Nuanced. - 78. John Borrows: Reconciliation, Indigenous Law & The Queen Passing

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Aaron visited John Borrows on Vancouver Island to discuss Indigenous law, the queen and reconciliation. Borrows shares his mother’s influence in learning Anishinaabe law, and for the passion he has for teaching Indigenous laws.John Borrows is a Canadian academic, jurist, and a full professor at the University of Toronto Law School where he is the Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law. He is known as a leading authority on Canadian Indigenous Law and constitutional law and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Borrows is Anishinaabe/Ojibway, and a member of the Chippewas of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Borrows, along with his colleague Val Napoleon, was instrumental in creating the joint common law and Indigenous law degree (JD/JID) program at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, the first program in a Canadian law school to allow an integrated study of the Canadian common law and indigenous legal traditions. The program is a four-year program, and opened in Fall 2018.Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

This episode is sponsored by the Real Estate Foundation of BC. REFBC is a philanthropic organization that supports sustainable, equitable, and socially just relationships with land and water. Learn more about the foundation's grants and initiatives at REFBC.com. So I'll introduce myself in my language first. So it's Giganos Nizigganos. Naashi, when I'mingameen, and don't jabba. So my name is Giganos. which is my third great-grandfather's name.

And my name is John Boros. And I'm of the Otter Clan from the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario on the shores of Georgian Bay. And I'm the Leavlin Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Toronto Law School. And right now I'm on leave from University of Victoria, where I'm the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law. Wow. When did this become something you were interested in? When did law start to become an interest of yours? and sharing sort of the beauty of it.

Yeah, I think when I was a young kid, I learned so much from my mother and family, grandparents, aunts, and uncles about the law. And so being able to see law from their eyes was it's something you do, and it's a relationship you have to one another and to your territory. And so when I eventually went to law school,

I saw a whole other way of processing law, and I wanted to give people an opportunity to see the alternatives to what's present in our Canadian system. Interesting. What was the experiences like of being involved in indigenous law? Like, that sounds like something you were exposed to as a young person. And for so many, the idea of indigenous law is such a foreign concept.

So what was that experience like? Because it seems so unique from other people. Yeah. So first of all, to explain law, it's a human activity. It's a function that all societies have. And it helps us understand what our standards are for making judgments are guideposts, criteria, measures, and Disha for taking action. Early law is a human activity.

It's a verb. It's as something you do. It helps us to regulate our affairs and resolve our disputes. And you don't have to wait for an institution like a court or a legislature to do that. That's something that could happen in a community context and in a family context. So for me, I learned a lot about law by being out on the land with my mother in particular, who would point out flowers and insects and birds and animals and we would develop relations with them

and she would tell me about them in terms of their own functions and the stories that flowed from our own people and her own observation. And then my grandfather was also a great storyteller. And he had a lot of humor and he would introduce these things to me as well. I'm really interested in that, like land-based understandings of things and the kind of connections to ecosystems that actually teach us how to have a good life. And this is where it was, I interviewed a lady named Carrie Lynn Victor,

and she was very interested in this as well. And she was talking about the connection we have with the environment and what we can learn from it. And then I started reading your paper, and I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, this needs to be on the front page of the news. Like, this was mind blowing to me because it was practical. It was beautiful. It almost, like, it's easier for us to kind of connect with. like there's more connection to it than reading a court document that says,

this principle means this, and it's like, it's something you sort of live out. And when you were explaining into it, with these examples, it was kind of blowing my mind. I think the one I remember is the butterflies. Yes. Can you share some examples of how integrated the system of indigenous law can be for? Yeah. So this idea of learning law from land in Ojibwe is called Akinomage is the earth. No mage is to point towards and take direction from the earth.

And so we see the land, the more than human world, is our legal archive. And so things like butterflies can be our professors. And so my mother would teach us about the importance of leaving the milkweeds intact around our home because she said that they survive on those. And if we found that we would take those milkweeds away, we would have very few monarch butterflies around us. And so she would have us pay attention to the milk weeds in their life cycles and to ensure that they did get properly spread when the fours, fall came along and those sort of beautiful parachutes would go in every direction.

And then she would tell us stories about the butterflies and what they mean to us and how they live through these cycles of migration and they live in relation to a particular plant. And so she was saying to us as a Nishinaabe people, we need to pay attention to the plants that surround us. If we don't encourage and cultivate those, we will find ourselves also suffering as eventually the monarch butterflies came to. Although when I was young and she was teaching me these lessons, the monarch butterflies were not endangered at that point. But she was saying, really, take care of the plants around you. They're not just weeds. And they have lessons to teach us about how they sustain us. And then the lessons about the butterflies are those bright colors

were transformed by our trickster to bring us joy. And when we're sad, we see those sort of colors in motion and they give us hope for the future. That's brilliant. And it leads into another question I have around the idea of like stories that mean something to us. Right now it seems like religious faiths are unpopular. It seems like we're really struggling to find a place for them. And a lot of people are more willing to identify as spiritual than religious.

And it's an unpopular word right now. yet the stories behind it seem to have incredible meaning and one of the ones I was thinking of is Sunday McKelsey who's a stolo historian in my area talks about the red cedar tree and how there was a very generous man who always gave back to the community

he was turned into a red cedar tree and the red cedar tree is very generous to indigenous people it overlaps to me with like the story of Jesus Christ the idea that a good person had to be sacrificed and gave himself for others whether or not either are literally true it gives you kind of an inkling of like who a role model might be in your life.

You've talked about heroes, villains, tricksters. Can you share a little bit of your thoughts on the overlay? Like it seems like our system is built upon sort of archetypes and then it's our job to sort of interpret them and make sure that we try and live a meaningful life. And I'm interested in your thoughts on that. That's right. So I appreciate spirituality, which is the opportunity to listen

and open up yourself to the more than human world to be able to in quiet stillness, appreciate a beauty that's not always something that can be quantified or described. And so that's really important to me. I also think religion is a key activity, too, because it helps you socialize together in relationship to spirituality, to support one another, to help one another. And with that, also provides some discipline to live in relationship to the spirituality that you're identifying with one another. And so within spirituality, within religion, or within indigenous ways, there are lessons, there are archetypes about how we connect to those mysteries. And connecting to those mysteries through those archetypes,

heroes, tricksters, monsters, caretakers, helps us appreciate the different roles that people function with in the world, but also how we're taken care of as human beings, not just by human beings, that there's this sense that there are greater powers, and with those greater powers, we can learn from them and see them in the human activity, and that's how we might understand more about the creator, as if we see someone being kind, we see someone being sacrificing, as you mentioned with the story of the cedar tree or Jesus Christ. We see someone who is selfless, Nukomis, our grandmother, who we often see in the teachings of the moon,

is a really strong figure to, you know, who pulls at the tides and has this huge influence over us. But she was our trickster's grandmother. And so even an amazing grandmother can produce offspring that are simultaneously harmful and helpful, kind and cunning, selfish and selfless. So we can be amazing parents like Nukomis, our grandmother is, but then we still have human agency and these tricksters teach us about ourselves because we see ourselves in them that sometimes we are conflicted as the trickster often is in the activities that he or she engages

in. Can you describe them a little bit more? The trickster seems really interesting to me. a concept. So our trickster is Nana Bojo, but you know there's coyote and badger and old man and crow and gluscap and we seek a jack and other indigenous cultures. And of course around the world, you've got Loki and the Scandinavian lore and there's a spider figure in the Caribbean context. And those tricksters are journeyers. They go out in odyses and along the way they encounter challenges and they will either do something that's kind or harmful in those challenges

and that helps us appreciate where we might be when we encounter the unknown but as they're doing that they might transform so nanobush might turn into a snake or a deer or a rohawk or a stump that is to say that our trickster is really fluid and that fluidity is important to at least in Nishnave legal traditions, to recognize that, yes, there are kind of certainties in life, but we also have a lot of opportunity to go with the flow, to learn along the way, and also to recognize we could cause harm. And the trickster brings us up short, because we might see the harm that they're causing in our lives and say, oh, whoa, I don't want to have that thing occur. I saw what the consequences of the trickster was, because when he took

too many fish. You could no longer feed his family in the same way. Or when he got too greedy, he was turned into a woodpecker and he had a really small beak. So he could still feed, but he could only feed in really defined ways as opposed to be a glutton like he was trying to do before. Yeah. So there's like almost like when you fall out of balance, when you start to think selfishly, because I think that that's something we are becoming more and more materialistic. We want more items, more products, and there's no end. It's the iPhone. 13, 14, 15, it doesn't seem to have a stopping point where we go, you know what, I'm happy with this. And it seems like older generations are better at saying this works. And that is what I

need my phone to do is just function. And it seems like kind of we're struggling to put ourselves in those circumstances. Like I often compare like to Harry Potter because there's there's insights on how to live a good life in that movie. But so many people go, it's just a silly movie about wizards like it's not real and it's like but how you apply the information uh despite all of the unfairness the uncertainty that the main character goes through he continues forward uh and doesn't waver in that and i find that really fascinating and motivational but it doesn't seem like we're able to verbalize it the way you are yeah so there are many traditions that have narratives that embed law within them so i was listening to something about jewish lie the other day there's agada and halika

And Halakha is the written sort of one-liners or statements of rules that for many years, some Jewish scholars have regarded as the law. And then there's this other set of narratives that go this way and that way, and they're sometimes contradictory. And that's called the Agadha. And the Agadah, these narratives, is also law, even though people have considered them not to be law. And you look into the Quran or the Bible, or you look at our own legal tradition, our narratives are in the common law. Those narratives give life to the legal principles that are there.

So in other words, you both need the particulars thou shalt and thou shalt not. You know, the codes and the rules, the chronicles, to be able to have a good life. But then you need to narrate around those codes and chronicles and rules to bring it to human form. So, you know, like Harry Potter or like the trickster or like the great traditions of the world, all law has to be associated with narratives somewhere along the way. And unfortunately, those narratives can be more than common law cases that judge writes out when they're trying to tell the story about how the law should apply in particular instance.

It seems like we went through a period of time where we were very uncomfortable with that idea, where we wanted just a bunch of rules to follow. And if we could just follow those rules, we'd all just get along. Yet, that narrative structure, as you said, is important. From my perspective, a lot of people are intimidated by the idea of bringing in indigenous ideas, oral traditions. It seems like there's a conservative element that fears being taken over, losing what it was, something along those lines. I'm sure you've encountered that over the years, but it seems like we're in a time now where that idea seems to be maybe at a pinnacle where we're the most open to that idea.

What are your thoughts on that sort of journey our legal system has been through? I think that we are open to narratives, both conservative, liberal, center, wherever we come from, because they help to give the rules meaning. And the rules on their own don't just speak for themselves. Language has fluidity, the intention of what those rules were when they were formed, whether or not they were meant to be continually interpreted with new things added to them through time. Those points, those rules all depend on narrative. and those narratives that are an invitation

to deliberate with one another, to talk with each other, and that's really democratic. That's really facilitating our agency. That's empowering for human beings. If it's just rules, then there's a danger that those rules can be used to force you and to compel you,

particularly if you've not been a part of making those rules. But if you can participate in the narrative about what those rules mean, then indigenous or non-indigenous, there's real life, there for again law to be something that you do and it can bring us out of ourselves and together and even though we disagree with one another we can find ways to disagree agreeably and we can also find ways to have freedom to be like one another and different from one another and have

contexts that allow for this and narratives teach us that rules you would just have to have so many specific rules that they would go into the thousands of thousands of pages to do something that a narrative and talking together could do in a much briefer space. Yeah, and it seems like there's also something inspirational about the story. If you have the context, it's not only that you maybe broke a rule or that you should follow a rule, it actually motivates you to think, like, how good could my life be if I were to follow some basic rules? Like, I like to compare it to chess.

You can't play a game of chess if there's no pieces, if there's no rules, if we don't have anything. So it gives you rules in some way give you the freedom to pursue what you want to pursue in your life and know what's off limits and when you're going off track and stuff. And it seems like a lot of these stories inspire us. Is there a story that stands out to you that's impacted you more than others? Well, let me just say that those rules do provide guidance and they do facilitate freedom because without them, we didn't have the rules to how to play the piano and the discipline.

and do that, we wouldn't be able to play the piano. But those rules also have to be, as you said, added to by narrative because the freedom then comes with the play as to how you might construct the chords and the timing and the sort of the emphasis that you put on the different beats. And so narrative invites us to have freedom within rules. And so story that particularly strikes me

is when I was a young boy, we found a young red-tail hawk at the bottom of a tree that had broken its wing, and we brought it into our barn. We had an old chicken coop that was empty, and we had it there, and my mother phoned to ask what to do about this bird, and the person from the natural resources said, well, if it's got a broken wing, you might as well dispose of it, put it out of its misery, it's not going to survive. And my mother said, no, that's not what we're going to do. That's not our traditions. And so she talked to people at home. She also did some reading. She went to the library. She discovered that red-tail hawks like cat food. And of course, mice. And there's

lots of mice within the barn. And so we had this hawk in our empty chicken coop. And through months and months and months. We would feed this bird and we would watch it go stronger and stronger. And it got really used to being in that space because we brought everything to it that you needed and that it needed to be able to survive. But we realized it couldn't just live in that confined space once it was healed. But when we threw open the barn doors, it didn't want to leave because it was comfortable there. So what we had to eventually do is put out food, Hansel and Gretel style kind of a row so that the hawk would jump from it. from place to place to place, to lead it to the threshold to see the wide world beyond.

And didn't want to do that. It didn't even get interest in the food. So we eventually had to create some more incentive. We yelled and clapped our hands and stomped our feet. And through that, the hawk was eventually coaxed and found the food trail. But then when it got to the edge of the barn at that threshold, it just stood there for a long time. I can remember it looking back towards us, looking out again. And I can remember that moment when it actually jumped up, caught that surge of wind,

soared across the barnyard, and sat on the old water pump on the other side, and looked back at us. Again, having a new experience that it had all those months in the barn until finally it again just caught this gust of wind. Up it went and it circled around the barnyard, ever greater circles until, you know, there it was living in freedom. And I just took so many messages and lessons from that from my mother as I was growing, which is, you know, sometimes we are in that place of injury. And we need someone around us that has care, that has tradition, that can talk to others, that know about this, that can do some reading, and then actually take action, right? To feed, to nurture, to be there with.

But then to recognize that is not sufficient to have a good life. Right? Just because you're safe again doesn't mean you should, you are in the place you need to be. And so to create other things that allow for that soaring to occur was so beautiful to me. And what was most meaningful about that story was that chicken coop, maybe about a year before, I had stepped on a rusty nail that went into the middle of my foot with my old shoes, and I was just in pain by that, and I had to get a tetanus shot, and I never wanted anything to do with that chicken coop again. I just thought that was a place of pain, a place of harm.

And she helped to teach me that a place of pain can be transformed into a place of healing. And again, it's through that care, that time, that tradition, that reading, and then taking action. So all sorts of stories unfolded in my life from my mother, both real and from my former generations, and then from those time-beyond-time stories of the heroes, the tricksters, the caretakers. and the monsters. That is a really good story. That's incredible. Thank you. So I think one thing that I'm pulling out of that is this healthy relationship to have with the natural environment. And it seems like something that's maybe lacking from our current model. Like when I see what's going on in Ferry Creek, it's hard to understand because it seems like a lot of people feel that the justice

system, the legal system is failing them in some sort of way, that more needs to be done. And that this going to the courts is not where they're feeling like justice is going to result and from an indigenous lens like i'm not sure if it's a lot of communities but in my area it's like the origin story is that all of the plants animals and wildlife are here to to take care of us because we're for lack of a better term like weak and pathetic we're not we're not independent we don't just rely on the sun to grow in water to feed us we rely on very different animals and ecosystems to take care of us, and so we're reliant, and that's supposed to ingrain a sense of humility for us as human beings to contribute. I'm just interested because it does seem like

it's a, an indigenous, more indigenous focused, which is this relationship to the environment and our responsibilities. I just interviewed a biologist within the Fraser River. He's concerned that we're going to run out of fish in the Fraser River eventually, based on, I think it was 10 years ago. We had 10 million fish swimming through the Fraser, and now he's like, it's 7, thousand. And so he's like, it's a steep decline and there's not a lot of action being taken. And he's very concerned. I'm just interested in, and how do we think about the environment in regards to our laws. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate your example because it does speak to the need to see ourselves as interdependent, human, non-human, more than human. And it also speaks to

the idea that this is found in many traditions, right? The scientific tradition is teaching about the importance of interdependence. We have many indigenous traditions that teach us about the importance of seeing ourselves as weak and pathetic and the last of creation or evolution, depending on your framework, and therefore we have this need to both be taken care of by the natural world, but then the responsibility to take care, right, to pass along what we've received. And this is, of course, in many religious traditions as well, and it's important to be able to see that wherever it occurs and not look at an us and them. Even within the Western legal tradition, you'll find many instances of

interdependence and the need to take care. But what's often happening is we're focusing on the dichotomies here, and we don't understand the places where we can have a meeting of those traditions. So we've got this beauty around us here. These plants in Inishnaubimwen are called Mushkeke. Ake. I mentioned that word before. A kinomage is the earth. A kinomagewin is to look towards the earth and take direction from it. Mashkekeke. So a ke, there's the earth. Mush is strength. So plants are the strength of the earth. That's actually our word for medicine. To say medicine in Nishnodmuhn is to say Mushkekeke, which is the strength that the earth gives us to be able to be healed and to be able to be whole. And then these beautiful flowers are wabiguanag.

Wabiguan is to be bright, to be light. Wa is this idea of seeing of light. We can also call these flowers wasconier which is to be dressed in light so if you look out of the world and you see it as strength and you see it as light and then you reason by a way of analogy you think we need to be this to one another and of course we need to play this forward so that we can continue to have light and strength around us and then of course there's stories about what these plants do and who they are and of course there's time-tested knowledge about how they might feed us or provide aid if we've got a cut or things that we might avoid because they're toxic. And so we have to ensure that they don't become invasive or spread and have that kind of impact.

That is really beautiful. One of the challenges I feel like is understanding the beauty of oral traditions. Like when I was growing up, I heard it, but I didn't know what it meant and I didn't see the benefits of it. to so many people, they go, just write it down. It'll just save time, just write it down. And what I learned about through law school with my professor, Julian Ekstabe, is this idea that there's more integration

with an oral tradition. You have to, you understand it deeper because you see it and you feel it. And within indigenous culture, if you're traveling around and you're like, this is this mountain, and there's this story of these two sister mountains and you have a story around it,

It's not only a geographic map pre-Google maps, it's this understanding of how to get around, but then it's also underpinning how to live a good life. And so it's like there's two pieces, and so you need to know how to get around, and then you also need to know how to live a good life. And it seems to be happening simultaneously. A lot of people don't understand Shakespeare or some older stories that exist, and they go, why do I need to know this guy? Like, why are you wasting my time?

Or like, why do they speak like this? it's harder for them to integrate the information. I'm curious, how do we think about oral traditions from your perspective? Yeah, I think you've described it well. I've heard it said that tradition could be the dead faith of living people or the living faith of dead people. And really part of our challenge is to make those things that have been passed on to us the living faith of those that have gone before us.

And if tradition is just written down and stored away and not accessed, then it becomes the dead faith of living people because we don't bring it into our life and we don't activate it such that we can have discussions about what Shakespeare mean when he wrote this or had this character or what did our ancestors mean when this happened with this trickster character

or what do they mean when they named this mountain and this way and they give us stories in relationship to this mountain? There are lessons to be unlocked in layers and I think the beauty of the oral tradition is that those layers can come alive to you through time, through life, if you're attentive to them, there may be use the literal dimension of them.

There's things that the kids can learn from them because of that. But then, like I said, there's the linguistics, there's the scientific, there's the moral, the legal, the spiritual, the physical, the geological, right? They open us to interdisciplinary learning. They open us to seeing the world just beyond our own perspective. and to get outside of ourselves is to hear and participate in the world of stories in a nuanced way. Beware the danger of a single story too, right?

Sometimes we cling on to one story and we don't see that can be correlated with and cross-referenced with other stories and therefore modifies what we might think is absolute because some people take one story as absolute and lots of harm and danger is done in the world. And this is an attempt by telling many stories and opening up the tradition to be self-reflective and to correct some of the over-exaggerations that can occur in stories because they can speak to one another and they're in a family of possibility. I really agree with you, the danger of one story. You wrote a beautiful piece about the different types of indigenous law, and you sort of started that out by acknowledging

that some indigenous people do recognize Canada. Right now, within at least my peer group, the people I interacted at my law school, there's a feeling that we're all across Canada on stolen land and a certain sentiment that it would just be better if people left, if all the land was returned and people just got up and left. From your writing, it sounds like some people signed treaties under God, under the creator, and recognize Canada. That's not the same for everyone. But I'm just interested, how do you kind of look at our, broadly speaking, Canada's relationship with indigenous people? Yeah, so two stories, if I could remember them both. One, I was working with the treaty elders, Saskatchewan in the early 2000s. And there were Dene,

Cree, Soto, and Dakota people in those meetings, elders, 80, 90 years of age. And they talked about when the number of treaties were signed, that they went to their circles, in their shake tents, they went to their spiritual leaders, they consulted with their bundles, they talked with one another about whether or not they should create a relationship with people that were coming to them from other parts of the world from across the ocean. And in our own legal institutions, in those settings, they both heard messages and talked with one another about the importance of harmony and the importance of introducing these people to our laws and to our ways,

our hospitality, our love, our care for our mother the earth, and also for other living beings, including human beings. And so when people came to the treaty gatherings with us, we wanted that intent to be a part of how we would live in accordance with our laws, intersociately, hospitably, building one another up. And so when those treaties were made, they came with their treaty commissioners and government officials. Also, missionaries were often there, and there were prayers in different languages. There were pipes that were smoked and bundles that were lifted up. And in that, the treaty became with the creator. It was a covenant with the creator that we would treat one another with love and with respect and kindness and honesty and in accordance with the highest

of both or all of our traditions. And so making a covenant with the Creator means that the treaty is there and then it's reinforced across the parties. So if the Crown breaks the treaty, that's not an excuse for us to break the treaty that we have with the Creator in accordance with our higher law. We have to find ways to get those folks back to that. place of loving, or if we, as indigenous peoples, break that treaty because we start saying, well, people should go back home. We don't want them here. We hate white people. That's also a violation of that treaty from the covenantal perspective that I learned from those elders in the treaty setting. And so to think of treaty in that light is then something that calls us to our

higher selves. And it's not just about parliament or courts or the nation of Canada. It's It's about how people with different legal traditions put together their laws nation-to-nation, and thinking about that in a nation-to-nation way, then our laws become a part of the creation of Canada. Our laws, therefore, are part of the creation story of who we are as a people. And now my own people back home around Georgian Bay, we made the Queen, Victoria, our relative. We adopted her. she is kin. And there's a case called Restool that just came out from the Ontario courts in 2018 that acknowledged that fact. So the fact that the crown is our kin, is our relative, means that we

need to treat the queen and the king with that kind of respect that you would treat your relative. And of course, you can correct relatives and you can sort of find ways in families to, you know, pull yourself back together when you're off center with each other, but they're still family. And so to think about the crown as family, the crown as kin is really important for many people in treaty territories because it's not just about this lady or this man. It's about a representation of what it means to live in a kinship-based way. We are people of kinship with our clans and our families, and we're trying to teach or invite those that came to our shores to live in accordance with those higher teachings that kin should live with, including our kin,

that we see around us, the animals, the plants, the birds, etc. That is really beautiful. Do you think that that nuance is missing? Does that scare you at all? I'm sure you've seen it as well, this feeling that Caucasian people are all. problem that we're in a bad time right now that this whole place is just founded on, I don't know, evil presuppositions or something like that. Does that concern you? It worries me whenever people operate on stereotype. Of course, there have been things that are tragic and wrong and

need to be called out and censored and pushed aside that have been harmful from the way the institutions of parliament and the courts have treated with indigenous peoples, also religious have a part in that that need to be held to accountability and apologize as many of them have done, but to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not also see that there is many people of goodwill, that there's things that are happening within many walks of life that we need to appreciate. I get the reasons why people would take this cynicism and wanting to push aside, but I don't support stereotype. I don't support categorizing people on their ancestry, their skin color, their blood.

I think we are human beings that are good, bad, and indifferent, and we need to learn to deal with one another on that basis, and call forth the best of who we are and hold to account and stop the harm that's there. I wish I had better words for what I'm hoping to say. I guess I do say nuance is sacred. And to find the sacred nature of nuance is to recognize good, bad, and different,

evil, helpful, etc. And be more shaded in our meanings in relationship to that as opposed to either or or dichotomous or this and that. That kind of binary way of thinking is not the trickster's fluidity. It's not the beauty that you see in the shades of ecosystem intricacy. It's not a message of interdependence. If we are sort of they're bad, we're good. And that is also the path to pride. It's not a very humble way to live, to think that you as

whoever you are, indigenous, non-diginous, left, white, black, red, whatever the categories that you might take on that. We are all messed up. We're all so beautiful, and we need to own both our beauty and the challenges that we face and have. I couldn't agree more. I think nuance is incredibly important, and I'm sure Socrates felt the same way, and trying not to be too pessimistic about the fact that many people aren't nuanced, because I think

like social media is the place of stereotypes, of assumptions of group mentality, and a lot of agreement. And so I think more in human conversations where you're talking to a person, I see when people get to experience that nuance. It almost takes a weight off their shoulder. Like I was speaking to a sheriff as a native court worker and he was like, oh, we heard about what happened in Saskatchewan.

And I wanted to tell my wife, like, it looks like like reserves can be really dangerous. Like there can be a lot that goes on. And his wife was like, no, no, no, you can't say that. And I was like, no, but resorts. do unfortunately have more higher crime rates and we're trying to do something about that that's what my organization's here to address and he's like you can say that like ah thank like i feel like there was a sense of like i am in a place where i can tell the truth and that seems like what our system was

predicated on and yet it's something so difficult for some people to do is to be able to say what they believe is true despite maybe a sense of discomfort the whole idea within i think the judeo-christian ethic is to seek truth. I'm interested in what your thoughts are on that. And does indigenous culture from your perspective have a similar understanding? And what does it mean to pursue truth? Yeah. So I really like the way you're framing that the importance of getting different angles of vision on what we're experiencing and not just seeing it from one light, but seeing it from many lights. And if people self-censor and don't participate, then we we find ourselves impoverished because we're losing aspects of what would help us learn.

Now it is the case that some voices have been dominant and some ways of viewing the world have taken up all the space, all the airwaves, as it were, and that becomes difficult to be able to speak into that space. And that can happen in many different ways. Our word for truth is Anishinaabe is Dave Weiwen. is a measure, way is like a wave or like a sound. So Debe Ween is like a measure of sound. So when I speak truth, I measure my sound and send it out to you according to my perception, according to my experience. It doesn't mean that it's truth for all time and place, because I don't know

certain things. And so I can't tell you big T truth. But if I measure my sound, and send it out to you, that is an invitation for you to then measure your sound and send it back to me. And something of resonance might be created. Something could be corrected in what I understand or in what you understand, or we can both perhaps be mutually modified by that. And then if it's more than two-way, but it's multivocal, that just opens up more possibilities for us to be able to learn for me to have another experience beyond just where I come from, but to be introduced to your experience and this person's experience and this person and this person's experience. And I appreciate the need to take care in communication and to, I know, to be respectful and

open. But we also need to take care to others' vulnerabilities too. And sometimes give people the benefit of the doubt, give them a break. Human society cannot go on if we just expect perfection of each other. And we need to, of course, change language and change frameworks and move away from some of the harmful ways we've talked about and done this in the past. But if we just get into this, like, I can't say anything because I'm not from this place or I'm going to hold you to account and patrol and police your every statement, then what you've got is a breakdown of our teachings. No more interdependence, right? No more ecology of life in our own relationships. And if we cut ourselves off from the natural world

by being mean in the way we tweet or respond to social media, we're not living the beauty that surrounds us. It's an irony that it's a tweet, right? That it's that they're trying to pull some of that ecology into some of these apps and trying to make it connected. And you hear the beautiful voice of the birds, right? And you see there's another way of communicating. They have so many vocalizations with different ranges for different purposes in different seasons and there's different species. And that way of interacting through tweets is what we should be doing as opposed to the sort of sniping and getting into kind of these camps or cliques or closed echo chambers.

I couldn't agree more. It's obviously going to be just from your personal experience, but I'm interested in the queen did just pass. And on social media again, it just feels like it lacks a lot of nuance. Personally, I have no understanding of the symbology that she meant, but she, in a lot of ways, helped form our legal system and supported the legal system coming. to Canada in a lot of ways.

How do you think about her passing? Yeah, so I feel in her passing that we've lost a woman of great discipline, someone who had flaws, but also tried to abide by a sense of duty through her life. I know some of that duty is misplaced if it's a colonial in position, but I saw her trying to live in accordance with her traditions, which were Anglican, obviously, and wanting to bring people together, you know, going from place to place to place, traveling around. Of course, she had great luxury, and she had, you know, great privilege in doing that, and I think that's overblown. It shouldn't be that in that way. But there is a

place for ceremony, and we as indigenous people, see the place of ceremony, and to disrespect other people's ceremonies just because it has an unfamiliarity to us is problematic. Now, I do believe the crown needs to be reformed, and I do believe that there needs to be much more groundedness brought into that relationship. But I'm feeling like we've lost someone who stood for something that in some of its better manifestations is who we should be to. I agree. I often try and balance it out by saying, like, I appreciate the technological advancements that have been able to flourish as a consequence of the colonial system coming here. We didn't have a lot of the tools that we have today. We had outdated approaches like slavery that have since kind of gone into the past and perhaps have a system that at least purports to be fair and working towards being more and more fair. If there was a change you could see happen, within our system, if you could call up whoever it is, Justin Trudeau, John Horgan, if you could speak to someone and have one modification today, what would it be?

Yeah, that's such a huge question. And I would actually prefer for people to see that parliament and courts and prime ministers and premiers are not the center of the law. They are where we can pool our ideas about law, where we can have conversations about what those things mean. But the source of law is you and me and your family and my family and the people up and down this street here and in Halifax and Nunavut. That is, if I could do one thing, I would have people see that we are all legal agents. We are all practicing law. Our interpretations of our standards, principles, criteria, and authority matter.

And we need to be developing standards, principles, criteria, guides, traditions, precedents, with one another. We need to be much more democratic, therefore, in seeing that law, if it's something that we do on the ground, can empower us in all sorts of ways in our families, in our workplaces, in our hospitals, in our schools, in our municipalities, that is, in the shopping malls, right, on social media, if we were to live our law, if I could somehow get that point across, people might be more self-conscious of, oh, what is the standard I'm choosing? What is the criteria? What is the process I'm following? What is the principle? What is the guide mark? What is the bent? And how do those relate to other folks' determination of those? I'm afraid that's not possible. to sort of put that out and just change that because really my point is that change is something

that people do, not prime ministers, not judges, not premiers. It really is in our hands. And to the extent that we can get better at doing that, our parliaments and prime ministers and courts will be better. And if we get worse at that, those are going to get worse. And we're going to have to find other options or we're going to be hooped. So we are in a time where anxiety, depression, PTSD, they're really, they feel commonplace. People are using these terms more and more.

And it seems one of my favorite quotes is like many people live lives of quiet desperation, that they didn't chase the goals they had, they didn't live the life they wanted to live, they didn't take the risk they wanted to take. I'm just interested in your thoughts on how can people live a full life. What does that look like from your perspective on really understanding these systems and what they're trying to pull out of the human being. Yeah. So I believe that we are spirits that are embodied

and our bodies need to be taken care of. I've read a great book called The Body Keeps the Score, that whenever we have trauma, it registers somewhere in our physicality. And so we need to pay attention to how am I feeling in my stomach, in my chest, am I tensing, you know, what's going on in my body, and that's a way of accessing what's happening in your deeper psyche. And so how do we get on that path of healing or how do we work through depression and anxiety and PTSD or, et cetera, is by getting a good sleep. Eight hours of sleep is the foundation to a good life.

And when we sleep, we dream. And Inishna Bey Law pays attention to dreams. Because in that state, we can think and have messages and connect dots that might not otherwise be apparent to us. And when we talk to others about our dreams as crazy as they might be, and of course, we would never share everything about our dreams because there are so sort of way out there. But they're a place of foundation.

Get a good sleep. But technology keeps us from sleeping, work keeps us from sleeping, anxiety keeps us from sleeping, poverty keeps us from sleeping, abuse keeps us from sleeping, addictions keep us from sleeping. Sleep is foundational, and it's the key to helping us then work on these other things. And so then, eat well. But eating well, think about the way we eat through the centuries. as a Nishnaabe people or indigenous peoples, the mindfulness of that, the gift that's around that, the ceremony that's around that, the prayer that's around that, the diversified way that we wouldn't just eat one species all year long, we would have different plants and animals and possibilities

so that we would draw lightly from all parts of the world in that waste of food and eating is just so important to build upon with it. And then exercise. I've been a runner for 46 years now. Every morning, I'm out about half an hour. It used to be about an hour and 10 minutes. And in that space, I'm not just working my body. I'm actually collecting my thoughts and I'm seeing the pine tree and I'm watching the change of the season and I'm understanding the shifts that are happening in my own body as time goes through. And whatever that exercise looks like, it's not running for everyone is that place. So if we can support people to sleep, sleep and eat and exercise, there's so much that can be done in our bodies to work to that

path of healing. So so much of the policy around health care and criminal justice and psychology, you know, all of those high theories are about eventually, you know, us as embodied beings. And I think that that is really beautiful to understand that our, you know, our human beings. teachings and many other traditions try to get us like Buddhism tries to help us think about meditation. And I love the idea of five times of prayer for those that are Muslim, being mindful during the day or Christians that might go take a communion and in a sacrament. Think about eating, but also not just eating physically, but eating spiritually as you know, renewing remembrances

of a savior in that setting. And so all of those dimensions are things we do with our body and to find ways to crawl back into our bodies in a nuanced way is part of my hope. I really see that within you. You have a beautiful home. You have a very calm energy. And I'm just interested in how that journey was for you

because you meet certain people and everything is so quick. Everything is the pace of their, words is really fast. The sense of disorganization within their own mind is high. You have a very calm presence, a warm home. I'm just interested. What was that journey like? Was that always something that you knew? Was that something you developed for yourself? So I think that you grow by degrees and you don't always know the end from the beginning. You start in the middle of the mess that we're in and you try to make things better. Sometimes I really think that we can make perfection the enemy of the good

by having these abstract conceptions of this is what the good life is, and this is the way that I should live to be as happy as I can be. Or if only we got self-determination, life would be so much better. And when we try to work towards self-determination, we see that it's not perfect. When we try to work towards whatever we think the good life is with our acquisition of wealth or status through job. And we reckon, oh, that's not what it is.

In other words, we can have the perfect be of the good. And so what I look to do is a lot of comparative judgments. Is this better or worse in this moment, what I might do, and then sort of calibrate it against a longer-term possible trajectory? Now, that's all very theoretical, which is to say, I just appreciate the encouragement I received from my mother and father, I think they themselves had a lot of trauma. My mother ran away from residential school.

She ran away from home so it did not be taken off to residential school when she was only 14 years old. And she just lived with her own wits through those years as a young, very young teenager. And all the guilt she felt from leaving home was just so difficult. But she knew she couldn't go to residential school because you saw what happened with others. And then my dad actually grew up in England during a time of war, and he walked home every day and found dead bodies in the street.

People were bombing his home, and there was just blood strewn everywhere. And he grew up in trauma. And so when I was raised by them, they sheltered me, and they tried to pass along to me encouragement because of what they saw happening in their life. And what that helps me appreciate is that parents, people can be transformative figures. They can stand at the crossroads and say, our life has been like this going one way, and now we're going to go another way.

And quite frankly, I feel that I'm the beneficiary of them absorbing all of that pain and saying, it's going to stop with me as much as possible. I'm not going to pass it along to them. And of course, they did pass stuff along. perfect and I feel some challenges as myself and I'm sure I passed a long pain to my own children. But you know, as our hands are joined with one another across the generations, the idea is as much as possible to have flow through us that good energy so that our kids can live better lives or those that we associate with our students, our friends, our employees, our employers, and then

have all the garbage stop with us. I don't want to pass along the garbage. I'm sure none of us, too. And it's trying to then find ways to appreciate that encouragement, however little or large it might be in your life, and then build upon all that is good. Wherever that good is found, build a fire around that. You know, add the wood, the fuel to that, tend to it. And if you grow good, just like our firekeepers tell us. Then there's a brightness and a warmth and a possibility to then be able to kindle other souls and other fires. And I just feel like I was so grateful to be able to receive that. That is really beautiful.

Can you tell us about the different types of indigenous laws that you understand that we've talked a little bit about the sacred laws, natural laws, positivistic? Can you talk about those? Yeah. So there are different sources of law, including indigenous laws. law, which means that when people practice law, they always have choice. And recognizing that choice is present invites us again to participate. If law is something that's just done to you, then you might as well just not be there. Law is not just done to you. Law is open for invitation to respond to what's there. So within indigenous legal traditions, other legal traditions,

we have those laws that are origin stories. Some of those origin stories are sacred, and they come from a time beyond time that place us in a supernatural realm. But those are those stories like the U.S. constitutional story, they talk about their founding with these deliberations and a revolution, and the origin is considered sacred. That if you can't draw a constitutional principle back to that origin, you can't find it being constitution protected.

So that's a sacred story, even though it's, somewhat secular, but you can also have sacred stories that are more spiritually oriented. Some would even take that constitutional story of the United States as a spiritual light as well. And certainly the treaty story I told you earlier on the numbered treaties on the prairies, that's both a secular and a sacred story. But it's about the creation of Canada. That's a secular thing. But it's also about the creation of relationships with principles of love. And that's more spiritually. And so we can find those sacred stories in many walks of life, many different traditions. Then we also have law that flows from our deliberation, our discussion, our lessons, our experience with one another,

from the earth, from the more than human world. And as we learn from that, we can analogize our behavior to the natural world, or we can distinguish ourselves from what we see in the natural world around us. And in doing that, that becomes like a source of law, almost like the common law. Do we do like that plant and animal? Or, you know, just like, do we do like that past case? Or do we distinguish herself from that past case? And the fact that that is experiential and can be also scientifically explained is a wonderful tradition that I don't think is found in the Western legal tradition. And anywhere near the strength that's there in at least the Nishnave and Kree and other sorts of laws. But of course, when you have sacred stories, when you have observations

and experiences with the natural world, they're not just self-enforcing. You have to take them into a human community and talk about them. What is that bird doing? And what does that word mean in our language about the plant? And how do we see the change

that are occurring with climate change? You know, not just man-made climate change, but climate change that occurs through millennia as our plate shift and things come and go. And so, in other words, when deliberation, we have to bring the sacred and the natural into the human community, then it's about persuasion. And we're persuading one another. It's not just about what once was, once upon a time, important to how we organized ourselves. It's about what's persuasive today.

So we might draw in laws of equality or administrative law principles of natural justice of notice and hearing. Or we might think that there's something in a scientific realm. a religious realm. In other words, persuasion has to be in the moment of today, which makes our traditions a living tradition, because we have to persuade one another right now, not like what was persuasive 100 years ago, but what's persuasive right now, given the roots that we have and how those roots interact with the things that are growing through and around and from them. And so I love the fact that deliberation and persuasion is a part of our tradition because it invites them an agency and that opportunity to develop consensus and also to disagree

with one another and find ways to hold that disagreement without squelching it and forcing people and compelling them to just go away, right? That's not law. And so that's another source. And then another source, of course, is then we might make a declaration about what we've identified in the deliberation. Could be a code, could be a chronicle, could be a rule, could be a narrative story, could be a song, could be a dance. we might dance our laws and have those principles there that are declarative about what we see in a potlatch in a feasting setting is how we've decided to proceed. And then, of course, some of our laws are customary, which means that they flow from our behavior

and they're unspoken, they're sort of implicit. and part of the thing I think we need to try to do is draw to attention what those implicit norms might be, and by drawing that to our attention, making them more explicit, we have greater opportunity to act in relationship, and especially those customs that are harmful, you know, all those incentives and disincentes that creep in through human behavior that can cut people out and not provide and diminish for. folks. We're talking about social media a moment ago. The customs that are there are often not those customs that are encouraged. But every time you interact, you can make a decision and be

explicit, but what is my custom? How am I going to be in this space? And maybe others will do that across the entire sphere, but maybe there's a group of folks that you regularly interact with that pick that up, and you create a better space, at least in that instance. And, you know, law is not going to create perfection across the entire world, but in spaces, you can make it better or worse for people. And to make it better, rather than worse, is within our power in particular spheres. And so having this idea of law with different sources and different possibilities is really, again, a hope that we see it's something we do.

That is very well said. I'm interested, what is it like to teach this? Like the way you deliver the information, we've all had bad teachers, bad educators, but you feel these things. You share like a passion, an understanding of your relationship with the material in a different way. You're the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law, your professor, you're an educator. What is it like to share this with students? Because it seems so inspirational, motivational. Well, it is the case, I think, that when we are teachers, we're supposed to both instruct and then provide incentive in relationship to what the instruction might be, but then that incentive should be internalized. It's not something that I should be motivating them to. It's what do you feel motivated to do? And so part of my hope as a teacher is not just to impart motivation, but to ask for self-reflection, engagement such that folks find in their different walks of life with their different interests, ways that they might be able to pick that up and make it go to work for them in their own life. So in other words, it's not so much about me

trying to get my point of view across in all instances. It's about me trying to open up people's possibilities to see what their point of view is, first of all, because that's often hidden from us. And then once we identify that, then say, what can I do to either further that or diminish that because I realize there's something harmful in the way that I'm going. So it's hard to say, I guess my main point is to be encouraging of others. I once had my students come to Chippewa, the Magikening, which is Ram, Ontario, Oralya, Ontario, and we were having an Indigenous Bar Association conference there. And since it's close to home, I invited my mother to come along.

And as my mother was there, a lot of younger law students and recently graduated, folks came up and wanted to know my mother. And eventually they invited her to speak with them at their school. And she said, oh, I can't do that. I'm not a good speaker. I'm not able to do that. I only went to grade eight. And so she kept giving these sort of comebacks, and they kept inviting her.

She said, no, I'm not someone that sees themselves in that place. And they eventually, you know, this back and forth went for a while. And she said to them, I'm just an encourager of young people. And they said, that's exactly what we want. And when my mother said that, and I was maybe 15 years in teaching by that time, I thought, oh, that's what she gave me was encouragement. And that's what I want to be, is an encourager of people. And so from that point, I got a little bit more clarity on what my role as a teacher is,

is to encourage people where they are. are to develop their own goals and their approaches to what they see as good and then work with others to try to facilitate that path that they identify. So it's, yeah, it's not just like a one-way pouring of information. It really is trying to bolster and build up and create the conditions for people to become their own learners and their own activated legal practitioners. What does it mean to you to be able to have the program that you offer there, the indigenous law program that supports the education and indigenous law. Well, it's so exciting to be able to walk into the classroom

and teach Nishinaabe law alongside constitutional law, or see that happening with Kree law and criminal law, property law, property law and Gitsan law, Halcaminum Law and Tort Law, contract law, and Silcotin Law. And then to see upper year courses and administrative law and business associations be trans-systemic and then have two full-term field courses where students are learning in community

the laws from the people alongside Canadian law and applying that to answer questions that they have. This joint degree, Indigenous law, common law, or JID, J.D at UVIC is the first of its kind in the world. And so it's exciting to be a part of that. It's also challenging because no one's ever done it before. And we've also recognized some things don't match up

and there's some things that we're still, you know, learning, and that is always going to be the case, but early on in the journey, you feel some of those more acutely. But I'm also excited now to be at the University of Toronto as the Leveland Chair of Indigenous Law. For the first time, this coming January, for four months, I'm going to be teaching 210 law students in sections of 70 Indigenous Law and Aboriginal Law as a mandatory course that they have to take. And having them get that experience in first year, I hope will open up their own inquiries so that we can add field schools and internships and externships and seminars and other sorts of options for them down the road.

I'm going back to Ontario in the end of this month, and there's 120 law students that are coming up to the Chippewa of the Rama, 80 Osga students, 40 UFT students, to learn on the land for four days about a Nishinawai Law with colleagues like Jeff Hewitt from Osgood and Da Wabos from Western and, or sorry, Windsor, all sorts of places in between. Otherwise, I'm just happy that life has presented this opportunity. And I remember when my mother went to UBC, we opened the First People's House back in 1993, she cried. So there was never anything like a First People's House in any educational institution I could ever

dream about. And so sometimes I feel like I'm living her job. generation's dream and then trying to pass on something that the next generation will make so much better and so much stronger than what we've done. But I feel like I'm in that flow of possibility given the harm that my mother experienced to some of the things that are now actually invigorating for indigenous and other people who want to be in these spaces. Yeah, you're really turning it around and making it changing the tides, moving it in a different direction. We're doing that together, right? It's a group, it's a team sport. And

I'm so grateful for Val Napoleon, the co-founder of the program, the acting dean, and I've got many, many colleagues through many different manifestations who have really put their shoulder to the wheel to make this a reality. Final question is National Truth in Reconciliation Day is coming up. There's National Indigenous People's Day. A lot of questions I get asked is, how do I get involved in reconciliation? What does that look like? I'm just interested, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, getting involved in reconciliation is both a personal and a group journey. So personally, reading more, learning more, sitting in quiet reflection, feeling some of the sadness that comes from the harm and hurt that's occurred, feeling some of the joy that might be there for future opportunities. And then really the group dimension is to find a place where you might be in public at a park, or Friendship Center or online or with a group of friends, just to, even if there's no indigenous peoples around, to express yourself, wear an orange shirt,

talk about something that's of issue or interest to you, and just kindle in that way, a small flame, and who knows, where it'll go. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think there's so many amazing indigenous authors coming up, beautiful books being created, different art exhibits coming available. I'm hoping to visit the Roy Henry Vickers one while I'm here on the island because I think that those spaces, art, is that way of kind of connecting to something

you might not understand yet, and there's so many different ways to interpret it and learn from it. I love what you say because art is another kind of language, and yesterday I was thinking, what if silence is also a language? It seems almost counterintuitive, but yeah, through dance, through song, through words, through art, through visual, but also through silence, there might be things that are actually communicated to you. And so I'm going to take that thought just occurred to me yesterday and wonder about it. Maybe it's something I'll think about on the Truth and Reconciliation Day. Who knows? But I really appreciate you being here and prompting all these great questions and opportunity to just get to know you better.

Absolutely. This has meant everything to me. There's individuals that you learn from philosophical thinkers that you get to read about Nietzsche, Dostietzky, like there's different people that influence you and you go, what it would be like to sit down with that person. You were one of those individuals in law school for me where I was like, oh my gosh, like this person is like a kindred spirit. Like they're saying exactly what I've been thinking but maybe didn't have the words for. And to be able to sit down with you, it's been surreal and such a huge opportunity. So I appreciate you opening your home to us, allowing us to sit down and have such an incredible conversation. It's been a warm, good day for me too. So easy to talk with you.

I'm glad. You really draw me in and I feel like I'm getting to know you. Sometimes people ask questions and there's lockstep and you put yourself into it and your warmth and your own judgment. And that's like, yeah, I want to be with you and have these conversations. So thank you. Thank you.