THUNDER BAY – The Bora Laskin Faculty of Law invited a group of community organizations primarily from Treaty 3 - NAN legal and Nokiiwin Tribal Council to bring everyone together to find out what their communities need in regard to Indigenous law revitalization.
The conference held presentations to bring increasing knowledge, understanding and awareness of indigenous laws and legal traditions while keeping an open dialogue and listening to each community and their members needs and concerns.
“We're hoping to host them, treat them well and find out really what they want in their communities in terms of Indigenous law revitalization,” said Robin Sutherland, director of Indigenous Relations and co-director of the Indigenous Law and Justice Institute.
“So, kind of what they're doing and what they want to do in the future in those regards.”
Larissa Speak, assistant professor and co-director of the Indigenous Law and Justice Institute, said that having community input when discussing Indigenous law revitalization is very important.
“Well, I think from an indigenous perspective, it's really important for us not to be the drivers of the work, but for communities to be the drivers of the work,” she said.
“And so that's why we work in this way, which is to consult with the community, see what they want and what they need, and then we go from there.”
This is the first of these events and Sutherland said that they were inspired by a similar event they were invited to held by the Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge.
“They did a very similar workshop, community methods workshop,” he said. So, we went and learned a lot from them and are hoping to bring some of those tools back to our communities here.”
The event started off with an opening prayer from an elder and a land acknowledgment followed by talks from Professors at Bora Laskin about what the institute is doing in terms of community outreach and engagement, land-based learning and research
Guests also participiated in a workshop with Naiomi Metallic, Chancellor’s Chair in Aboriginal Law at Dalhousie University – Schulich School of Law, and Hadley Friedland, Associate Professor at the University of Alberta – Faculty of Law.
“They're doing a narrative based analysis method to workshop, so they're looking at stories and extracting the Indigenous law from those stories by talking to the participants here today,” said Sutherland.
“And this afternoon we'll do our own kind of methods workshop with the participants again to find out what they want in terms of law revitalization.”
