 Good evening and welcome. It's a pleasure to be able to extend a warm welcome to each and every one of you for this 41st annual Forestry Memorial Lecture. And I'll begin by acknowledging that we're all gathered here this evening on traditional, non-cedent territory. We have an excellent array of lectures here at the Schulitz School of Law. And of all those, this is one that has been with us for the longest period of time. The Reed Lecture was established to honor the memory of Horace Reed, who was the Dean of the Law School from 1950 to 1964. The lecture series was established as a joint project of the Reed Family and the Law School. And I'm very pleased to say that we have members of the Reed Family here today, Dr. Robert Reed and Ms. Michelle Rand. It's a pleasure to have you here, as usual. Yes, we should applaud each other. Horace Reed lived a rich academic life and a life committed to public service. He enlisted during the First World War. He served as chair of the Regulation and Regulation Committee with the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War, as a longtime member of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board, a longtime member of the Conference of Governing Bodies of the Legal Profession and the Conference of Commissions on the Uniformity of Legislation, honorary president of the Nova Scotia Barrister Society in 1966 and 67, and as a Canadian delegate to the Conference on Private International Law at the Hague in 1968. Not only is he remembered for this remarkable life of public service, he's also remembered following with great respect for his scholarly achievements and his contributions as a teacher and as the Dean of this Law School. He had an editorial written in 1975 in the Halifax Herald, as an analyst. His life as a scholar was described in the following way. Horace Emerson Reed, there's a lot of letters coming, O-C-O-B-E-Q-C-B-A-L-L-B-L-L-M-S-J-D-L-L-D, former Dean of Dalhousie Law School and a legal scholar and law teacher, top law with all of the authority of a profound and mature scholar of international renown. But he always brought to this teaching the benevolence and humanity which were among his most admirable qualities. Kindly and adaptable, readily available to students and colleagues alike. He presided as being over a lengthy period of unparalleled expansion and development of the Faculty of Law and marked it firmly with his philosophy and his objectives. In recognition of all of his remarkable achievements, Dr. Reed was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1973. Among his other honours are honorary degrees from Acadia, Queens, Dalhousie and Windsor universities. Horace Reed began his teaching career in Minnesota but eventually answered the call to return to Dalhousie. I think he did that for the climate as dean. We're very glad that he did and we're pleased to be able to honor him with this lecture series. This year we're delighted to have as our lead lecturer Professor Val Napoleon. Professor Napoleon holds a research chair at the University of Victoria Law School. The title of her chair is Law Foundation Professor of Aboriginal Justice and Governance. She comes from Northern British Columbia, 3T8 and is a member of the SOTO, First Nation. She's also an adopted member of the Gidscan House of Luxon, Canada Frog Clan. Prior to joining the Faculty of Law at UVIC in 2012, Professor Napoleon was cross-appointed with the faculties of Native Studies and Law at the University of Alberta. Professor Napoleon's current research focuses on Indigenous legal traditions, Indigenous feminism, citizenship, self-determination and governance. Some of her major initiatives include the JDJID, Joint JD and Indigenous Law degree program, a very exciting new initiative, and establishing the Indigenous Law Research Unit with a number of research partnerships with Indigenous communities and groups in British Columbia, across Canada and also internationally. Some of this group's projects are a two-year Indigenous, non-Indigenous water law research project and work on gender and Indigenous law, dispute resolution, Indigenous lands and resources and human rights in Indigenous law. Professor Napoleon has taught and published on Aboriginal legal issues, Indigenous law and legal theories, Indigenous feminism, governance, critical restorative justice, oral traditions, Indigenous legal research methodologies and property law. It's my pleasure to be able to introduce her this evening. The title of her lecture and it's a title I'm very jealous of, it's just a beautiful title. As you see it here, he's dropping a meeting of Grandmother Ravens convened at the graveyard to discuss Indigenous law. So that's my introduction. I'm now happy to hand things over to Professor Napoleon. Thank you so much for that introduction. And I'm grateful to be on these historic and present-day lands of Mi'kmaq people. Thank you for this opportunity to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of the Read Lecture series. And also the start of the Kawaskaman moot and you can feel the energy in the room. So this is this is lovely, really lovely to be here. So here's the thing. The work that I do is the most exciting work on the planet. I get to work with Indigenous law in all different kinds of ways. And I'm going to share that with you tonight. So the way I'm going to do that is to sound okay? Can people hear me? Okay, the back, okay. So I'm going to engage with a number of thorny issues that arise from this work of rebuilding and restating Indigenous law. We can see from the Indigenous legal discourse that there are lots of really important questions that are generated in this work. And some of these are delicious and rich. Others are fraught and uncomfortable. Some are tentative and exploratory. And still others are hard-edged and declaratory. So how might we explore these issues and questions? And maybe before I go any further, I'll introduce these ravens that you see on the PowerPoint. You're going to see a lot of them tonight. These are my paintings of Grandmother Ravens. They are born and reborn of Indigenous feminism from around the world. And they're tricksters who, as we know, are the first law teachers for many Indigenous societies. And they teach us by slapping us upside the head, by sometimes they're very kind to us. And other times, you know, there's humor and there's love. And that's the way that they teach. And so they'll be joining us on our talk tonight. So exploring the issues and questions. What's our way in to the conversations? How do we remain necessarily critical and respectful in our debates? How do we get past some of the existing sites of paralysis, the romanticization, the wishful thinking, the unhelpful dichotomies, and the simplifications? There's still silencing that happens, because we're, we have lots to learn yet. And so to set us up for tonight's talk and to get us on the same page, I want to introduce some elements of Indigenous law as a starting place. So wherever you go in Canada, there is a legal order. And the question is, which legal order is in that place where you're at? Is it with Sultan? Is it Sikwetmek, Mi'gma, Chimxian, Kree, Gixxan? There's a legal order that's in that place. And the second question, the second question is, what's the legal issue according to that legal order? We know that we can't just ask general questions of Canadian law. We need to think about what's a legal issue and what concerns this legal order? How do I frame the questions I'm asking of that legal order so that so that is cognizable according to those legal perspectives? Who are the Indigenous authoritative decision makers? And there are different numbers of decision makers depending on the legal tradition that you're looking at. So for instance, with the Kree legal tradition, there are four decision making groups. There are elders and medicine people. There's the community. There's families. There's there's also the individuals depending on elders. So the way that they participate in the decision making depends on the legal issue that's that's before them. And also, what's at stake with that legal issue? So for instance, the elders, when they're engaging in legal decisions and fulfilling that responsibility will be declarative. If there's danger, if there's community danger involved, but if there's no community danger, then there'll be persuasive. So there's a lot of nuance in terms of how is it that the decision makers are responsible and how do they engage? What are the legal institutions? Law only operates through legal institutions that humans create. So what are they? And likely, if it's a different legal tradition, we'll learn to see different forms of legal institutions, those perhaps that we're not familiar with. What are the legitimate legal processes for determining legal responses? And what are the what's the range of legal responses, according to that indigenous law? So it's not enough, the same with any other legal tradition, it's not enough to know what the law is, you have to know what to do when the law is broken. And when we look at the range of responses, these include remedies, they include sanctions. And when there's more than one people involved, then there's there's what we have to think about are the relationships between legal orders? How do people relate across legal orders? And we were international peoples on a great Turtle Island. So we do have those as part of our legal traditions. So no legal order is complete without sanctions and remedies or ways to enforce their laws. We know that indigenous law hasn't gone anywhere in Canada. And it's a multi juridical Canada. But we also know that indigenous law has been undermined. There are gaps. There is no complete functioning legal order ready to spring to life with mere recognition. The work today is fundamentally about rebuilding our indigenous legal orders. And that's what we see taking place across Canada. That's the most exciting work on the planet is being able to do that. So as was mentioned in the introduction, I'm the director of the indigenous law research unit and the indigenous law degree program. And I'm going to provide some information about both of those a little later tonight. For now, though, what I propose to do is to employ an innovative device called eavesdropping. And many say that eavesdropping has a bad name. But others argue that it actually makes us better people. Think of children sitting quietly under kitchen tables or under quilting frames. They are listening to adults. They are learning how to be in the world through social comparison by listening. Now, it is the case that while we expect children to listen, we are also taken aback when they repeat things we didn't expect them to hear or that we didn't want them to hear. And interestingly, we don't want to hear the conversations that are too loud. Think about those loud cell phone conversations that we've all been unwanted. We didn't want to be a part of those. So we find loud conversations intrusive. We want to hear quiet conversations. We tune in to quiet voices. The best eavesdropping is when we have to strain just a little bit to catch what those voices are saying. And children do listen to everything whether we notice or not. One example is one of my grandsons. Last year, his mother asked him about his day in preschool. And he said that he had been talking with his best friend Sasha. What about asked Sasha to talk to his mother? And Elijah very casually said, indigenous law. Obviously, he had been listening. So he was sitting beside me as his mother recounted this. And he looked up at me and he said, well, it is a lot of work. And I have to wonder what I was saying. But anyway. So for the purposes of this talk, I'm suggesting we all embrace eavesdropping as a particular form of legal research that will allow us to reflect on some of the pressing, surprising, and not so surprising indigenous legal issues that are emerging today. Some of these are gendered politics, heteronormativity, and all that those involved. There's also power imbalances and internal oppressions that our communities struggle with. There's differing expectations and differing definitions about what indigenous law is. In the same way that our law schools have libraries full of different opinions about state law, common law, civil law, Roman law, and so on. And there's access to justice questions. There's reconciliation questions. And there's questions about what really goes on in a trans-systemic classroom. So these are some of the questions that we'll look at. And when we look at those, where might we find a conversation that takes up some of these very delicious but complicated questions? Where can we eavesdrop on such a conversation? Let's start here. Six indigenous women were buried in the Ross Bay cemetery in Victoria in the early 1800s. These women were married into the five founding families of Victoria. And for an all-to-brief period of time, they were politically, economically, legally, and socially very important. When I look at this graveyard now, and since this is Victoria, there are often deer that are snoozing and resting against the tombstones. Anyway, so I imagine the spirits of these indigenous women today as taking the form of Grandmother Ravens. I imagine them as contemporary indigenous feminist tricksters. Who are these women? And I'd like to thank Sylvia van Perk, a wonderful woman for her work and her book Many Tender Ties. There's Emilia, a Cree woman from Fort Churchill. There's Josette, a Coast Salish woman from Washington. Isabella, an Anishinaabic woman from the Great Lakes. There's Matilda, a Haida woman from Haida Gwai, or the Queen Charlotte Islands. There's Nishaki, a Niska woman from Northwest British Columbia. There's Sophia, a Sokopak woman from the interior of BC near Kamloops. Let's imagine listening in to these Grandmother Ravens while they're having a heart-to-heart, or a mind-to-mind. What might we learn? Now, to help this imaginary, the Raw Space Cemetery is located along the ocean. There are twisted gary oaks. There's elegant elms, graceful evergreens. All of these amazing trees provide shade. It's beautiful of rain or shine, whether it's windy, whether it's misty, and the lovely sea breezes are enjoyed by the lounging deer. Now listen, lean in close because they're not talking very loudly. These Grandmother Ravens have gathered for their weekly chew of the fat and they're looking forward to a good debate in a juicy gossip. They perch on the carved granite stones near the center of the graveyard and they're wearing brightly colored scarves, a form of grandmother signatures. They are rather formidable. With them is a younger Raven. She's a Grandmother Raven in training and she's wearing a stylish cowboy hat and cowboy boots with turquoise trim and her name is Tamara. So Amelia, Josette, Isabella, Matilda, Neshaki, and Sophia begin with the usual Raven mutterings about their, as they settle into their respective positions. They eye each other, they look down their long beets at the snoozing deer, and they're especially looking sideways at the western outfit sported by the in-training Grandmother Raven. Neshaki asks, Tamara, what's up with the cowboy look? You trying to tell us something? Neshaki adjusts her bright blue scarf. Tamara is unperturbed. I'm just resisting the Grandmother stereotypes. As long as it doesn't affect your thinking laughs, Josette. Tamara sniffs and she stares hard at Josette just for a moment. Amelia begins the gathering. I've been following some of the things that have been happening with indigenous law over the last while. I think we should talk about the need for respectful debate and disagreement in the indigenous legal discourse. And we should talk about some of the indigenous gender politics that are playing out across the land. Matilda pipes up. I think we should talk about the indigenous law degree program at the University of Victoria and some of the recent concerns about the recording of indigenous law. Isabella is nodding the tassels on her red scarf in agreement too. Don't forget access to justice and reconciliation. Tamara is getting excited. There's a pipeline that's happening or proposed in northern BC and there's a huge conflict with the Whitsawitian people. Shouldn't we be paying attention to the current conflicts where these issues are played out on the ground, especially when they're so complicated. Sophia pitches in. That is lots. We don't want to be here until next week. I have places to go, people to see. Amelia, there are lots of ways of researching and teaching and working with indigenous law and we are seeing this now across Canada. But we are not seeing any real discussions across the differences. Why is that? Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars have different approaches and are saying different things, but not to each other. Sometimes this is not so positive. Are they afraid to disagree or to debate? Isabella, I wonder if indigenous legal scholars know how to disagree openly or positively. Maybe this has something to do with historic societal ethics and maybe it has something to do with a loss of our practices of civility because we sure have deeply sedimented conflict in our communities and our organizations. Matilda almost squacks. What the heck? Are you saying we're not civilized? Are you agreeing with a colonizer of yesteryear now? Isabella, quit getting over yourself. You, Haida, are so darn sensitive. Geez, I'm talking about the practices of civility that are an integral part of our historic legal traditions, whether we are Haida, Cree, Sikwepmek, whatever. When our legal traditions and laws were undermined, we lost some of our legal practices. She continues, this is not just politeness, but rather practices of civil engagement that allow for different voices and perspectives, fairness and inclusion, ways of creating space for different opinions, and when necessary to resolve differences without violence. It is these practices of civility that allow us to hold our differences outside ourselves. Without this ability, we take everything as a personal attack, and then we make personal attacks on others. Amelia is shaking her head. I see so many conflicted communities and they get so paralyzed. I know conflict is to be human. We need to restore not just practices of civility, but our laws so that we have legitimate and constructive processes of conflict management. Sophia asks, are you saying that Indigenous scholars are afraid of disagreement? Amelia, that's part of it, but there is also the matter of deep societal ethics regarding how to respond and how to engage with conflict. Conflict avoidance is one such ethic. I heard that Anishinaabek and Kree peoples are particularly problematic on this front. Don't forget, I can say that because I am Kree. Anyway, conflict avoidance only worked when you could just move away, but our communities are now geographically pinned, so it just makes things worse. Do Indigenous scholars still think they have to put up a united front when non-Indigenous people are around? As ravens, we don't mind conflict and we deal with it directly, so we're both smart and productive. However, it seems that Indigenous peoples and scholars have to re-learn practices of civility so that they can productively disagree. It would sure make the discourse more exciting and maybe more creative too. And most importantly, it would help to ensure that Indigenous law that is being rebuilt is healthy and not stuck in the past. Sophia, you know the problem is real simple. Conflict is uncomfortable, so we avoid it. And are we done with this issue now? Geez, we're kind of, you know, okay. Sexism and gender politics, nishaki, clears your throat. Okay then, I want to discuss Indigenous sexism and gender politics. Indigenous women have finally been speaking up about sexism everywhere, and Indigenous gays, lesbian, and trans folk have been challenging Indigenous heteronormativity too. For the most part, there's still shameless sexism in Indigenous communities and in Indigenous politics. One of the problems is that it gets reproduced by Indigenous people wherever they go, in universities or organizations and in other places. You mean the LGBTQ community, nishaki? You know what really gets me are some of the justifications for Indigenous sexism and the ways that gendered politics gets framed and limited. Nishaki is speaking loudly. I heard that Val Napoleon talking about a missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls inquiry. She said a couple of things that I thought were important, but she really does get carried away, doesn't she? She said that Indigenous societies were lawful precisely because, like every other society, we have always had to deal with universal human violence and vulnerabilities. Our laws are societally determined and we have different legal orders, but our laws still function as laws. So all of us were part of lawful societies. Niska, Sikwepek, Anasinabek, Coast Salish? Well, we already knew that. Anyway, she said that today the problem is that while our laws have not gone anywhere, there are gaps and there are distortions. Where there are gaps and where Canadian law has failed has created spaces of lawlessness and violence happens in these spaces, whether in Indigenous or non-Indigenous communities, whether in cities or in rural Canada. The most vulnerable pay the price, usually women and girls. Rebuilding lawfulness is necessary to stopping the pervasive violence. Josette, I just heard an argument from an Indigenous male elder in Edmonton that Indigenous men go missing and are murdered too. He was saying that there should not be a focus on Indigenous women. Also, at an early meeting of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, it was decided to focus on Indigenous families, not Indigenous women. This was despite arguments from Indigenous women that often the families weren't safe for them. It just makes me crazy. Isabella, we've talked about this before. We know that both men and women suffer the consequences of colonization, but that Indigenous women and girls suffer additional harms because of our gender. We are not murdering each other. I thought we were going to talk about the reproduction of Indigenous sexist dynamics. Nishaki, we are, but we have to look at what is being reproduced. For instance, some of the justifications for sexism just creates more essentializations of Indigenous women and more cultural stereotypes. For instance, there are those that argue that sexism was created by colonization, and some interpret this to mean that we don't have to do anything except to return to former times. This is a problem because many of our societies were sexist, and even if we weren't, we still have to deal with very real sexism today. All of it is harmful. Think of a spectrum. At one end are the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. At the other end are the essentialized stereotypes. All the way along the spectrum are decisions and actions that have very real and material consequences that are gendered. Most of these have to do with the policing of Indigenous women's behaviors and clothing. Think of the skirt. This is really hard for women to talk about in case we're accused of trying to be white. Matilda, you go girl. So let's start with what's happening in universities. I heard that Indigenous male professors are imbued with more authority by students than Indigenous female professors. You know, this sounds remarkably similar to what's going on with non-Indigenous professors with some of the same results. Josette, Psy, this is really depressing. Is this true? Everybody should watch, but I was wearing a suit to hear about the experiences of Indigenous women lawyers. It includes some Indigenous men's experiences too. There we are. Tamara, but how do we deal with this? Assuming that Indigenous men are the authorities is pretty hardwired. How do you get past these insidious assumptions? Matilda, I think we just have to keep talking about it rather than pretending it doesn't exist. I don't know any other way, but it's really discouraging. I think the fact that sexism is still mainly shameless in Indigenous communities makes reproducing Indigenous sexism at the university level easier, invisible, and harder to challenge. And Indigenous men have a role in challenging it too. We are done with this issue for now, at least until we have some constructive suggestions for how to deal with it. Sophia, this is where we see a lot of differing opinions. But first, what does recording Indigenous law actually mean? When we think of this, it turns out to be a really complicated question. First, it depends on which of the 55 odd or Indigenous societies across Canada that you're talking about and at what point in history are you asking the question? Second, it depends on who's asking the question and what her legal lens enables her to see. For example, does she have a civil or a common law lens, a Cree lens, a Tokotin lens, or a combination of lenses? Now, I'm going to talk for a while, so just sit back, because this is a really important national and international issue. My starting place is that all law is recorded, whether it's past or present, whether it's Indigenous or non-Indigenous, state law or non-state law, formal or informal, and there are the critiques. The first, there's the critique that recording Indigenous law in written form will damage it, thereby causing it to lose depth and meaning. Second, that recording Indigenous law is to disembodied it from the land which gave rise to the law and caused it to lose its meaning and be distorted. Third, that recording Indigenous law will decontextualize it from its spiritual moorings and cause it to become entirely intellectual rather than holistic or embodied. And finally, that Indigenous law must be expressed in its original language in order to be properly conveyed and understood. While these assumptions are problematic, they do contain grains of truth and those must be considered in the research, in the restatement, and in the practice of Indigenous law. However, what's troubling is that these critiques reflect a narrow conception of law and they have an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism. For one thing, they contain assumptions about Indigenous law's former purity prior to colonization or at least prior to writing it down, and hence law can be corrupted by this textual form. Another assumption is that Indigenous peoples did not historically employ rigorous analytical reasoning as part of their legal intellectual traditions. And there is a very limiting assumption that the unchanging nature of law through time and to the present day, as if law has been the same for 10,000 years. Sadly, this turns law into a cultural artifact with notions of authenticity. It's a foundation of fundamentalism. These critiques can stop conversations and in doing so, they obscure power dynamics regarding, especially those regarding gender. To properly consider the critiques about recording, it's helpful to consider Indigenous law in its broadest sense. According to John Merriman, legal traditions are deeply rooted and they comprise a number of assumptions. And attitudes about the nature of law, the role of law in society, and the political order, about the proper organization and the operation of the legal system, and about the ways that law should be taught, the ways it should be made, applied, studied, and perfected. It's a huge construct. So from this larger perspective, however and however law is recorded, it's still part of something much larger. That something much larger is integral to all aspects of governance for each society. Historically, most Indigenous peoples in Canada were non-state, meaning that political and legal authorities were distributed horizontally, operating through decentralized institutions. The relationships that mattered were horizontal, not vertical, the way that Indigenous communities today are hardwired to the Canadian state through legal history, legislation, and funding. As with state societies, Indigenous law is also a public collaborative process that operates through legal institutions. And to apply law, one draws from patterns and dissimilarities of past applications. Interpretive choices of precedent are made on a case-by-case basis. And for this to be possible, there has to be a legal memory or precedent that's publicly available. Law does not interpret itself. Only people interpret and reason through legal problems. This means that law must continually exist in accessible memory, organized and recorded in different forms of precedent so that it can be applied in the everyday, thereby creating new precedents for future legal problem solving. Historically and today, recording law has been necessary or is necessary for the rebuilding that's going on. It's a way of creating local accessible legal resources. Questions of the what, the why's and the how's must be carefully considered in the essential rebuilding. So if we look at the questions of recording Indigenous law, let's take a look at a specific example with the Gixxan peoples in northwest British Columbia. This will make the issue of recording less abstract. So historically, the Gixxan organized their laws in four different kinds of oral traditions. First, there's their Daoic. These are collective oral histories. They're formal and they're the intellectual institution that each matrilineal house group owns. It's the Daoic that links the people to its territories and establishes ownership over those territories and the resources. The Daoic goes back tens of thousands of years. It tells the origins and the migrations of each group to their current territories and covenants are established with the land, with the songs, through the crests and through the names. These result from the spiritual connection between people and their land. Second, is the Antimalasks. These are the stories that are collective properties of all the people. There are other forms of oral histories. Some are general reminiscences and others are actual cases. These are are recounted in order to apply to current problems. Gixxan law is also recorded in crests, in songs, in kinship relationships, in chiefs names, in place names and in legal practices such as poll raising. The structure of argument for the Gixxan, the structure of legal argument, requires that you recount where you learned something, who you learned it from, and when you learned it. So the Daoic, the formal collectively owned oral histories, are recounted and witnessed at feasts. The feast itself is a complex legal, economic and social institutions, in which the main business of the hosting house is transacted and formally witnessed by the other houses. So we can learn, what can we learn from this tiny backdrop of the Gixxan? The first lesson is that there's many ways to record law. The second might not be so obvious and that this is, we have to learn how to see law, we have to learn how to reason with it, how to apply it and how to record it for future recall. In other words, to work with this legal order, you have to have a Gixxan legal education and Gixxan children, their legal education starts in infancy. So Denim Gett is a hereditary chief. He explained that when he was a tiny child at the end of the day, his grandparents would bring him in and he would have a recount what happened throughout his day. This meant that amongst other things, he had to pay attention during the day. He had to increase his memory capacity and develop and hone his skills as a thinker and as an orator. These are the legal capacities that are necessary for Denim Gett to be able to be a hereditary chief and to be able to recount the full and extensive of doubt of his lineage to serve as a witness for businesses at feast and to recall precedent for future album solving. This is all part of Gixxan legal education for Denim Gett and for others to be effective individual and collective legal actors through the house groups and through the clans. While Denim Gett is an important hereditary chief, he is also able to write and read in English and in Gixxan. He operates fully in Canadian society. He worked as a millwright for years. He, along with over a hundred Gixxan with Sultan, hereditary chiefs were expert witnesses in the seminal title court action of Delgaru. Denim Gett was also one of the founders of the Gixxan Immersion Preschool, the Hopesu Olaxo Hopeson Gett, where he helped to develop extensive written texts on all subjects of Gixxan curricula in English and in Gixxan. He has tremendous pragmatic efforts in the major court action and as an educator involved many ways of recording Gixxan for his larger political project, establishing Gixxan title and protecting and teaching Gixxan knowledge and language. So while Denim Gett has a Gixxan legal education, most younger Gixxan people do not and many do not speak Gixxan. Texts and other forms of media are now common place for education and entertainment. My point is that insisting on orality and historic methods of recording only work when all of those historic societal elements form the context. When people do not have the historic Gixxan education that Denim Gett has, then texts, including audio-visual media, are important additions to supplement Gixxan law and legal education. That's what Denim Gett recognized. My goodness, Joseph, take a breath. Did you get every little idea out there? Joseph told me such a smartass. I just did my homework. Amelia, who's been looking into the Indigenous Law degree program? Tamara pipes up. That would be me. I've actually been thinking I've been rolling next September, but let me explain. This is actually a joint degree program over four years and students will get close to Indigenous Law degree and Common Law degree. It's much easier to just say J-I-D. J is Tamara. Could you just get on with it? Sophia is getting fidgety and grumpy and her scarf is fidgety too. Now let's leave the grandmother Ravens to their conversations for a bit now. The Indigenous Law degree program, as Dean Cameron said, the first of its kind in the world. We accepted 26 students this past September and in this coming September we're going to accept another 25. My colleague, David Milberg, is here. He's teaching in the program to increase criminal law. It's over four years and we'll be working with selected legal orders. I mentioned increased criminal law but there's also Anishinaabe constitutional law. I teach Kixang property law. It's alongside Canadian or the Common Law program. There's legal process and research and writing and there's all the subjects have the corresponding Canadians with the subjects. They're being taught similarly or they're inspired by the teaching by the civil and common law trans-sustainable education at McGill. Next year the first cohort will take Coast Salish tort law as well as Indigenous contracts and administrative law and other available upper-year courses and which legal traditions will be involved there is dependent on current hiring. In the third and fourth years students will have field schools and these are being organized with the Indigenous communities. So it's really really exciting times because we're we're learning a lot as we teach. So there's some other related issues here that I just want to go through so that would have been helpful. So what you see now is a is an overall representation of the work of the Indigenous Law Research Unit and the Indigenous Law 101. So we work we have been working across Canada. We work by invitation only and we work on subjects or questions that the community that's invited us wants to focus on and we work in partnership with that community. Each research project takes about 18 to 24 months. We have lots of people working on those projects we have. Some of our students are here that have been involved with our work and we start every workshop with a three-day workshop or pardon me we start every project with a three-day workshop. This chart is actually a three-day workshop. So we've now work we've been in partnership with over 50 communities we've had over 400 community members go through the workshops with us and so there's not only a tremendous hunger and uptake for this work across Canada it's also international. So we have requests from Australia, Norway, Peru like everywhere around the globe and so there's people that wanted to learn how to do Indigenous law degrees but also learning how do you do their research that supports the teaching in those law degree programs. The different kinds of subject areas that we work with have been lands and resources, water, dispute resolution, child welfare, governance. We've also just launched a new project on human rights so there's a whole range of different subject areas that we have worked with and are working with. We produce reports of Indigenous law reports. There are about 100 to 300 pages and these are owned by the communities and we get to share them with the communities get us permission to. So what you see on this chart is on your left right, sorry. We start with ideas about law. What is it? How do we understand law as a human collaborative mode of governance that it affects and involves how people make decisions and manage the sounds over time. So and part of the reason that we spend time just exploring and thinking about different ways of managing ourselves over in large groups is because there are sometimes very narrow ideas about what law means. So many Indigenous peoples for instance think that law looks like the worst part of community law. That's been their experience with law and so what we have to do is expand that. We have to push back against those limitations. The methodology, there are different parts to the methodology. As I've mentioned, we start with a specific research question. We look at existing resources which include oral histories, songs, other kinds of materials that people make available both that are already published. We analyze systematically, analyze materials and we synthesize them. It's an intensely iterative process with kitchen table discussions about how we work with stories about what we're seeing as patterns or what we see as dissimilarities. So all of this is pulled together in a report and then people can start thinking about how do you use this to relate to Canada or to design a policy or to design a program. So that's the methodology and that's as I mentioned, labor intensive. There's different applications. We have for instance the water project, the two-year water project that we've started. We're working in three regions of water scarcity. We're researching the Indigenous law from those regions. It's Cowichan, Lower Simucame, and the Tilquatine as well as the non-indigenous water users and colonial law and with that overall research we're putting together management systems for the protection and stewardship of water over time. So there's the application of law, like Indigenous law, has to deal with the messiness of collective human life. It has to deal with the mundane, not just the exciting things. So I mentioned the different resources that we draw on and then there are the different sources of law. We understand where Canadian law comes from but we also need to think about where does Indigenous law come from. So this draws on the work of John Burroughs and he sets out five sources and then I've added social interaction as another way to understand the source of law. So up until recently we were the only Indigenous law research unit in Canada and now there's a new research unit in Alberta with the faculty of law at the University of Alberta. So we're really excited about that. We're really hoping that there'll be one starting here with the human experience law and we're supporting whenever we can. We support others to try and get this work going elsewhere. We've been providing a lot of support, for instance, to folks in Sydney, Australia because they're really wanting to get the work going there. I wanted to, in the time that the few units that I have, just talk about some of the other issues. So Indigenous human rights, one of the arguments that you hear sometimes against Indigenous law is that it's going to violate human rights. The other notion is that Indigenous peoples didn't have concepts of human rights within their legal traditions and so we've just put together a major project, a two-year project, we'll be working with the pick sound and it'll be pick sound women who are running the project and we're also working in the Yukon with a John Dick kitchen on human rights and so we've been looking at understanding of dignity and legal agency and fairness and inclusion and all of the other kinds of things that are an important part of these discussions. In the work so far, you know, it's looking at who's the rights holder and how does the rights get responded to and part of that is thinking through the horizontal systems as opposed to the vertical systems. In Canada, you have a direct relationship between the individual and the state so that works differently in Indigenous societies. In looking at the work of Sally Engo-Marie who's done a lot of work around the globe with violence against women and focusing on how to understand that violence against women as human rights. What she says is that unless people can see themselves as mattering to the legal institutions in their world, unless people can have positive responses from those legal institutions whether it's the police or the courts or the probation or social workers or whoever, if they don't have that positive response they're not going to understand themselves as rights bearers and they're not going to understand themselves as mattering and they won't seek help. And so when we think about that and we think about Indigenous law, we have to ask what are Indigenous women and girls experiences with Indigenous law? Do they feel like they matter? Do we know what the Indigenous language for the terms for evasion is or sexual assault and if we don't why don't we? So that's part of the homework effect that we have to do. On the question of access to justice, Chief Justice Beverly McLaughlin, former Chief Justice Beverly McLaughlin said in Saskatoon a few years ago that access to justice in Canada means Indigenous legal orders and law. That that has to be a part of our understanding of Canada if there's going to be access to justice here. My colleague Jerry McHale has looked at research around the globe and part of the findings that they're seeing is that when people don't feel like they can have access to then again the concepts of justice or institutions of justice that society starts to fragment and I think that that has been part of what's been contributing to the problems in many of our communities. I've already mentioned the water project. With the conflicts on the land I think that the biggest challenge for all of us is to create space in those conflicts for Indigenous law. Again the legal characterization of the issues and the processes and so what this means is not foreclosing the Indigenous legal reasoning which would actually solve the problems rather than just declaring what the law is. There has to be an actual inclusive way of tackling what the problems are and then figuring out how does that relate to Canada. So the research unit we provide create and provide a lot of different kinds of legal resources including Indigenous law on demand which is available on YouTube and we're we're just putting together another graphic narrative some of you may have seen one called microposas there's a teaching guide for that there's gender toolkits large amount of property and so on but we've just finished almost finished a script for Coast Salish Water Law and we'll be doing a teaching guide for that and that will be available too. On the question of reconciliation there has to be there has to be space in reconciliation for Indigenous law otherwise Canadian law will be the default will be the terms of reference for for what reconciliation means and so I advocate for this because as I said earlier Indigenous law and other law is a distinct mode of governance it's central to being a people and if you think for just a tiny minute but all of the ways that Canadian law is a part of your life in terms of where you work how you work you're driving to work kids marriages and so on all of the ways that Indigenous law or Canadian law should say is a part of our identities in Canada that's those are all of the reasons that Indigenous law is important for Indigenous people it's central to human existence and to human beings living together so there's conflict in communities and there's relations of power and there are structured ways I think for our communities to engage with that this is some of the work that we do in the community workshops no matter where we are in those relations of power we have a role to play and the last thing is that law is fundamentally about citizenship for Indigenous peoples this is about rebuilding Indigenous citizenries and so drawing on the work in Latin America of taking dangerous things dangerous places and rebuilding citizenries so that they're safe for people I think that we might be able to learn from some of those examples for our communities because of the levels of violence not at all but in some of our communities there's there's things that we can draw from and with that I would like to thank Joseph and Amelia and Isabella and Matilda and the Shaki and Sophia for being with us tonight and one last word my job so just recently he announced to me that he's already a lawyer inspired so what he's decided is that his mom's a lawyer his dad's a lawyer and I have a lawyer so it's hereditary and I wonder if you have any questions far to see thank you so much for your words we've already met my name is Stephen Bustle I'm a lawyer and I'm a founder and my question is relates to accessibility I would argue generally that the Canadian law is very inaccessible it's very hard to understand the language you start to understand something I've been noticing with Indigenous people scholars and conversations with other Indigenous people is that we're tripping in that direction our language is getting very inaccessible it seems like we're talking to each other and my question is how do we stay away from that how do we ensure that it's just not us who are privileged enough to be in spaces and have new discussions to talk about Indigenous law we're learning and applying living how do we ensure that it's not you don't go down that road and keep getting more vertical rather than standing on that plane was it Nietzsche that said that what academics do is muddy the water so is to make it appear deeper I think that we just have to call each other when we start talking like airheads we just have to call each other on it and it's it's one of the reasons that I spent time making comic books because discussions about law whether it's Indigenous law they have to happen outside law school they have to be like kids have to be able to access it elders have to be able to access it and we have to find other ways of creating resources that that aren't just going to be available to academics so thank you it's a really important point I think the JID is something that's brilliant but I wonder if moving in that direction well we're kind of falling into that same trap so maybe if you have any thoughts on that or if you could comment on that I think it's I think it's too early to say um you know I my colleague and I were still figuring out how to teach first year uh you know and it's it's really interesting like so what I like with I mean all of you love property right so to teach property it it means uh thinking about how to relate to the things in the world the stuff of the world how do we organize each other so that we share that those understandings of the stuff in the world and so in figuring out how do you teach that um how do I teach that alongside uh Canadian or common law property it means I've got to break it down and there are there are differences there's some um and it means I have to look at what are the social conditions under which law develops differently and and then asking about how would Gixam legal principles inform this area of law if Gixam people decided to to to work on this or whatever and so it means imagining conversations about law that aren't just taking place in the law school but outside the law school um and and I hope that that's what the field school is going to be able to do as well is to keep the program grounded keep the students grounded and to keep the professors grounded um so it's it's going to be it's going to be an ongoing uh challenge I think um and I hope we can stay true to the initial vision okay so um my question is is that I work with the modern law project and my question is how do you manage working with people who kind of give you like essentialist type of comments and like don't know you don't know how to get those types of comments for example like this law shouldn't be discussed by this group or or those types of questions or you know what I mean like essentialist type comments and then you're there as sort of like an outsider coming in and trying to work with like how do you manage those types of situations this is why it's so important to have lots of conversations about what law is about the importance of disagreement about the fact that law only operates against that backdrop of disagreement um and in the work itself to include all of the different the differences so if there are different opinions about an interpretation of a oral history uh where there are different differences in terms of what should happen with laws and all of that has to be included like so that you don't don't win a weld or obscure the different perspectives that people bring the um the other thing I mean is that at some point we have to be able to look at what is the the purpose of the law and where law itself is oppressive because we know that law can fail just as there's a promise of law law can fail too so when we we think about that then when we talk about the purpose of law it gives us a chance to think about are there other ways that that purpose could be fulfilled in ways that aren't oppressive so it it means that that us working with the law have to be critical as well as creative in terms of what are our expectations and what are our definitions what is it that we think we're doing sometimes uh what I've seen in indigenous communities is that it's hard for people especially older people if they haven't had a chance to learn their own law if they were for no reason of their like no no choice of their own lots of people work raised they weren't raised in our own communities but they think they should know and so what you'll get sometimes is a defensiveness and so we just have to work with that if you go to most houses here in Halifax where people don't have legal education and ask people to tell us about Canadian law they might have some difficulty and it's the same so that's what I mean by the expectations what what is it we're expecting and so if we understand that learning and law itself is collaborative that um that we need to work we need to reflect inclusivity in doing all of that work then we can make it so that it it's actually building what we've learned is that most groups that we work with on one project that will turn into another project so we we work with lands and resources that turns into a dispute resolution project uh the number of people who participate in the kitchen table discussions for other kinds of gatherings increases because what we've done is created um conversations that that are accessible locally and so what you the longer you talk about it the more people you'll have come and and actually work with you on it so there's no one answer you just got to keep doing it but thank you for the question. Wait, Sherry Ross, I'm a specialist I'm from Ponson University in Canada in D.C. I just had a question about um sort of how to avoid like a pan-editious approach when it comes to uh editions of our applications of law I just think we're seeing a big trend of the government policy that's typically the approaches that they've been taking and so my question to you is how I'm thinking kind of big one but how do we sort of avoid that how how do we ensure that the government both the federal know that that's not acceptable that's so uh that's so important and so interesting too so in the work that we did across Canada with different peoples um we saw different aspirations of law so these are Canada has aspirations of equality and and so on right no society ever lives up to the aspirations but but it's important that we try so that we saw similarities in aspirations um dignity inclusion fairness safety and so on for Indigenous law the way that people were working toward those aspirations were different so the legal orders themselves are structured differently but but law still has to do the hard work of law it has to do it has we have it has to fulfill the functions of law um and there's elements that each legal order has to have in order for it to be complete what they look like is going to be completely different so I took as an example I took a gixand feast and I broke down all of the elements all of the legal processes that happen in that feast and then I compared that to what went on in the trial and all of the elements were there but a feast looks completely different than a trial and what we have to do is we have to make similarities where we can see there's necessary bridges but we also have to keep talking about the fact that there are different um there are different ways that we're going to get there and and just keep whenever we see that happen keep pushing against it um I I think some of the confusion happens because when we think about Indigenous law we've got to think about scale we've got to think about the largest legal order so for gixand people there's a gixand legal order there are six bans I think what happens sometimes with government folk and others is that um they don't they don't understand the difference in scale that's that's necessary in these conversations and they do like people together in ways that that aren't helpful. When we met in Ottawa in November I think on August of the legal journals and things they uh the question that I was dealing with was the large legal systems and the environment of law uh in this case between so clearly you can see it in the federal Department of Law and I'm just wondering whether whether there are you think that there are areas of law maybe perhaps even you know perhaps maybe even business law where there's so many Indigenous you know initiatives bringing out to to take ownership of natural resources and to develop Indigenous we sort of approach this industry do you think there are areas of law that's where they're just move it just it it'll take a long time before there's a a bend in the Indigenous way that will actually govern the way things are done in the communities or I mean is there or maybe maybe by the law I'm sure I think Indigenous peoples have always had to make hard decisions about the world around them and about their relationships with other people um one of and I think that I think that there are certainly areas of law where you could describe clashes um but I think sometimes what happens and what I described as clashes is a is that foreclosing of Indigenous legal processes and so what happens um sometimes with the environmental and disinferred statements about Indigenous law and when there are no when the space for processes um isn't there what happens is people declare the law at each other so that's part of what you see happening with the Witsotin and the Augustine the media has characterized that as being between elected chiefs and the Redditor chiefs but they're all the same people what's happened is that the legal processes that are necessary in so far as not land in so far as those political orders in so far as those legal actors that those processes aren't being engaged and what's happening is that perceived outcomes of law are declared as opposed to actually working it through in terms of who are the authoritative decision makers what's the way what's the way that we determine a legal response what are the substantive and procedural rights what are the obligations what are the guiding legal principles like all of that work that people have to do in order to be um legally competent with one another I've talked about Indigenous people and Indigenous people like we have to do this work with each other and within our own communities until we do the work we're going to end up declaring law at each other and the other thing that happens is we take each other to court and we use Canadian law against each other right so that's the downside of not doing the homework that we have to be able to do now here's the thing Indigenous peoples need support to do that work just think of how far Canadian law would get without all of the supported institutions that make it possible to have Canadian law in the world right open to justice though which has bad things going on right now the police the courts the everything else all of those institutions that that are supported and which enable Canadian law to be we need support for Indigenous legal institutions and Indigenous research and so on to be and once once law is fully articulated and recognized according to the terms of the legitimacy of the people it's easier than to look at disputes and to break disputes down and it may be that there there's some that there aren't going to be an agreement on there can be agreements to disagree but at least you'll have you know a situation where there's symmetry as opposed to asymmetry between legal orders. Thank you so much for coming all this way we're just delighted to have you so I really appreciate that and we've been starting to have some conversations had a couple meetings about myself and calling some other institutions in the Maritimes about looking at what I think my law institute would look like and just this more a bit of an observation but question to you about you know the conversations that you're having the project that you've been working on um one of our first meetings we brought together knowledge keepers so and there were so many elders in the room and then one person who brought their granddaughter who was a 20-something and I sort of I loved having her there and I talked to myself you know if we're going to have these meetings and have a lot more of these meetings we have to have this mix in the room right and then kind of we can't just see and so I love how you talk about non-essentializing and not seeing something that's touching a particular way certainly we need elders and knowledge keepers but we're going to keep this going in a sustainable way it seems to me that we have to have young people involved in this and just as engaged and seeing this as their project so I don't know can you talk perhaps about some of the projects that you've done and how you've engaged when I say youth I mean not just teens but 20s and 30 something people as well so most of the workshops that we that we facilitate include people of all ages which has been really wonderful for us because it means you have those different experiences that people are bringing but also it's the responsibility of every generation to take the law that they learn to solve the problems of that generation and to pass it on to the next generation like law has to be multi-generational if it's going to survive if it's going to matter and all to anybody so there are one of the hardest situations that I was in was was where there were elders and there were also young people and in that situation they weren't talking to each other because the elders said those kids have no respect and they don't listen and the kids are saying they don't know nothing and they don't protect us anyway and so there was this so the work was to get people to talk to each other the young people and sometimes you have to do that one of my best memories is a workshop up in Gitner where we were talking about a Gixxan story where a Haida chief had been kidnapped but died in captivity and so there are practices of redemption in those societies and so he was buried as a chief because he had been a chief and so this was part of the story and there was a young woman there she's probably about 21 and she said lady don't leave it I don't get it like the kid died and then we buried as a chief why did we do that but what happened was that in this room of about you know 40 people of all different ages there was a small conversation that started about the why and so that was an example of Gixxan legal pedagogy because she was learning and being taught to asking questions and we need to create not just opportunities for young people but old people too to ask questions right we can't just expect all the old people to have all the answers and all the young people not to know anything right so that's that's where we create the dichotomies um we learned that kids can do the analysis of the stories and elders can do the analysis of the stories and they can help each other so go for it I'm a philosopher so I may not be the right person to be asking a question but because it seems to me that you're giving a beautiful philosophy of the law lecture I'm feeling great in order to ask the question and I think the example I'm going to ask for is the context of property law because I can understand how it would be this trans-sustaining conversation in the context of contract law in the school but I've worked with an MA student an indigenous feminist student we had this kind of trans-sustaining conversation and at the conclusion now you might want to say though that he's being had indigenous and I probably would agree with you but he did suggest that all my relations and commodities are not compatible so at that point in a conversation very difficult um well some specificity is helpful some specificity some specificity is helpful so get some people understand that they own the territories the territories are held in trust by the through the name of the house chief so people talk about ownership uh in lots of parts of this Columbia and I understand that that is less the case with some other people so um so it's important to I mean it's it's why I've I've framed it as um how do we relate to the things of the world whether it's the earth or um the the things right because without our construct of ownership or possession it's just a thing and we have to agree that there's something called ownership or possession right in order for that to be a reality so that can be done from a lot of different legal present legal perspectives and the end result may not be the same kind of ownership or possession but you'll still have a way of relating to the things of the world that has to be cognizable to each other otherwise you don't have a system of law you don't have a collaborative system of law now it's getting late so I think you'll hear enough here I want to thank you very much on behalf of everyone here and on behalf of the um school of law and I have the University for being our read lecture it's been a beautiful eavesdropping opportunity and thank you for introducing us to these very with it grandmother and great that's I really enjoyed reading them so thank you very much