 I'd like to begin by thanking you for being grateful for the prayer and the welcome to these lands, the historic and impressive day of aunts and the new pop peoples, and for starting us in a good way today. My goal for today, what I'd like to do is situate the discussion of restorative justice within a friend that includes and makes visible Indigenous law. The pictures on the slides, many of the slides have these ravers. They're Indigenous feminist ravens. They're born of national and international Indigenous feminist consciousness. And I understand tricksters to be the first law teachers for Indigenous peoples, so we have the trickster name and we're going to be joining us. The fun to do this framing of restorative justice is to provide some context, a job in terms of my work, and I want to explore an idea of Indigenous restorative justice and where that fits into Indigenous law, and then I want to provide some specific insights into pre-law and show how that works. So for a number of years I've been working with Indigenous communities across Canada, including Nygma peoples here, and Anishinaabe people, and few people, and so on. And in these partnerships, what we've been doing is substantively researching and articulating and restating Indigenous law, including Indigenous legal processes and institutions. So my starting place is that through time, every society has conflict, violence, and law abilities at some point or another. And I understand law to be in a distinct mode of governance, along with the governance of the society's social life, economic life, and political life. So the problems are universal, the human problems are universal, but the law and the way the society deals with those problems is distinct according to that society, and therefore it's societal and determined. So when thinking about justice here, and understanding it as a societal aspiration, we can see it as being a part of the kind of normative commitments that we make to one another, to our families and to our communities. It's the responsibility of every generation to take up those commitments, to undertake the work of justice. So across Canada, in this work with Indigenous law, a number of the aspirations that people hold have become clear. And these are just a small example. These are rights from the different legal orders that we've been working with. So what is community safety? There's fairness, there's inclusion, which includes those who have part and those who have been part. There's human dignity and there's human agency, and human agency is understood as individuals and as collective. So these are the kinds of aspirations that comprise justice in each Indigenous legal order. The reality is, and someone said this earlier, no society ever lives up to the aspirations. What's important is that we have an opportunity to try. And for Indigenous peoples, that's through Indigenous law. The late Nils Christie argued that if people don't have the right to determine the rights and wrongs that they're going to live by, they become paralyzed. He was speaking about industrialization and the centralization of the state in Scandinavia. But I think his insight applies equally to Indigenous societies in Canada and in the world over. In other words, the colonial suppression of Indigenous law has denied Indigenous peoples the collective responsibility of norm determination. To determine the society's rights and wrongs. So the question is, how has this fundamentally denied the people? How has that contributed to the levels of violence and conflict experienced in some of our communities? So it is the case that Indigenous law hasn't gone anywhere. But it's been undermined and there are gaps and in some places there are distortions. So there is no completely intact Indigenous law, Indigenous order of their readiness to bring into life with mere recognition. The work of the generations now is to thoughtfully rebuild Indigenous law. Some years ago, one of my brothers who had a long history of incarceration was convicted of a violent crime. Dave and Sandy who are here were the people that helped my family through that time. And it's not a story of a happy ending, but there are happy moments among continuing addictions and homelessness. My purpose in recounting this is to share two observations. One, restorative justice happens within and against the backdrop of Canadian law, no surprise. At all times, Canadian law and public legal institutions that it operates through are visible and present. The second observation is that my family is a creed. And while we worked to include my grandmother and the things that were important to us, creed law wasn't a visible part of that process. So it was a situation of asymmetry. And it's highly problematic because on the one hand we have fully developed articulated Canadian law and all of its institutions and on the other side you have people acting on legal applications but Indigenous law remains invisible. So through the Indigenous Law Research Unit, we've worked with over 40 Indigenous communities. And one of the major research projects which was national was to look at what are the legitimate responses in this legal order to harms and injuries. Generally, there were a range of responses that were consistent and they included everything from healing to compensation to reconciliation as well as a range of sanctions and incapacitation that community safety was at issue. Colonial history has meant that the state has assumed their responsibility and monopoly for responses to serious issues, leaving only responses to the minor issues on the hands of Indigenous communities. In fact, sometimes Indigenous law is described as if it never had any way of dealing with serious crime or as if Indigenous societies never needed that. As if Indigenous law was only ever about healing, arguably a historic possibility. So this raises questions today about the efficacy of Indigenous law. If its scope and understanding of it is restricted to lesser harms, the point is that within Indigenous law there are a range of legitimate responses to harms and injuries. And it is possible to situate restorative justice as one legitimate response within the range of Indigenous responses to harms and injuries. But that can only happen if Indigenous law is visible and if there's a symmetrical relationship between Indigenous law and Canadian law. And that has to happen in every instance and around every Indigenous person. So this means not equating restorative justice with a full representation of Indigenous law. It means seeing the invisibility of Indigenous law. And it means supporting Indigenous communities to restore and rebuild law and to figure out what a symmetrical relationship would look like between our communities. So one of the bare-mount challenges of today for our communities is to rebuild Indigenous lawfulness. It's my contention that it's the undermining of Indigenous law and the resulting lawlessness caused by napses of both Indigenous law and Canadian law which has created the conditions of violence and conflict. There's no room for idealization here. The community's got to form that. There is and always is both the promise of law and the potential failure of law because it always reflects the overarching political dynamics in any communities and we see that in Canada. There are also the conditions of violence which have led to the missing and learning of Indigenous women and girls. It's all part of the same thing. So if we turn to tree law, which Indigenous law and Indigenous legal orders in Canada are organized on a non-state decentralized basis for the most part. The authority for law in its operation operates through more horizontal legal institutions. So the starting place is to take Indigenous law seriously as law and we work with Indigenous legal precedent which is part of the public memory contained in oral histories and in stories and we undertake a partnership with communities and this is not an analysis of the stories based on different research questions. And there's a couple of things that we insist on. One is that we cite every source because other people have to be able to go to that source and disagree with you and say, actually I have a different interpretation of what that story means. That's the collaboration that's in this other part of law. The other is to insist on absolute transparency so that every assumption about families, gender, communities and everything else are laid bare in our public conversation. I think that helps. Very well. So this is the framework. Once we've gone through all the stories from 40 to 100 stories per legal question this is how we organize it. The intent is to supplement Indigenous legal processes to create something that people can add to and change as they apply Indigenous law. And in the time that we have, we're just going to focus on one of these. What are the range of legal responses and what principles govern those responses for a free society in this example? Another question just as a reference talks about four of the legitimate decision-makers. In increased society there are four legitimate authority decision-making groups. So these include leaders, medicine people, elders and the community. And what's really important to be looking at these is the nuance that's involved. And so the elders, for instance, in pre-legal decision-making if there's danger involved, their role is directed. If there's not, their role is persuasive. So it's important to look at the different kinds of ways and different legal problems at a simplification with which just this legal order operates. So the principles. There's a principle of healing and when someone is becoming or has become dangerous to others, that's the predominant approach, is one of healing. There's the principle of avoidance or separation and this is the removal of the harmful actor or a dangerous person for actively avoiding them. There's different ways that people do this. Sometimes the whole community moves, sometimes the person is removed. This is a way of signaling inappropriate disapproval of inappropriate behaviors and it's about dealing with situations where their conflict might in and of itself cause more harm to the community. There's a principle of acknowledging responsibility as a remedy. These should be recognizable to many of the ways that I've heard people talk about restorative justice. So here a wrong doer can remedy harms by taking responsibility. There's different ways that they can do that. There's also compensation and restitution that are part of this legal process. There's a principle of reintegration where it's possible and it's safe to do so the person who committed the harms is reintegrated back into the community. But there's no idealization here. People are practical and so there's an ongoing responsibility to support and observe that person and their interactions and continuing interactions in this community. There's a principle of natural or spiritual consequences and sometimes it's a matter of people stepping back and allowing those consequences to take place. Sometimes the people will undertake additional kinds of actions in order to deal with and respond to harms. And usually the consequences are proportionate to the harm that's been committed. The proportionality is actually another level of threat that runs through the different legal orders. There's a principle of incapacitation so I want to be very clear about advocating capital punishment. These were legitimate responses in the past just as they were in the Canadian industry and elsewhere. So in some of the older stories and these were rare occurrences but where there was extreme or ongoing harm and there was no other response the group would take action to prevent future harms and there would be sometimes execution and this has been written about in pathologies actually under the guise of discussions about the way to go or when to go. There are also substantive and procedural rights within free law and the substantive rights include safety and protection. They include the right to help when one is vulnerable or one is incapable of taking care of themselves and there are procedural rights the right to be heard the right to have cases looked into and to have evidence to support whatever happened and open and collective decision making around individuals. So what does it mean? It means moving beyond Indigenous law by declaration to knowing what to do when the law is broken which is what we have to do with the whole law. It means rebuilding the legal institutions through which law operates and this means looking at past and present legal institutions and law and looking at where there's contradictions or where there's reconciliation that hasn't gone within our own societies. So why does restorative justice matter to Indigenous law and vice versa? It's one way, I think, to resist fundamentalisms within Indigenous law. It's a way of opening up other courses of conversation that are critical to ask critical questions about what is going on and how power is a part of every human dynamic. It's also, I think, necessary for restorative justice to resist romanticization and simplification about Indigenous law. So with the Indigenous law research unit we have a website we've created a number of resources including 13 videos that take out issues of gender in Indigenous law and tough questions within Indigenous law as well as the introduction. There's a range of papers, there's a graphic narrative on pre-criminal law. The report that I'm drawing from the CRE CRE Legal Traditions Report is available online. If the communities agree we share the information from the research that we've conducted with them and we make that available. So we just finished a really wonderful toolkit on gendered Indigenous law and it includes a complete case book which is often different from public CRE and gendered law and we have a bunch of other kinds of things that may be of interest to you as well. Thank you for your questions.