, I think we've got to consider them all in the work we do, even if we are looking at particular ones. For example, language, the one son language 13 to 17. Now, how does that embed into the work we all do here? Well, one of the things is that the big ma language is dying. And it's going to become extinct very soon, you know. Early on, I was heralded as the first big ma lawyer to be fluent in Nova Scotia. And I was in 2001 when I was called to the bar. For many years, I thought I'll be the only one. And probably, I thought maybe I'll be the last one. That's not a good state to be in, you know. So, in the work we do, in the teaching of our stories, we also have to be look at all the other calls and look at when if we want to do this, we also have to do this. We also have to save the language. We have to take desperate, you know, drastic actions to do it, you know. All the universities in the Halifax area have had a difficult time trying to find somebody to teach basic meaning. We've been doing that asking for, since I was a student here in back in 1988, almost 35 years of asking. We still haven't really gotten it right. So, yet, our language is where the vast majority of our legal principles can be found. Almost, I would say 75% of it. We lose the language, we lose legal principles. So if we want to incorporate the new legal principles and laws and the justice system in the courts, we need to share the language. We need to save it and do the research necessary to bring out these concepts and bring them to the forefront. And that's where I zoomed in. We're gonna be zooming in on a particular call. My job is zooming on one. And that's truth and reconciliation call, action number 50. But 50's doesn't have, it's not the one stretch of the legal system. I swear, 50. Basically, it calls for the government to fund an indigenous, the law institute, you know. And it's, I'm gonna read it out here. And it says, in keeping with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, we call upon the federal government in collaboration with Aboriginal organizations to fund the establishment of indigenous law institutes for the development, use and understand of indigenous laws and access to justice in accordance with the unique cultures of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. And I'm like, no. In the conversation I had with Associate Chief Justice O'Neill a few years ago, he brought this to my attention. And I'm like, I had read the whole thing and I went straight to the ones in there and I had zoomed in and I said, I have to step back and look at the whole thing again. And he says, what can you do with this? What can we do? How can we help? How do we bring this to fruition? How do we make this? And I'm like, well, I think we should look at this. It's one thing to see the story, listen to the story, ring our hands in grief and say, oh, God, terrible things happened. But we have to do something. We have to work that out. We have to go towards this goal and having an indigenous legal institute or a law center would be a good start. So I'm proposing that Cape Breton University, of course, along with the Schulich School of Law, of course. And why not University of New Brunswick School of Law and the University of Demuncton School of Law. These are all law schools that operate in Mi'kma'a and Wulistuku-Egwa'i people, territory. We should work together on establishing a, what I would call, Weshkwabaniak Institute of Law of Wabanagi Legal Principles, that we can do research on, find out what they were, bring them to the forefront, and then train, embed these into the work we all do. It's not enough for a court to sit on a reserve. We need that court, we need those institutions, we need those law schools to use Wabanagi Legal Principles. So, I'm thinking, imagine if you're a judge in New Brunswick and you can use the Pasemahwadi, Basemahwadiah Legal Principles to resolve a dispute on hot tracks in St. John's, maybe between Irving and somebody else. And you're like, oh, I can! We're a judge in the armament using the concept of nautical ink to settle a fishery dispute down there. That would be reconciliation, if we can get that done. Or the court that's going to be uprising, they're going up in Pamuku, using, you know, Gizaakalek to reconfirming Mi'kmaq customary adoptions. Instead of using the Nautical Welfare Act, why can't we use our own traditional customary adoptions in the concept of it, you know? Or a federal court judge using the concept of Abiksik Tuwan to resolve disputes over elections. And we do it. But this is where the Weshkavniah Institute of Law, to me, would offer the best help. Imagine our law schools teaching Wabanagi Legal Principles. Imagine the Nova Scotia Barrister Society. I'm not going to lecture you after. Requiring competence in Mi'kmaq law before admitting anybody to the profession. I think we all need to work together to make this happen. A multi-university approach. There's not, I don't think one university can do this by themselves. That's why we need to bring up Cape Breton University has expertise in Mi'kmaq studies, in governance, language. The Mi'kmaq Malacy Institute, you know, in New Brunswick also have particular expertise. Jewelry School of Law has particular expertise. The Mount St. Vincent University has particular expertise. We need to bring them all together to join in this one institute. As it's going to take a multi-disciplinary approach and a multi-perspective to get this done. And if Nipisin wants seen on this. The Nishnabi are our cousins. And we belong to the same Anguambuan linguistic family. So, you know, what we can learn here can be applied here and what they have here can be applied somewhat here, you know. We won't talk about the Hadunah showing how they said to us. That's a different story of the history to tell, right? But we do know that research is desperately needed in this area so true reconciliation can happen, you know. We have smart folks at all these universities. And Naomi's going to kill me because I'm going to say, well, Naomi, it's one more thing for us to do, right? No, it's one more thing for all of us to do. We can make this a reality, but it's going to be hard. Nobody be under any illusion. Reconciliation is difficult, you know. It's going to be hard work and it's going to challenge each and every one of us. Challenge us in ways we never thought possible, you know. It really requires a paradigm shift, you know. It really requires us to gap-a-gal-suk-ti, a total commitment. We need to pick up that bundle and go with it, right? And that, when we do that, the story will continue to be told. We'll continue, Elis-Khanawadamu, we'll continue with the braiding of reconciliation to education. So when we tell that story in 50 years or the next generation, 100 years, of how either we went sideways or we get accomplished, I don't know how it's going to end. That's like all the new stories, it's going to really begin in our end, it'll just continue. Well, I'll go. Thank you. Thanks very much, Tuma. As tempted as I am to comment, I'm not going to have to say that for the responders and I'll ask Professor Michelle Williams now for a shoot at the School of Law to speak. Well, I'll come up and I'll just say that sounds like an excellent idea and let's go for it. Sounds great. So thank you for bringing me in today's panel. I'm going to shift gears. Professor Young did a wonderful historical overview in a short period of time. So I'm just going to sort of zero in on a little bit of a narrower dimension or snapshot of the work of the Indigenous Blacksmith Initiative in that broader context. And particularly pleased that we have some of our current students here, but also students from CBU who are really hoping that we'll continue on the path of law school and so it's great to have you here. So I was sort of considering the question that of course was asked was if reconciliation involves restoring equity and balance in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and they can do more for sort of saying, well, when are we starting on that question or have contact or before that, what role has the IBM Initiative played in that process of reconciliation? And so there's sort of three main points that I wanted to address in sort of trying to answer that question. One is to just briefly touch on the origins of the IBM Initiative within that broader context. Secondly, to highlight a few of the elements of the IBM Initiative that I think do contribute to reconciliation and education. And then finally talk about what more needs to be done. So first of all, for Duma's comments, the initiative is part of a much larger quest for mutual justice in the broadest sense, which includes access to legal education, the legal system and the profession, including the judiciary and access to substantive justice. So not just access to the system, so we can be in the system, but to actual outcomes that are transformative. And so we know as a result, I think everybody here of the courage and perseverance of Donald Marshall Jr. and his family and supporters and advocates, a royal commission was struck to examine the wrongful, his wrongful conviction and imprisonment. And the commission's recommendations were designed to in part eradicate racism from the justice system, but I think also to move us along the road to a MiGMA justice system, again, more broadly. So the recommendation 11 of the Marshall inquiry called for support to the IBM Initiative, but there were many recommendations that were never implemented. And I think Dr. McMillan may be touching upon some of these because she certainly has done a lot of follow-up work in this area. But one of those recommendations was sounds like an echo of what you were just presenting around recommendation 50. And that was the Marshall recommendation 21, which was calling for a need of justice institute, right? And that's now some almost 30 years ago. So it shows that this really is a long path. And so the creation of the IBM Initiative arose from this recommendation to redress injustice, which brings me to my second point and that is how has the IBM Initiative actually facilitated reconciliation and education? And here I briefly reference article 14 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which speaks to the rights of education, the right to education, and TRC call to action number seven calls for a strategy to eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. And so I think the IBM Initiative helps give effect to those recommendations in addition to TRC call to action number 28, which talks about mandatory education within the law school itself. And so how we do that a little more pointedly, well, first of course, we recruit and support MiGMA and other Indigenous students to come to law school. And we currently have 16 MiGMA students across all three years at law school and another 68 Indigenous students who have graduated over the time of the IBM Initiative. And I think each person of two point about stories obviously has their own story. And when you meet the applicants in the first instance and you read the personal statements, they're very often driven by desire to make the change that we're talking about, to contribute in their way to reconciliation. It's very powerful. So part of, I think the importance of the work we're doing is to provide as Dr. Degany talked about, institutional support. That is really helpful in terms of everything from funding to peer educational support, to support in terms of navigating the legal system and learning about this whole new world, which all law students are doing, but I think can be particularly challenging sometimes for those of us who aren't as long into the legal field as maybe other communities are. And so we provide that in part by having some key staff, people, and others engaged in the work that we're doing. And I would be remiss to do this conversation with that talking about Barry Armstrong, who's a key part of our work at the IBM Initiative elder and residence, Jane Averham, who was unable to be here today. Heather McNeil, who's been in our advisory council for a very long time and helped guide us. And so there really are a lot of people, many more than I even mentioned, who are part of the work that we're trying to unfold in supporting students. And the students themselves, in addition to coming and taking up a legal education, are contributing themselves to reconciliation from the moment that they arrive. So whether it be from class discussions, to research that they take up, to work that's done by the Indigenous Law Students Association, they are immediately part of this process of reconciliation and education. And also, through specific student-led initiatives that really run the gamut, and just to highlight a couple, Jarvis Google, one of our graduates, helped to develop the Donald Marshall Junior Award at the school. And Rosalie Francis, the portrait which now hangs in our atrium. We also have students who developed the Mead Mall Articling Initiative, which enables Mead Mall students to spend at least part of their articling time working with the Mead Mall organization. So again, these are student creative ideas that translate into reconciliation efforts. In addition to the student role, of course, we have trying to change the curriculum. And that's been talked about a fair bit today. But certainly, that's been accelerated with Professor Metallic joining us in the role of the Chancellor's Chair. And, but just to highlight a few of the sort of offerings that we have at Aboriginal Rice Moot, of course, we've had prior to all of that Professor Llewellyn and Negani's intensive course and other offerings in Indian residential schools. And then we're moving in a further direction that the Dean had already highlighted. And I think we sort of need to make a lot more effort down that road in terms of making material mandatory for all students to learn, but also creating the opportunities in the room for the introduction of Guavanaki legal notions and integrate it into how we're even understanding the teaching law overall. So all of those help give effect to TRC calls to action 28. There are also similar recommendations again, back to the Marshall inquiry number 13 and 14 that advocate for the same approach in terms of changing curriculum and teaching. So finally, the third element that I wanted to highlight was the impact of our graduates. So we can talk about reconciliation and education in terms of students coming in, in terms of changing the curriculum and the overall approach to law generally. But I think we would really be remiss to not consider the impact that our network of graduates have had in addressing all of the calls to action under TRC. So in all of the areas that we can think about. And given the central role, as already been mentioned, that law has played in colonization, assimilation attempts, creation and maintenance of residential schools and other harmful structures. It's imperative that we have people out there who are legally trained to address all of those impacts and biases. And so, our students start very early on working with many of our graduates on projects that relate, for example, to Mi'kmaq child welfare, the Nova Scotia Native Women's Association really sort of leading the creation of the current inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women. But our alumni really, again, are across the field in doing this work. And I just want to highlight a few, I could spend the rest of our afternoon actually going over that. But I've mentioned a couple who are in this room, Heather and Naomi and their others, I know. But Haime Batisse, for example, is treaty education lead for the province. Viola Robinson and Jovi Marshall were here earlier and they all know about the impact they made in Mi'kmaq and beyond over the years. Chief Paul Prosper is leading a lot of the work on Mi'kmaq child welfare and other justice issues. Jarvis Gugu is the health director of the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chief. And Patty Joel Bedwell was here earlier and she is a part of the indigenous steering committee in making changes across the house of university as a whole. And so, that's just a snapshot, a real small sample of the impact that our graduates are having as a network on creating reconciliation through education. And so, just briefly, we have a lot more work to do. I don't want to repeat the impression that all as well. We are still actually very early on, I think, in reconciliation, particularly in light of the history that Haime, you had met, Professor Young, and so, we certainly need more Mi'kmaq and indigenous students, both through the IV&M, but more broadly, I think, through our admissions process. We also need to expand our Mi'kmaq leadership and supports at the law school, including the role of our elder in residence. We need more Mi'kmaq and other indigenous faculty. We have two, Naomi and Patty Joel Bedwell, who attained their masters of law, but I think we need a more systematic approach to supporting our students in going to grad school so that we can have more joint academe. Also, more formalized partnerships in addressing legal issues. And that, I think, echoes the call to action number 50. So we have lots of our alumni working in organizations, but how can we formalize that through an institute like you've suggested, so that it's a more systematic response and approach to what we're doing? And here we are, so there's probably a lot more that I'm looking forward to learning about and hearing from other speakers about what we could be doing better. But I think we certainly have made a contribution to reconciliation over these years. Thank you, Michelle. Next we have Dr. J. McMillan from St. Francis A. University. Thank you. Can you see me, Bill? Yeah. Can you hear me, Bill? Hi, I'm really happy to be here. A few years ago, hereditary chief, Stephen Augustine, shared with me his thinking about the highest, her most profound of Mi'kmaq laws, his out of honor and respect, as in get me day deminage. It's an honor to be here. Get me day deminage, Dr. Degagne. I honor you and I respect you and I really admire the incredible healing work that you do against the edifices and treacheries of colonialism. In this dialogue on education and reconciliation, I wish to emphasize the concept of responsibility. In this case, the responsibility to learn. To learn about ourselves, to learn about each other, and to learn about those who came before us so that we might better know the heritage of the healing foundations we walk upon. I'm gonna tell you a quick story because Duma always gets me in a storytelling mood. And one of our first dates, Donald Marshall Jr. brought me here to the Friendship Center. It was a gathering, it was a treaty day. It was the first treaty day without his father, the grand chief, who had passed away earlier in August. In this room, a splendid feast was put together, collectively, collaboratively made by hunters, fishers, gatherers, bakers, from all over the seven districts. It was a really warm and joyous and friendly, safe gathering of friends and family who came together to honor and to respect each other, to honor and respect the memories of their ancestors, and to uphold and celebrate the life of their treaties. It was some nice, as Jr. would say. Later that night, though, a group of us, mostly juniors' cousins and friends from Weigoma, not small men, if you see how they grow them up there, but gentlemen, we were in the lineup and we were waiting to get into the old misty moon. Now the young, or people in the audience aren't gonna know what the misty moon was, but think of it like the, I don't know, is the licoridone still there? Something like that. Anyway, so we were standing in the line and a group of pretty drunk young guys come out and start hurling racial slurs at us and a brawl ensued. Now most of the Weigoma guys got put into the lockup and the white boys were told to go home. And I've been in watching the Kenisotaki resistance unfold in Oka the year before on television and I've been deeply horrified by what I saw there as the overt racism, but I was kind of removed from it through the lens of television as a spectator and as a white person rather than as an actor. But then I met Junior and as Junior started to weave together for me the nightmares of his wrongful conviction, any faith I had in Canada as a just society was evaporating. That night in Halifax on the street, I realized that the rage infused racism, the rawness of discrimination was far more widespread and volatile than I'd ever imagined. It was ugly, it was frightening, it was violent and I didn't understand it. And I was soon to be immersed in it as I became Junior's fishing wife. It's through the generous storytelling and deep patience of my many Weigoma teachers that the edifices and treacheries of colonialism were revealed and I've been determined to fight against to unsettle my ignorance ever since. I've committed my scholarship to nation rebuilding to treaty rights and self-determination advocacy. I tried to use my privilege in the academy to keep in the foreground the transformative legacies of McMoggy since time immemorial so that indigenous temporal priority will not be undone by denial, neglect, lies, broken promises or silencing or by some self-congratulatory ticking off of a box or worse still forgetting as Dooma mentioned. If we as settlers are to have some hope that building right relations with indigenous peoples and nations, the edifices of ignorance, of apathy, of feigned benevolence, of heroic pioneering, of entitlement and ownership and seller righteousness and intolerance must come down. Reconciliation cannot just be about goodwill inclusion in settler institutions either. It must include settlers in coming to the understanding that substantive sustainable generative paradigmatic shifts in the relationships nation to nation, knowledge systems to knowledge systems, persons to persons must be required. Unscrewing 500 years of intricate assimilative scaffolding and sandblasting the concrete of 150 years of willful blindness will take some work. And I'm really glad to see so many of you in the room today with the tools in your hands to take the edifices down, to make restitutions, to return the space for reinvigoration and to learn how treaties are honored. Indigenous peoples have been talking about writing the relationships for a very long time. In their commitment to reconciliation, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation provided the resources and encouragement to indigenous communities across the country to address the far reaching legacies of abuse, cultural genocide, assimilation, racism and discriminatory legislation by building on their people's strengths and to sustain self-determination. It was a genius model of governance and engagement. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation understood the importance of relationships. They recognized that any efforts to dismantle the colonial apparatus and the justificatory ideologies that feed it had to mobilize hope in the hearts of indigenous peoples. Their success was grounded in their faith in community-driven, community-based organizations, in community knowledge, in community reality, in survivors' experiences, in indigenous cultures and identities, thousands of years old. Not some remote policy, not some complex bureaucracy, not some crisis management, not some homogenous, band-aid remedy. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation respected diversity and they understood better than anyone, I think, the responsibility of their healing work and what legacies they needed to shape for future generations. The Healing Foundation was in very good hands. It was in the hands of the people and Dr. DeGene through the Healing Foundation forged more than 120 partnerships to help thousands of people uniquely embark on the most important healing journey of their lives. The AAHF built their relationships, enhancing self-worth in individuals, communities, nations, families, to sustain well-being, to tap into that resilience and recognize their dignity after generations of denigration in our institutions, education, health, justice, social, religious, economic, and government. It nurtured the very roots of the reconciliation dialogues we're having today and thanks to their exemplary work, those roots took hold. Without the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, I'm not sure where we would be right now and I don't think we'd likely be in this place of hope and action. The transformative legacy of the Healing Foundation is like the proverbial iceberg. We only have seen the tip of the cultural rejuvenation, recovery, and restoration of spirit. The impacts are immeasurable. It has led to governance models to protect diversity and foster identity and a resurgence of indigenous institution building and that is what reconciliation is about. The termination or as it says graphically on the Wiki page, the extinction of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation remains an outrage. Yet another terrible policy decision in the ever-shifting matrix of accountability avoidance brought to you by blank insert name here of whichever federal office responsible for indigenous peoples is in charge today. But we move on. And I think for when we have a responsibility to learn about these transformative legacies to as part of our reconciliation journey, make every effort to understand the legacies on which we stand today. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation is a momentous one. Learn from that literature. Their documents and activities are the blueprints and roadmaps for substantive, strategic, nation rebuilding, and reconciliation. They point the way forward to honor and respect. In my concluding remarks, I turn to the treaty imperative and point to what I see as a major obstacle in taking down the colonial edifice. In a recent province-wide review of the Marshall Inquiry, Mi'kmaq people shared deeply intimate accounts of their experiences with the Canadian justice system. With alarming regularity, people spoke about painful incidents where they felt they were mistreated and misunderstood by police, lawyers, judges, and service providers. Consistently, people identified both the Marshall Inquiry recommendations from 1989 and the Supreme Court decision in Marshall, 1999, as foundational to establishing Mi'kmaq justice system and imperative to self-determination. But they recognized serious structural obstacles, impeding the implementation of the recommendations and in the exercise of treaty rights. These were identified as a profound lack of awareness or knowledge regarding indigenous treaty rights. The failure to identify and respect the Mi'kmaq as a nation and the denial by settlers of the legitimacy of Mi'kmaq governance and legal principles and the management of their lands and resources. We have section 35 of the Constitution. We have not just the Marshall decisions, but we have a whole host of decisions by the courts affirming treaties and telling us to honor and respect them. We have commission after commission recommendation and calls to action. We have hundreds of years of Mi'kmaq knowledge, rituals and traditions of treaty diplomacy and treaty principles being translated from generation to generation, yet do we have good treaty relationship? Can you identify in your practice or in your pedagogy a substantive productive relationship to treaty or Aboriginal rights? One of the greatest obstacles to reconciliation is amongst agents of the Crown, such as the DFO and their lawyers. In their pervasive characterization of the Supreme Court decisions affirming indigenous treaty rights as losses. That requires a paradigmatic shift if we're going to ever get to reconciliation. Crown indigenous relationships remain adversarial and the response to the perceived losses Crown agents aggressively assert their regulatory power and control over resources and territories that do not really belong to them at the expense of indigenous peoples' rights and self-determining laws. The DFO stands in large measure while reflecting the attitudes of many non-indigenous constituents is counterproductive to reconciliation and puzzling in light of the federal government's declaration that that most important relationship is one with indigenous peoples. Indeed, Trudeau says it's time for a new nation to nation relationship based on recognition of rights, respect, cooperation and partnership. Yet still in just at the end of last year a federal fisheries official says, we the DFO have been tested in court many, many times on issues related to fisheries by indigenous peoples and I'll put it to you bluntly. In most cases we come out on the losing side of those issues and we need to be careful moving forward that we don't create another situation that results in another precedent and that's a possibility. We didn't think we were going to lose the martial case but we did. And the hostilities persist and the hostilities are out there today because treaty rights get constructed as something settlers have to give up and this treacherous ideology is reinforced by the attitudes of those running the regulatory institutions and their enforcers. Reconciliation for many requires the full recognition of Mi'kmaq rights and title, meaningful consultation and fulfillment of the fiduciary obligations of the Crown. Without rights education and the implementation of Mi'kmaq treaties, systemic discrimination and poverty are going to contribute to intergenerational impacts. They're going to generate conflicts with the law. They're going to limit opportunities for justice to be lived and felt by indigenous peoples. The authority of indigenous legal principles and practices need to be recognized. They think Dumas got an excellent idea about an institution and supported and these systems need to be decolonized through self-determined incorporation and the use of indigenous ways of being whether it's through ceremony or knowledge translation, some kind of collaboration, respect and education. Remember the law of honor, get Mi'kmaq Day Diminage. One honors the relationships with each other and the ancestors and the lands and the waters and their gifts, but does not own them. One has a responsibility to them, not ownership over them. So in speaking with you about education and reconciliation, I ask you to consider the transformative legacies and the relationships you have to them. I ask you to think about what does your treaty relationship look like and please consider how will you act and honor to respect those relationships and to learn the laws of the people, the laws of the peoples of this land. Thank you. And we call on the honorable Greg Nicholas. What's that first step? Well, first of all, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for inviting me to come to your territory. I meet my brothers and sisters and cousins and this friendship center, when I first came here was a year after the Simon decision was made in the Supreme Court of Canada. My memory may be jogged, but I think it was 1986. And this is where I met Matthew Simon. And when you were involved in the case in the Supreme Court of Canada, my good friend Bruce Wildsmith at the time said, will you come and partner with me because the treaty involves also those from New Brunswick? I said, I will. And I was curious, well, who's this guy, Matthew Simon? But it's here where I met him and I was introduced to him and I asked him, could I ask you what really happened on that day? And of course he did. And we was talking about story time. Where do you begin? Where do you end? What do you share that hopefully will be significant to the Indigenous students who are here? My first exposure to an Indigenous issue was in the winter of 1968 when St. Francis Xavier University had a teaching on Indians. And so I was in my last university and I said, why not? I got a free afternoon. I'll go there. That was the first time I heard two Indigenous elders speak about Indigenous rights. In my community at Tumic, Negrotkobur, let's still gather as we call ourselves now. No one in my community ever mentioned treaty rights. No one in my community ever mentioned about the traditional ways of our people. No one in my community talked about what the law was before the arrival of other races. So needless to say, my background is in math, science. This was a totally new experience for me. That's not the event that motivated me to become a lawyer by all means. When I graduated in 1968, I went back to my home community up in Tumic and I wanted to be a teacher because the students from my community went to the public school. So I went to summer school to get a temporary teacher's license in New Brunswick. Now school opens in New Brunswick at that time in the middle of August because of the potato harvest. So between the course and the starting of the exams and the Friday and a Monday morning, Saturday morning, I went to see the principal and the superintendent of that area because I was going to be signing a $3,600 contract. Now $3,600 in terms of comparison, the cost of a Mustang was $1,800. So I said, this is a good deal. I'm going to have wheels. But to be generous, there were philosophical differences. They didn't want an Indian to go teach at the public school. And my mom had asked me to go to university, saying if X were elsewhere, get an education, come back and help our people. And the first job you try for when you face discrimination, that's why I call it philosophical differences, it really hits you hard. However, the benefit of that is how I ended up at law school at UMB because I was looking for something else to do. And so I got accepted into UMB in the fall of 68 I had no absolutely nothing about and I didn't have an interest in politics. Thank goodness I behaved myself so I wouldn't go to the U.S. court, or whatever they called it, I've been a juvenile court. And I kind of kept a low profile. So I was immersed in the fall of 68, the UMB at law school, immediately with something very new. And the only methodology I had was my mathematical background. Because in math you're taught this, this, this, and this, and then the answer is there. Law, you're dealing with presidents here, presidents there, presidents there, so this must be it. So that fascinated me. But as luck would have it, you know sometimes, two more talked about somebody approaching, somebody encouraging you. After I finished my first year law at UMB, I had an opportunity to go work in Toronto to do legal research. I was the only Indigenous law student in 1969 who was on his research program in the book that eventually came out was Native Rights in Canada. And this was my first exposure on Indigenous law to decision making in the United States, Canada, and in Australia in Indigenous rights. It was also assigned to me then to deal with 500 years of history, starting with the contact of the Spanish, the role of the church, the role of the United States Supreme Court, and then ultimately Canada as well, dealing with Indigenous rights from an international perspective. Because it weren't examined at the time in terms of human rights instruments or human rights law. So how do I compact 500 years of legal history, theology, political, and all these other aspects into 10 minutes? I can't do it. So why did I choose this? Well, when I was contacted by the Dean and I looked at the TRC, I said, what is it that I still have a firm passion about? What is it that I would like to engage the students I teach and the other people I get involved in about what it is that I learned I can share and hopefully motivate and encourage them to go the next step. I chose the cost of action 45, I, 46, 2, 47, and 49. And why? Because they'd deal with the doctrine of discovery and terramoss. So in the research I was assigned in the summer of 69, right after, of course, Columbus came and right after in 1493, the Pope of the day, Alexander VI, issued a papal ball authorizing Spain and Portugal to go around, civilize those heathens, civilize those savages, make them into followers of Christ so they'll be one of us and we'll have the right to exploit their land. So when I saw that, and I'm Catholic, I was brought up Catholic, and I saw in the history the savagery of the Spanish soldiers. They raped the women. They stole the land. They made the people into slaves and if they didn't, they were shocked. You know, people talk about genocide, people talk about holocaust. Holocaust didn't just happen to the Jewish people. Genocide wasn't just experienced by the Jewish people. It was our brothers and sisters who lived south of us. When you read the diaries and the conquests that the conquistadors did, you'd have nightmares. So in this shocking environment, there were certain voices that were voices what I call in the wilderness, in the indigenous wilderness. One of them was Bartholomew de Las Casas. Now Las Casas came from a merchant family and was sent to a new world to make money for his dad and for the company. However, he saw how the indigenous people were treated. He saw how they were abused. He saw the destruction that took place in their spiritual temples. And he couldn't stomach it. He changed his life to be Dominican priest. So he contacted another strong voice in Spain, a man by the name of Francesco de Vittoria. And who is Francesco de Vittoria? Francesco de Vittoria was a doctorate in theology teaching at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And King Ferdinand started to hear these dissatisfactions in the new world. So he asked Vittoria, can you write some advice as to how I should treat with these indigenous peoples? Vittoria took the challenge, produced new books, which in fact challenged the authority, not only of the pope of the day, but the authority of the Spanish and every European power to be able to assert discovery, to be able to assert Caranullis, to be able to assert that slavery was all right. Now, as happens, the king of the day did not like the opinion of Francesco de Vittoria. What does he know? But Vittoria didn't stop, you see. Vittoria and at the time, both planes, trains, or automobiles, he had to ride a mule to Rome. Now, the opinion to the king was 1534. Not long after the introduction of the European contact with indigenous peoples. The pope of the day, Paul III, he convinced him to issue a papal law in 1537, which contradicted exactly what the Spanish king and other European sovereignies were saying, take what legitimately do. And this document of 1537 is still a valid document in the Vatican. If you look at the speeches that Pope John Paul II has, when he was still a pontiff, when he came to Canada in 1984, and in 1987, each time he said, I am here to uphold what my predecessor said in 1537. Paul III. So that is still a very valid document with one of the first authors who legitimately tried to say it was okay. So now one of those partners of that colonization have completely withdrawn from those concepts. And actually that papal bull was in fact over, I guess erased or whatever you want to call it, shortly after it was proclaimed in 1493. So where do I jump from there to where in five more years there's going to be this major celebration about the United States Supreme Court who made the decision of Johnson and McIntosh. So what's Johnson and McIntosh all about? And does it have any relevance in our country? Well, Johnson and McIntosh, and then later won, both were in the state of Georgia. Both of those cases is where the theory of discovery was decided by the United States Supreme Court. And they went back because they said European powers had to have among themselves some kind of an entity of understanding. So that if France came to this part of the world, the British came to this part of the world, the Dutch came to this part of the world and all the other Europeans, well the first one here against the monopoly. Literally that's what it is. They would have the franchise of dealing with the tribes in that area, the nations, but it diminished the power that our ancestors had because we could not relate to anybody else about our sovereignty. So to me, 18, 90, 2000, and 23 is not going to be your celebration. Now, whether I'll still be around or not, a good guy asked me, oh jeez, how old are you anyway? I said well, I'm 72 years old. But I age well. But I'm not sure if we'll be around in 2023. But for those of you who are thinking of law, for those of you that will still be a law student, for those of you that will be judges, also remember what happened in 1823 and how it has influenced the common law of this country as well, which to me does not make it right. We knew of course the Chief Justice of Canada in the case of British Columbia said that paranoia was never a part of Canada because of the real proclamation of 1763. So what do the Canadian judges know in the courts? What do our law schools teach our students? Okay, there's an Aboriginal title. But if you assert that original title, there's the certain press that are set up. And more so if there's an economic interest on Indigenous land. Traditional as well as current territories we have now. That seems to be a litmus test. But doesn't that contradict what was there before discovery? Where our people were nations? Where we had our own territory? We developed our own institutions. So why did Marshall think Europeans could get away with this? Well I would say, read that decision. Because he thought we were ignorant. He thought that we couldn't cooperate. He thought that we were rar like, holy jumber we're going to give them a civilization. We're going to rescue them. Well, how did the Acadian survive in Mignol country? We dealt with the health of the Mignol. They would start with that. They didn't know where to get the water. They didn't know where to get the food. They didn't know how to get clothing. The same thing with non-community. And I'm sure the same thing with every tribe in the Americas. So what's our compensation? What's our consolation price? We allow the current system of law to dictate to us what we can be. And to me that is the biggest human rights violation not only for us as indigenous people, but around the world as well. So if you try to implement the right to self-determination that's been recognized by the United Nations, you can see now why the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, blocked. It was only when they were assured in 2010 that, look, you can still continue to develop resources in Indian country. You can still go put your pipelines, put your minds and everything else through indigenous country. It was only then that Canada said, yeah, I think we can support something like that as long as we're allowed to benefit from the indigenous resources. So that's the big challenge. You as future deciders will be. I hate to say I fought a good fight. I feel like St. Paul. I hope I'm not running my own eulogy. Or what's going to be put on his tombstone. But you need to do it. You need to do it for the future generations. Believe me. From 1971 to now, I wish I knew what I know now back in 1971. And I was just finishing a couple more. I got a whole bunch of this stuff. I don't even want to read it, but it'll be in the papers, I guess. How many are studying to be a law student this year? Don't be shy. How many want to be a law student? How many indigenous lawyers? In 1975 to 1980, there were maybe just 10 of us across this country. 10. I was the only boy from the East Coast. A little child was one of them from Alberta. There were a little bear was another. There were two others. And the National Indian Brow Hood, which was our political organization at the time, had convinced the government, the Trudeau government, to have discussions among the cabinet representatives, as well as an idea representatives. I was assigned the portfolio of justice. Who was the minister? Mark LaLonde. A right-hand man to Trudeau in Quebec and in Montreal. A very learned man. Trudeau himself was a lawyer. But let's not forget, Trudeau is the one who said, Aboriginal rights are historical might have been. When you was trying to advance the white paper policy of 1969. So in this workshop, I go in with the minister of justice, and there were others. And we're sitting down with Mr. Mark LaLonde. And he's a very impatient man. Okay, Mr. Nicholas, what are you going to say about these topics, about relationships between the governments and your people? What would he do? I didn't know I had people. But I say, well, I want to tell you something. Through a case law in the United States, tribes have been recognized as nations. There might only be a certain part of domestic nation of kind. The domestic sovereignty of a kind. But the United States Supreme Court has recognized. And in our rationale in the early court decision, they said, who signs a treaty? Only nations can sign a treaty. So the tribes, according to the dictionary of Oxford Dictionary, they had to say, the tribes are nations. The tribes are also sovereign because how can you as a nation sign something unless it's recognized? He says, that's a non-starter. We don't want to walk a nice Canada if we have 500 tribes, 500 nations in Canada. But that wasn't his reason. He was afraid of what was happening in Quebec, the Separatist School. So he couldn't legitimize with us, then, the differences of, in fact, what the law had recognized in the United States, that we factored our nations and that we had sovereignty. And the United States made it quite clear that the word nationhood, the word treaty, the word sovereignty are English expressions. So how can we now say that they're not nations if we sign treaties with them? So that's the struggle still going on in the international arena that you're going to be exposed. Make them all our nation. We'll stick with our nation. Password party our nation. Penobscot's our nation. Nishinaabe our nation. Decree our nation. All our tribes are nations. That's what we were always. And that's what we should always be. Now, just to give you another very sad part, I hope some of you who are going to be judges later on as an indigenous lawyer. In my career as a provincial court judge in New Brunswick from 1991 to 2009, which was 18 and a half years, the Department of Justice of the province of New Brunswick would never allow me to have a case with treaty rights or aboriginal rights in New Brunswick. The prosecutor would jump up and say, well, wait a minute, probably they knew how radical it was because they had lost so many cases that we advocated. They said, well, we want you to recuse yourself. Now you have to have a backing of your teeth justice in order to stand strong in a court. So another judge would be conveniently brought in my particular court, take over the case. And I'm talking about right to 2009. At what stage do you trust the judiciary to be neutral? At what stage do you trust the legal system that they so highly think is good to allow a different voice, a different interpretation, and a different set of eyes? You see? So I commend what tumor is doing. It should be the Americas institution which satellites all over the place. That's what we need. Because we need all kinds of indigenous jurists we need all kinds of indigenous lawyers and professors and all this to come together. Is it possible? Well, why was it put into the cause of action that I enumerated a little while ago? So that we repudiate the theory of discovery, we repudiate pyramids. That is the challenge that I see. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be around, but my message is going to be the same. And why? Because we owe it to the 7th generation. That's why. We do. We should not be made ashamed of our past. Was Europe free from wars? Back in the 14, 15, 1600s? Was Europe void of religious conflicts? Back at that time? It was free over here. So who brought in the violence? Who brought in the stuff? Was it us or was it them? Because of what our people had. I know it's a tough message, but please look at the stuff that I'll eventually leave to the dean here for what I wrote. But we have to have a different set of lenses. It's not true. It's a British concept that the Crown has the ultimate title. But who had the ultimate title in our nation? It was a collective right. Not an individual right. Because we benefited our community. Now, does the property of law that we talk about collective rights, does it talk about sharing the resources among the people who are at top 5% or 90% of the resources? Is it the law that legitimizes that process? As I say, it's a good thing I didn't know what I know now back in 1971. I might have been incarcerated. And not necessarily in a prison, but in some other institution. Because you've got a revolution who's talking. Now, just to conclude, as I said, Inter-Sitara, the document of 1493 has been abolished. Hereafter it was proclaimed. The United Nations has been told by the Vatican that that was never a valid poll anyway. And yet that's the one that the Europeans decided to act on for their benefit. So to me, we should, as a community, we have to do with our brothers and sisters of all backgrounds. All knowledge is all races in Canada. If we want to bring justice, if we want to bring reconciliation as our good friend Murray says, it's not going to be an easy journey. There's going to be some painful steps. But he said, it's education that's got its mess. So let's do his education now to get us out of this mess. Thank you very much. Next we have Associate Chief Justice Lawrence O'Neill. Thank you very much. I first want to express appreciation for the opportunity to be here, to participate in this very important event. And acknowledge my Chief Justice, MacDonald, and of course the Dean, the representatives of the university and other leaders. As has been indicated, I am a judge. I have been a judge for 10 years and for seven years I've had administrative responsibility for the Family Division of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. And in that role, our judges, my role has been to administer with judges in Halifax and in Cape Breton. Other parts of Nova Scotia, there's the Family Court. Our division of the Supreme Court deals with all child protection, all the child protection files in Halifax Regional Municipality and in Cape Breton. It represents about 55 or 60% of the child protection files in the province. And if you review the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada calls to action, you will see that the first five are focused on child protection. And in my view, it's no accident that those are the first five calls to action. And so in my capacity as the administrator of the Court, leader of the Family Division, I was approached several years ago by two senior members of our court, Justice Claire McCallum and Justice Laura Lejeer-Sears. And they said, you know Lawrence, we're doing these child protection files. They're pertaining to the First Nations communities. We really don't think we're making any difference. We don't think we're doing much of a job here contributing to the problem. And I said, I agree. It was a statement of the obvious. So the discussion was, what can we do? We should do something. And I said, I agree. And so there was a coincidence of attitudes to effect change. And the discussion led to, okay, we don't know what we're doing in terms of what we do next. So let's visit the university. So we ended up at the paper at the university at Dule Young. We went to the library there, to the Unimapi College. We met Professor Augustine and we said, like, we don't want to demonstrate our lack of being informed or our ignorance for the sake of a better word. But we would like to have some outreach. We'd like to visit the top to the communities, the First Nations communities about what they think we can do better or a different way of doing business. And so we started that dialogue first recognizing our limitations. So in my short note there that you'll see on the tables on retrospect, I guess we were humble about our position. And so we did start. And so there were these meetings we had, and I kept getting pushed about Lawrence, you know, what's the, I said we're going to have a meeting. And then of course that led to the question what's the agenda going to be? And so I kept having to put that question off because it had to be when we got into the room together. And so I had some contact or knew some of the persons in leadership in the First Nations community. I was comfortable with the First Nations people. I'd been in the homes of First Nations people in my capacity as a member of Parliament and also as a lawyer with Bill of Scotia Legal Aid. I would visit the homes, meet with people. When I was with Legal Aid I would go to the homes, often pick up a youth and we'd drive to court together. And I knew from those experiences how different the worlds were to some extent. Obviously I knew very little, but I knew that. I knew that as a defense lawyer by the time we got to trial it was all kind of academic and kind of a bit of a Walt Disney experience for some of them because the issues had been resolved in the community six months later. So people didn't want to show up being witnesses and all that kind of stuff. So in any case I then decided well how are we going to do this? Well people don't, I can't just pick up the phone and call people so say my name is and we want a meeting and all this kind of stuff. I knew I had to meet people and introduce myself so I visited the offices of the chiefs and I didn't I dressed in a casual manner and I sat down in their offices and some of them knew sort of of me and so then we chat we just chat. It wasn't about an agenda, it was just this is who I am, I'm concerned about this they're concerned about it so it was about building relationships and that's sort of my main message is you want people to work with you, you have to introduce yourself and you have to show them respect, they will show you respect. And I went to their offices, I didn't write I didn't phone and say come and meet me at my office, come and meet me at a hotel or whatever. So that kind of relationship building went on for six or eight months and I got their input about a meeting and what we should do and again I was very careful to not communicate that we were there or the judges were interested in suggesting what should happen it was to learn. And that wasn't just to get along it was because I thought it had to be the case and the image that I've used in other presentations and I'll repeat it now is as a judge I'm at the front of the room in Sydney for example and I look down and there's a there's a First Nations person perhaps one or two parents who are First Nations obviously I'm not the minister's lawyer, child protection lawyer would not be typically the lawyer for the parents would not be the sheriff would not be the clerk would not be as I said to a group of judges a couple of months ago I'm to look down at this mother or this father and say and invite her to trust me and trust the system and although not spoken I would not it would not have surprised me or would have been fair for her to say or him to say you took our land, you took our country you took our children and now you're taking my children my child and you're asking me to trust you with your system so recognizing that dynamic is in my view critical it's certainly from my perspective the judges something that had to be recognized so with the support and leadership of Chief Justice McDonald all the Chief Justice of the Superior Court came with the entire family division to member to to have a meeting and you have to understand my role I would have to be concerned about the judges thinking what's he up to you've got this idea so it was the first meeting outside Halifax of our group of judges and my rationale quite simply was this many of judges, many members of the public have stereotypical views of First Nations communities so you can spend a lot of time in seminars and classrooms or whatever or you can just go visit people in their community and you take people to member to and you see the convention center you see the Hampton Inn you see the Tim Hortons and the Pharma Save and the corner stores and the streets and the two or three pad ice rink which opened six months ago or so that's a picture's worth a thousand words so in terms of educating members of the bench my thinking the other part of it was to just challenge those stereotypes the other part of it was to allow the judiciary to meet First Nations people lawyers, social workers business people political leaders that are in the community that we might otherwise not have contact with in other words you must trust the First Nations leadership and the community there's a lot of strength there so that was the rationale and we went there and we met and we were at 8 or 10 tables about 50 or 60 people and there was a judge or two at a table and First Nations people and there were discussions and reports and do me young school and so from our perspective we accomplished a lot in terms of trust building and of course it's all about it's not all about the top it's not just a photo op it's not just the current preoccupation of society it has to be lasting and we recognize that I recognize that and so we have continued to work and as I indicated in the notes that are at the table in this spring we will be sitting as a court in Lagma first nations first Superior Court in Canada we're dealing with child protection so there has to be results and the First Nations people speaking well I'll speak to it but the answer to the problem with First Nations and child protection is in the community I deal obviously with a lot of non-first nations child protection files in my opinion the answer for the child protection files of all the families that are not First Nations will come from the First Nations the approach that they've educated me about they wish to have child protection in my view will be far more successful than what we are doing in either the First Nations or the non-first nations community now in terms of child protection so I'm excited about that given the work I do as a judge but also as a citizen and I'm going to close by relaying an exchange I had with Chief Leroy Denny as Cazzoni Cazzoni is a community of several thousand people about 4,300 and part of my travel around I went to see Chief Denny and we had lunch and he showed me around the community a bit and he talked about child protection and talked about the other issues that affect the community and through all of our discussions he became emotional at one point and that's when he was talking about child protection and he talked he said you know child protection is the modern day residential school and he talked about the fact that we're lucky in Cape Breton most of our children who go into foster care can be placed with the First Nations family it's not so on the mainland so I thought wow I hadn't heard it expressed that way so it is a huge challenge but I believe and I think we're there, we're fortunate at this point in our history as a country where resources will be devoted I think the level of education throughout not only in institutions but my institution the judiciary we are reaching out recognizing what we have to learn and I expect that what First Nations want will be achieved that is their own I'll use the word of my tradition court system will be achieved it will be far more successful than what we've done with our model of child protection and so I'm optimistic I believe there will be success and I think as I was told the people I met with early on trust me we're not trying to keep the work we're happy to give you the jurisdiction I'm speaking personally obviously to give you the opportunity to solve to address your problem and the people that I've met in the First Nations community and I know are more than capable of solving it with and as Duman know we've talked about the customs of the First Nations people which are far better suited than the legislative constraints that we have so thanks again thank you thank you Justice O'Neill and we now have a professor not on the metallic I think we'll finish with the presentations before we take a break we'll shorten the break and then come back afterwards I think we'll do jumping jacks or something like that my remarks won't be all that long I hope not first I want to thank all the cool panelists it's amazing to hear you and so many wonderful insights thank you to Mike for being for all you have done first of all and also being the wonderful impetus to have this discussion here today I also want to thank the Friendship Center I mean for all the great work that they do but also for being our hosts and I think as you said earlier today Dean opportunity to do more things here so I'm not going to talk too much about the work that we're doing in the law school because it's already been mentioned several times and I didn't want to get up here and sound like I'm reading a laundry list and be self-congratulatory although I do have to say that I am ever so grateful as she's left now but to Ann McClellan for creating the position of Chancellor's Chair which is allowing me in my role at the law school to do things that I don't think I would otherwise be able to do and also I'm very thankful for faculty, staff at the law school who are on the TRC committee with me and I think that we're trying to do good work and there's always room for improvement but I think that I'm very happy with what we're trying to accomplish and what we hope to accomplish in the future so I didn't want to talk too much about that because it's already been mentioned so here's what I really want to talk about for my brief period of time today I think one of the things we've heard is that there's so much work to be undertaken in reconciliation we heard Duma talk about the need to revitalize our languages and our laws we heard Justice Nicholas talk about reforming Section 35 and getting rid of Terranulius and Doctrine of Discovery and it all needs to happen such important work and there's one area that I also want to highlight where we need to be doing more work in order to get to the point where we're implementing our own justice systems and our laws we also have to have healthy functional communities who can do this good work and for that to happen it's been mentioned several times but it needs to stop that our First Nations children being taken into foster care and placed in non-indigenous homes in record numbers and also the mass overrepresentation of our people in the criminal justice system both as offenders and as victims needs to stop and in 2018 our people should no longer be living at unacceptable rates of poverty which they continue to live in facing numerous barriers to employment with high unemployment rates probably the unemployment rates I think Mikey mentioned them earlier maybe in the 70s they were at 90% I don't think they've changed very much and we have people who are on welfare in communities with rates that haven't changed for 26 years we've done quite a bit of research here in Atlantic Canada on that and the stories are really mind boggling that this situation is allowed to persist communities face food insecurity the housing stock is inadequate and also there's huge housing shortage communities I visited last summer some places you have 7-10 people living in a house together and some communities because they're put under something called management haven't been allowed to build a new house in 15 years you know so these are what I refer to I believe all to be human rights abuses that are happening daily right under our noses here in Canada but we're not often talking about it and that really bothers me and I'm not saying that any of the things that we need to be doing implementing our laws rediscovering and vitalizing our language laws and implementing under it it all has to happen but this is so important to getting our people we can only be in this situation to be implementing self determination if we have healthy communities and right now the socioeconomic position of our people is really preventing a lot of that from happening some manage to get into universities and go to law school but imagine if we actually had functional universities how many more wonderful indigenous people would be out there making a difference you know and the reason why I wanted to talk about this is over the weekend I read the fourth compliance order from the Canadian human rights tribunal in the caring society case and I don't know how many of you know the caring society case but it came out on January 26th 2016 so it's already reached a past it's two year anniversary and and this is not the first compliance order from the tribunal it's the fourth so four times a party since the sort of watershed decision from the tribunal that found that Canada has been knowingly underfunding child welfare services on reserves for over a decade they've had the parties have had to go back now four times and the tribunal is pretty clear this is going to be the final time on immediate remedies that the parties should be coming back in fact this time the tribunal made some pretty strong orders about what Canada is to be doing um but it's really funny too because Canada did not appeal the decision and talked about that it was going to be complying with the ruling and said that you know it's said a lot in the last two years about implementing TRC and implementing UNDRIP and it passed the ten principles about the relationship um and um the tribunal I mean despite the fact that Canada has been saying the right things in the public obey the tribunal found that in many ways in the ensuing two years since the original decision Canada has failed to comply with the decision in significant ways and what struck me when I was reading the decision this weekend um was that you know despite all these good things that were being said in public um all the while Canada has been before the tribunal after losing um and still uh behind the scenes making the same types of arguments that it lost uh at the tribunal in 2016 in fact the tribunal mentioned this in this fourth compliance order that Canada was trying to rehash some of the same arguments that it lost and which it didn't appeal so uh I'm glad the tribunal didn't accept uh uh those arguments um but it left me thinking of three things so here they are the first thing is why don't more Canadians know about this decision and why aren't more people up in arms about it you know um ACJ O'Neill just said this um um but you know it was and it was also noted in the tribunal decision itself that the child welfare system the first nation child welfare system in Canada is replicating the residential school system and didn't we say never again it's still happening right so these are to me situations that are intolerable and completely unacceptable so it's really hard for me to fathom why it's still going on right under our noses okay so that was point number one my second point is that you know I have this fear and I get invited to a lot of places to talk um but you know and going back to how Canada has been saying the right things in public but behind the scenes arguing something different how do we effectively address uh address what I might call false or at least window addressing reconciliation efforts you know several of our panelists have already said that the work's going to be hard you know and um there's um a quote I recently heard from uh Pam Pometer uh Dr. Pam Pometer about reconciliation and it keeps haunting me and I'm saying it more and more but she says and it might be slightly an over statement but she says if it feels good it's not reconciliation you know um but I think there's something there's a grain of truth in there right so there's lots of activities going on and I think there's lots of important stuff um but I think we need to be critical and to some extent in our lens of you know what is happening under the mantle of reconciliation um I think it's fair questions to ask I mean I think blanket exercises are important but doing one blanket exercise for your you know institution and then no more is not sufficient you know and also questioning is having a speaker series one speaker series or having a panel I mean these are important things to do and they raise awareness and and there is a relationship building there as well but they cannot be sufficient and I so um you know I question you know how do we ensure that we are you know doing activities and things that are meaningful meaningfully achieving reconciliation or somebody needs to come up with standards or guidelines on what that is but or maybe someone has been thinking about it but you know I think that you know surely to goodness you know the work that needs to be done has to include making significant structural changes and many of our panelists have already talked about that right and it's going to involve redistribution of power lands perhaps and other resources right we need to be having adult conversations about those particular issues and so my third point is what is the role of education in all of this I think we need to be teaching more about these ongoing human rights abuses I think many Canadians sort of you know live with this idea that Canada is a wonderful country that has a stellar human rights record I mean I'm proud of many things that Canada has done the legal institutions but we have to recognize that there's been significant human rights abuses that have happened and that are still happening right and they need to be talked about and also just so many stereotypes that need to be addressed through the formal education system about indigenous people you know that we get everything for free and that you know somehow even despite you know that we have this poverty so it must mean by virtue of that that we are somehow incapable of managing our affairs or that our leadership is incompetent like those are still deeply ingrained in the Canadian psyche and we need to be addressing them yeah so what else can education do I think in building you know in teaching people about this this is where we'll get our advocates and allies and the more pressure needs to be put on institutions of power to be addressing this this is really the only way that you know these issues are going to be addressed particularly the underfunding of essential services for indigenous people I mean Canada has known for a long time that is doing it unless the Canadian populace is shaking their fist and screaming how can you let this continue it's going to continue as it has for decades yeah and I think a major point is that I made earlier is changing structures that really there has to be big structural changes both internally and I think externally and I'm talking about their formal education in universities but you know hiring a faculty and staff and greater admissions of students Michelle spoke so passionately earlier about you know the great work of the IBM initiative I'm so proud to be a graduate of the initiative and I mean it is amazing the work that programs like the initiative the results that it's having you know the fact that two over 200 graduates soon you know there's a startling statistic to kind of get your head around how important these initiatives are and I'm going to pick on New Brunswick a little bit there are over 50 Aboriginal lawyers practicing in Nova Scotia there are over 50 African Nova Scotian lawyers practicing at the bar do you know how many Aboriginal lawyers are practicing in New Brunswick I can count them on this hand versus 50 here IBM makes a huge difference and our graduates are making massive differences across the country so access programs and putting work into realizing that the systems just hoping that a system will eventually fix itself is not going to happen we need to make fundamental changes to structures in order to make it just society and I think we can be doing more and doing things differently than our institutions perhaps have previously done Mike spoke about this but actually going to communities speaking with the communities and actually figuring out what their both educational and service needs are and maybe coming up with creative programs that would actually be in the communities so there's so many things that we could be doing but I feel a major way I'm preaching to the choir but I do think that there are and there's been great work that people in this room have been doing but still lots of work to be done . . . . . . . . . . . . .