 I mean, throughout my career, throughout the time that I was working in Indian country, I mean, I was either a politician or a lawyer advocating positions, advocating for native rights, advocating for fishing rights, advocating for, you know, the native people. To get on a bench, all of a sudden you can't advocate for anybody, you're just an arbiter of these positions, right? And thankfully though, I didn't get a lot of native cases in front of me. In Prince Rupert I did, I got a few cases, because there's only me and this other judge in the whole town, Judge Krantz, bless her soul, she's passed on now. But I had Louise in front of me in one case there, she came up and all the way she never changed a bit. And throughout the time that I was working on that decision, I would refer back to her factims that she brought forward, right? It was one of those cases to do with, and it was a good case for me because it was about self-government and how two different tribal councils, two different Aboriginal groups should relate in relation to that. Which case was it? I can't remember it now. I don't know how well I did actually in writing that, but I remember that case. And it was a pleasure seeing her in court. It was interesting for me, actually, because I started out of my career working with her as a research person. She was a lawyer and then I was working with her as a lawyer when I had my own practice. But seeing her in court as a lawyer appeared in front of me as a judge. It was always a pleasure to have Louise in court. I think a lot of people understood that. Her and I had this history, right? This relationship. And of course, you have to disabuse your mind of all that and look at the case in front of you and decide which I try to do the best to do. It seems to me it was one of those overlapping cases that had to be resolved between two different families. It was very tough, very tough to do. What do you consider the most exciting or meaningful part of working in Aboriginal law? Oh, there's, I would say, being in court, of course, is exciting. I mean, working on the cases and bringing matters to court. When I had my practice, of course, I had a lot of, I used to do a lot of fishing cases. Sometimes I'd have 20 people in total with me going to court and putting a case through and organizing it so that we could distill the principles down and then put a case forward that would resolve all of these other cases, right? You know, judges, of course, and the court system itself is, it's not that predictable and you never know what you've got to sometimes go back and talk to your clients and say, this didn't work out good. We're not going to be able to do this, you know, managing your cases is always a challenge. What was exciting for me, though, sometimes is when we'd actually be on the line. They'd call me up to go to, when the twin tracking was happening, Leslie and Louise were actually out on the line trying to negotiate, trying to get things settled and calmed down. When you're in that kind of a situation, it's pretty exciting. It's pretty interesting. I've been in a situation where, you know, there's a roadblock or something. You've got to go out and try to resolve the issue or try to help resolve the issues. And that's pretty exciting. That's pretty interesting. But I mean, law doesn't lend itself, it's not as exciting as many things. When you talk about law, people start going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you talking about law for? That's not even very exciting, you know. But locked up, for example, in a room to read the Delgamot decision after it came out of the BC Court of Appeal, for example. That's exciting for lawyers. Whoa, you're in a room going over things and then going out to talk to the media afterwards. I was in a room, for example, listening to Judge McEchrin as he talked to the lawyers and heard witnesses. I went and sat in on some of those hearings during the Delgamot trial. And that was exciting for me as a lawyer. That's very cool, you know, because that case has got such notoriety that's been written about for so long. And yeah, and I remember being in that courtroom, seeing how many people were there listening, the lawyers that were there. That was an exciting time, a very exciting time. And of course, standing up and intervening on behalf of the Union of Easier Chiefs in the Delgamot decision, that was pretty exciting. Sitting there and having your name called. Well, what do you have to say? I remember the first case I ever fought, and I wasn't even a lawyer then. I was in law school. A colleague came to me and she said to me, Steve, I have this case. I can't do it. I can't do it. She just couldn't do it. She'd frozen up. And I said, what is it? She says, it was a case where a Native woman had purchased a bed and put a deposit down, but her bed was never delivered. One of these hospital bed cases. And I go, oh, what are you doing in the lawsuit? We're trying to get the deposit back. Oh, okay. So I went to interview her and we filled out the documents. We filed a case in. And I said to her, well, I'll sit in the back of the courtroom another day. Your case is called just to give you support. I was in my blue jeans. I've been back, back on. I was on my way to law school. I told her, I just stopped into the provincial court to be with you. So the judge called her case and she stepped up. And the other party didn't even show up. The bed people didn't show up at all. And he said, well, can you tell me what your case is about? And she said, my lawyer's right there. She pointed at me and I'm sitting in the back room. I go, he says, who are you? And I go, ah, your honor, I'm just a law student. I was from the legal clinic. I just helped her. I'm just here for her support. He looked at me and said, well, you want to ring your case in? I'll let you do it. Really? Okay. Put my backpack down, took my coat off, put her on the stand and led the evidence into the record for her. I walked her through her statement and whatnot. That was my first ever case. I won it. Of course the other side didn't show up. It doesn't matter. Right? You won. And that was exciting. For me, that was like, well, you know, that's what you dream about doing, right? Going into court and fighting with your clients and meetings and things. So, yeah, I mean, some of the best things, those sitting in negotiations, when you're negotiating, sitting across the table. I remember sitting in a room one time with a mayor on one side and a travel chairman on the other side. And they were yelling at each other and I was the legal advisor sitting there. I said, you guys sit down and shut up. They both looked at me and go, okay. I don't know why I said that. But this isn't getting us anywhere. We need to discuss this, right? And sometimes, yeah, negotiation is going to be pretty interesting. It's going to be pretty cool as a lawyer when you're sitting there and having negotiations. So, yeah, it was pretty cool, too. Anyway. But generally, law isn't all that exciting. You know, the ball stars or hockey stars. Lawyers, oh, yeah, okay. They're pretty exciting. Not really. But I got to meet some very interesting lawyers. I met Tom Berger at one time. Fascinating. I haven't talked to him. Oh, Harry Rankin when he came out of Chillowack. He defended some of our boys up there. He got to meet him. Had Oliver came out of Chillowack one time. I think his Mercedes, but not Mercedes. He had a Bentley, a silver Bentley. Parked right outside in the front of the courtroom. Everybody went in to watch Had Oliver. Because he was, he had such a reputation. I got a chance to meet him. To sit and chat with him. Yeah, so Al Scow. Great, great judge. God bless his soul. So you meet some really, yeah, you meet some pretty interesting people in this law. I went to graduate in 1985. It was called the bar in 1986. I've been a lawyer since 1985, I guess. So that's about 1985. Who would have thought you got this far? And how my mom got me into law school when she wanted me to go. She said, I'm going to have this lawyer pick you up at school. I was in law school. I was in university at the time. So Andy Thomas, that's his name. Andy Thomas. Andy, yeah. There's a lawyer in Chillowack. Pick me up. I was in second year of university. He drove me to a house. And there was, like I was telling you, this was during the hippie era. And there was a white two-story house. It was a pretty skinny-looking house. And the grass was not cut in the front. They had a goat there, I think. And there were kids running around those shoes on. It kind of looked like the Beverly Hillbillies, you know. And he brought me in. A guy with a long beard sitting there and his wife with a print dress. And then he brought me some corncakes to eat with tea. And me and Andy were sitting there chatting with him. Then we left. I remember there was even a bed in the living room. You don't think there's a couch, but there was sort of an iron bed. And he, getting back to his car, he said, you know what they were? They were lost dudes. They weren't lost dudes. Holy crow. And they were working their way through law school. And when we got to his place in Chillowack, he gave me a book called The Life of Time and a Clarence Darrell. So he says, I want you to read this book. I'd been at the university, but I'd never read a whole book. No kidding. That's a real true confession. I'd never read a whole book. I mean, you read excerpts from your textbooks, but I'd never read a novel. I'd never read just ten reading. Wasn't that great? That was a very slow reader. Really slow, still read slow. Anyway, I put the book under my bed. I stayed there. I was in university until the second year that I left. I came home, got married, got on council, started working out with logging. I was a logger working in the bush. And then one year, I forget what year it was. I found that book again. It was dusty and it was in a box somewhere. I forget. I read it. I started reading it. I read about the monkey trial. I read about his work with children working in coal mines in the United States. I read about how he was helping people that were poor. I really admired him for what he did with his life in the law. When I remember sitting there one year and we're at the mountain, I was looking over the valley and I thought to myself, I don't have to be doing this for the rest of my life, working in the log. I could actually go back to school and become a lawyer. So that's what I did. I was 31 then. I went back to school and became a lawyer. Never look back after that. It was a long time though before we started actually making any money doing the log, because when I got out of law school, I opened my practice. Everybody else was getting paid except for me and Karen. I wasn't making any money at all. It's not really a big money beaker unless you're in a law firm that's got big practice. But it's a way to get experience. I did it for three years. I got my import experience. Anyway, so what else do you have? I'm curious to know a little bit about how, what drives you in Aboriginal law. What drives me? Well, I remember going back home, opening up my law practice, and Karen and I rented a space in the old Safeway building, next to the legal aid office, just a block away from the corner. We didn't have any furniture, and we didn't even have a way of painting the building. So the court workers arrived, and they painted it. The Indian bands got together and they bought us desks and chairs for the front. Plants, things like that. So we got a little bit, borrowed a little bit of money from the bank, and we started working, hired a secretary, and we started working. I remember going to court one day, and one of the lawyers walked up and he was a lawyer from Abbotsford. He said to me, you're Steve Point, eh? I go, yeah. Because I'm losing clients to you because of you. And I said, really? I didn't know that. And he says, yeah. Every native client that I've got has come up to me and said, we don't need you anymore. We've got our own lawyer now. Steve Point. All of a sudden, I was everybody's lawyer. Native people would call me out of the blue and say, Steve, could you go down to the court and tell them I can't come until tomorrow? Okay, bye. And I go, who the heck was that? It was like this notion that we never in Salt Lake have a native lawyer before. I mean, I was the first one to come back to my community. In fact, the first one, not really the very first, for me, the first two or three that had his degree in anything. But definitely the first lawyer. And Monday morning, I go to court and I saw all these native people and they're all people that you know too, these were people that were from the community. And they had ever fallen through the cases. They always tried to get them to they always go down and they did, I did, I did. They're finding God. And the same was happening in Lowell. I wanted to live to do a case one time. And they were telling me how the court worked in Lowell. It or Found Monday morning most of the cases were native and everybody would plead guilty and they all would be gone by noon. Nobody fights their cases because they never believed in the system. They didn't believe that they would get anything from it. So I started working in the law, doing criminal cases, working with young offenders. People start coming, they would say, you know, I fell down, or I got hit by a car or, you know, things like that, stories that you heard and they want you to help them, you know, because there was no one else they didn't want to talk to anybody. Well, I had one guy who was hit by an ambulance while he was riding his bike. An ambulance. And so, yeah, I mean, it was a little overwhelming, but what drives you is the simple fact that Native people are, they've been marginalized, the edge of society. They're not part of mainstream. This isn't their justice system either, you know. This isn't, you know, the whole government infrastructure. It's not their government, you know. And they're more or less dragged into it from time to time. A lot of them don't even want to go to hospitals because they just don't get treated very good there. And so, being kind of a guide a little bit in the system, that's what they, that's why they came. They, so I get called to schools to talk, you know. And I began to get parents coming in and saying, could you talk to my son, tell him to smarten up, and I'd be like, well, how do I get this wrong? Steve Point is going to talk to you, you know, I'm going to go straight to their kids now. And yeah, it was an odd place to be, but you're dealing, Aboriginal people, they're oppressed, they're poor, they're shell shot from colonialism, they're mean, you know, so your office is a lawyer and you become someone that can help them. And so, that's what I become. Steve is a simple fact that there's a lot of bad things that happen to many people that they need help with. There's no agreement there to give them that help. Except for the court. My court workers are good, I mean, when you're in court they help you with that. But after that, there's not a lot of, at least when I was there, there were very, very few native people in the system working for the neighbors. There's not just the sort of an awesome weight that's sort of put onto you too and high expectation. It was good though. And I was doing much really good. Okay, one final kind of question. Kind of two parts. What do you think are the most important issues in Aboriginal law today? And where do you see or where do you want Aboriginal law to go in the future? Well, the most important issue I think in Aboriginal law is the definition of around a theory, at least about what Aboriginal title is. I mean, we've really, since St. Catherine's Millings, we've kind of moved the mark up lawyers and judges have. You know, it started out as a use of fracturing right. And now it's something, not total ownership, but something a little less than ownership with expanded rights. And the right to be consulted or there's some infringement. There's right to possession to hold on to the land and expanded fisheries rights, fishing rights on the sparing decision. Yeah, there's been a great movement I think in the law in regards to the definition of Aboriginal title. And that's clear. I think that what's happening in political realm though is from any international realm is informative because they're moving towards something like co-sovereignty, something that helps the flesh out of different theories of Aboriginal. The courts need to catch up with that somehow and we need to find a way of conceptualizing that so that it fits the framework of the gay constitution. I think where Aboriginal law needs to go though, particularly in the area of family law and in the area of property law, it's the whole idea of clarifying and formulating, bringing Aboriginal traditional legal systems into the judicial and the Canadian law system somehow. I was thinking about writing a paper, and I still might, but the title of it, what is it that Aboriginal communities, that Aboriginal Turtle Island, Native people, what have they brought to the justice system? Right. What we brought to the justice system is our perspective, our worldview, which is quite different from your view. Out of that worldview comes our traditions, our legal traditions around how we resolve conflict, how we deal with bad people, for example. So our legal traditions inform things like family and children that are in need, that sort of thing. And that sort of thing needs to sort of, we need to bring some of those things, unpack them in the justice system and find a respectful place for them in the justice system without necessarily creating another silo called Aboriginal justice. I think that if they can do that, then eventually maybe they will have their own justice system. But for now, I think what we need to go through is to begin to define and to unpack the whole question or the whole area called traditional legal, traditional Aboriginal justice, to see what that looks like and what we need to try to find a place for. Do you think a lot of, like, seeing what that looks like is working outside of the court system first and then, or does it kind of coexist at the same time? Well, take the area, for example, and I had this court case happening a while ago where children are being taken from a mother, right? And normally you'd go into court and call the social worker and the social worker would say what's going on in the family and why they think the child is in distress. Then the lawyer for the family would come forward and say, okay, this is what the mother thinks, this is what the mother plans to do, how she wants to improve her life to get her children back or whatever. Well, that's based on the definition of what a family is from a European perspective. We've got a family from Aberdeen, that includes everybody, everybody that's connected to the family, grandparents, uncles and aunts, neighbors, this is their family. And that sort of process of conflict resolution isn't adversarial, it's circular. It's like they begin to talk together in a circle to understand what needs to happen. And when you allow that to happen, as I did in this case in Haida Gwai, I moved the hearing out to the old massive hall and we sat all day and listened to witnesses from the neighborhood. The bus driver came and gave us this motion, they opened it with a prayer and the elders had their button blankets on. It was like they kind of took over this hearing about the mother. And at the end of the day we heard great things about the mother, how she was being supplied with deer meat and cockles and clams by neighbors, how she would go clean houses, how she had so much work to do. And, you know, it was the community that stepped forward and said, this is how this should be fixed. And it was fixed that way. The next day the lawyers came in and said, we're going to do this, this doesn't have to proceed. And the children are going to go back to the mother. And so when the justice system allows itself to make respectful space for Aboriginal traditions, right, and allow that tradition to sort of play out within the judicial system, you can come up with a different solution, you can come up with a different place than just, well, the mother can have her children back in six months if she does this, this, and this. It's like a sentence from a youth court, you know. And so I find that that's important, right, that's really important. The other area is when moms and dads decide to go their own way, and they've got kids on the reserve, and they've got a house, a car, a property. There isn't any real, you know, the Family Relations Act doesn't apply on the reserve with property, and the federal government doesn't have any division of assets. And often the mother will get removed from the reserve because she's un-membered there. Or the father won't. So there isn't any rules around the division of assets, and it creates a very bad situation, right, where, you know, if they did have rules that were traditional to that community, that would be respectful, then, you know, there would be a way to fill that void right now, which is a void. So, yeah, I think there's areas like that. Criminal law, I mean, not everybody needs to go to jail. We've always talked about the rights of the offender and the rights of the victims, right? And what I've done in some of my cases is to bring them together in a room and sit them down and say, well, how do we solve this, right? You know, because you've got to go back to that community. You've got to live there. And when you give voice to the circle and you implement what the circle is talking about, you actually can come up with different solutions again. Solutions that make sense within that community, not in Vancouver or Abbots River, in that community. It makes sense there, you know. So, yeah, when you make respectful space for Aboriginal law traditions, you end up in a different place where I think it makes more sense for Aboriginal communities.