We always make each other laugh
One of the things which I really enjoyed, that kept me sort of grounded, there was ten of us in first year law that year that I started. And we would meet once a week. We would have lunch, usually lunch, and we’d talk about how we were doing and what we were doing. It wasn’t just the first year law students. There were a couple of First Nation law students in the upper years, in second year and third year. And they would come every once in awhile, and once in awhile there would be someone who wanted to come to law school and they were coming to see what it was like. And so we would invite them into our lunch hour.
That was really quite beneficial because one of the things that happens is, when you’re at university or law school, you form friendships. And those friendships become very, very important because once you become a lawyer, sometimes when you’re in that place where you need some help or you need someone to give you some advice, you’re going to go to the people that you have as friends. We were always a group that kind of stuck together.
We had a couple of professors, both of them taught First Nation law, and both of them were quite helpful in terms of making us feel like we were going to do something important. They had us over to their houses, had supper for us. We’d bring food and just hang out together, have a couple of beer and just have a good night. So it kept us together kind of thing as a group of people who identified as First Nation law students.
They used to have kind of like a cafeteria in the law school and someone who looked after the cafeteria, and they would have a party there every Friday night. People [would] come and have a few beer. So we would go there and have fun, meet one another there. Because we all identified as First Nations students, and we were interested in First Nation law and what we were going to do when we finished law school and all of that stuff.
We didn’t have an advisor like the First Nation director of the law school. So there were obviously difficulties that students went through as they go through law school, and we were able—because we knew one another—we were able to lean on one another and talk about some of the difficulties we were experiencing going through law school. And we would encourage each other and push each other and that sort of stuff. So in that sense, that aspect of the First Nation law students was I think very important. As we got a little bit older and third year law, we didn’t hang out as much as we did in our first year law. But in that first year law I think it was very important that you keep them together, that we sort of were together and we kind of supported one another and had lunch with one another.
Most of us would bring our lunches or we’d buy lunch in the cafeteria and come and sit and just hang out together and talk about and laugh. Most of the time we were just telling jokes and laughing at one another. It made us feel like we’re okay. We could—we’d be okay. And so I think that time of the week where we looked forward to getting together was really important for us, because we got together and it wasn’t like just one or two of us that maybe could share some experience. There was maybe six of us or seven of us that were getting together to share lunch and sort of encourage one another as we were going along. It was a good opportunity to sort of support one another.
First Nation people are always telling jokes. We always make each other laugh. And the way they laughed, everybody laughed when somebody laughed like that. You grow up in a reserve, you just always hear these people talking like that. It’s just like—I feel like I’m back home. So it was important for us to hang out together. As we got a little bit further along in our second, third year, it became maybe less important that we hang out. But we still had the relationships so that we could talk with one another as we went along.
That time where you spend with the other law students, the First Nation law students, is just critical because you form how you feel about law. You form relationships that are going to be throughout your life. It’s just a critical time for anybody going to a university. Some of the ideas that you have when you go into it, into the law, change. And some of that is influenced by the students around you, other friends that you make there. And then as you get out working, those same students that you formed relationships with become the people that you rely on sometimes to assist you in working out various areas of law. Or you refer people to them, and they refer people to you. So that area of friendship that develops at law school becomes critical in your life because of that.
[One professor] was kind of like the native law director. And so he was the one that kind of met with us. I think he was the guy that sort of maybe in an informal way met with the dean to say how we were doing or what we were doing. But he was a good professor that really related to the First Nation law students.
Reading the law all of the time
One of the things I think that was different about us—there were maybe a couple of students that probably would have maybe been able to get into law school without the category that we got in on. But for the most part, we didn’t have the grades that most of the other law students had. So it meant we all felt kind of—we wanted to go to law school, but we didn’t have that kind of confidence that these other bright law students had that had a four-point GPA average. We didn’t have that. We didn’t kind of feel overconfident. We were never overconfident. That’s why we hung out together, I think, because we felt okay hanging out together, because we were all kind of the same.
Most of them kind of felt that, knew that, that they didn’t have that kind of academic background like most of the other students. But they worked hard. That’s one of the things I think with most of the First Nation law students, we were hard workers. We were working hard. I know there were lots of kids, young people in my class who, they might have come to class sometimes, but they didn’t come to class all of the time. And they were getting better grades than me, I know that. But I had to work at it. I was reading the law all of the time. If I wasn’t reading the law, I was working or travelling home, travelling to law school. There was a lot of times I was anxiety ridden.
Nobody would tell you about it
I think probably the low points, just like any other law student, you would go in and write the exam. And then you would come out and you could see that exam and all the mistakes you made after you came out. Nobody would tell you about it. You just knew. And for the next couple of days you would go through this very anxiety ridden time where you’re worried about how you did on that exam. That was always my difficulty. I’d prepare well. I prepared well for the exams. Some of them I did fine and others I didn’t do so well. I managed to get through them all, but with some of them I didn’t do as well as I could have. And sometimes it was just, had I approached things differently, I would have been a lot better off I think.
I don’t know that there was anybody in our year that taught us how to write those law school exams. The summer before I went to law school I’d been to the law school in Saskatchewan. That’s where I got some idea of how to write those law school exams. Because there’s a way of doing that. And if you don’t know how to do that, then it’s going to be very difficult your first year. So I had some experience from the summer program on writing the law school exams. But I think what you should be doing as you’re writing law school exams, just like taking the LSAT, you go over it a number of times. After awhile you become good at it. So that’s just getting that process down and doing it a number of time, and you become comfortable. So writing the exams was probably one of the difficult times in my [experience].
In that first year law school, you have to do a lot of reading and you’re not used to doing that kind of—but when you go to law school and you have to read all of those cases and brief all of those cases, it was very time consuming. And I was always anxiety ridden that I hadn’t done enough or I hadn’t been able to read enough. I had going to class and you’re always worried that the professor is going to say, “Stevens, what about this case? What do you think about—how does that fit in here?” I was always worried that I couldn’t really respond well because I sometimes didn’t have a complete sense that I had understood that area of law from reading the cases. My time was a problem, my time that I had to study law. I was always pushed for time, like I say. Christmas time I can remember very distinctly, it was just like somebody trying to push me through a little hole, and I couldn’t get through the hole. And at Christmas time I was always pressured, and exams of course on top of that.
But after I got through the exams at Christmas, it was like you popped through the hole and … ah, I had time to relax, catch my breath and then it would start all over again. And then summertime would come along and I’d catch a bit of breath. For me, my experience at law school was—I just always felt I didn’t have enough time to deal adequately with my studies.
Some … but not a whole bunch
There was some [First Nations content]—you know, first year property, they taught some in first year property—but not a whole bunch. They didn’t have really a course in First Nation law. But [a professor] did teach a seminar on that in the upper years. So that did help. But by then I had selected courses—for example, I was doing a criminal course in my third year, and I was articled to a Métis lawyer. You could take a criminal law course and actually article to a lawyer, and you went into the trials, the criminal trials with them. And for me that was really good. That was one of the highlights of my law school experience, to actually be able to do that kind of law.
Every once in awhile we’d have guest speakers as First Nation law students. [One professor who] taught property law identified with the First Nation law students as well. He incorporated some of that in his property law. That was good. I think most of the professors there were quite good in so far as how they accepted and tried to help the first year native law students.
The colonial aspect
Well, one of the difficulties with First Nations is in fact the problem with the residential schools. It’s the big reason why First Nations are where they are today. They have never really addressed that area. Even today, even though all that mostly is out in the open, the residual part of the residential school is still within the consciousness of the majority of adults in our First Nation communities. They haven’t been healed totally. Unfortunately it is going to take some time before the younger generations are free of that difficult area.
The people who have gone through residential school, they’re still around. There’s a lot of them still around. So the sons and daughters that come from those students, those students that had been affected by the residential school, because of what the parents went through, there is definitely effects on them. The parents that went through this, one of the effects is they feel unworthy. They don’t feel like they’re worth anything.
Then, in addition to them feeling, because of what they went through individually, [that] they are [unworthy], they hear from their leaders and from others, the colonial aspect of it. It exacerbates that notion that they’re not as good as other people are. They’re not worthy. And so if you have a number of those things, it all comes to a point in time where the adults have not the confidence that they should have in being able to move forward. So that stuff is the stuff that, no matter how good their lifestyle is, the behaviour of the parents becomes the behaviour of the students to a certain extent. Not totally, but some of it.
And so it’s going to take maybe three or four generations before that stuff fades so it doesn’t have any effect. So all those students are coming out of the First Nation communities, even though they’re smart and they’re going to university, they still have some of that effect, either from the colonial aspect—largely, though, it’s the Indian residential school stuff. Because once that sexual abuse becomes part of the individual, it is really a difficult thing to deal with—[a] very, very difficult thing to deal with. It’s just in you. It stays there—very, very difficult to overcome that. And so in the way the parents interact with the students, they’re very overprotective of the kids. They’re usually trying to minimize the effects, so they do that in various ways. Largely with the First Nations it was drinking. And some of them were able to overcome that.
There’s a lot of anger, just a tremendous amount of anger. It doesn’t always come out, but it’s there. They don’t trust anybody. Trust nobody. So kids begin to appropriate a lot of the effects from the residential school. They don’t trust. They’ve seen that in the parents. They are taught not to trust. It becomes a behaviour. Even though they’re smart, they go to university and they’ve got degrees, they still have the effects from the residential school in them. It’s going to take some time before that becomes so that it really doesn’t affect them.
You have to have some way of being able to help the students with that in the law school. [It] isn’t just the law students. It’s any First Nation student. In some ways what you’re really doing is you’re helping them to overcome their sense of not being as worthy as other people and there are ways of doing that. That’s what I think one of the reasons why in first year law, the native students need to stick together, because they kind of feel like that. If you’re together, I can relate to you. And you’re laughing and telling jokes and every week when you come together you have a good time. It’s a comfortable thing. Makes you feel comfortable.
So if you don’t have that, then you’re on your own. By and large you’re on your own. And it becomes a difficult thing when you run into trouble, challenges, to be able to manoeuvre your way through this on your own. Or if you have a group of people that you can fall back on, you develop some relationship with these people. Especially if you’ve got a director who knows you really well and accepts you just the way you are, you can navigate your way through some of these challenges because there’s support there.
But I think for any native student, not just a law student, part of what they’ve been indoctrinated in is the colonial aspect that they hear all of the time. And so they begin to voice the same thing. Even though probably at this point in time some of them, who got their undergraduate degrees, they’re not there. They can be as good as anybody else. They can do whatever anybody else [can] and probably better. But they have this mindset, and plus they’ve probably come from a community where if you know the social conditions of most of these First Nations, there’s still a lot of violence that happens. There’s still a lot of drinking that happens. There’s a lot of sexual assault that happens. They come from that background, and you don’t want to talk about that stuff. You want to have the ability to be like everybody else and think you come from an area that, I’m good. But you have all that stuff that you bring along. Some of it from residential school, some of it from the colonial aspect. And there you are. You’re just as good as these other students, but this stuff kind of holds you back. So you need something that allows you to begin to feel like, I’m overcoming that stuff. I’m feeling good about myself. I’ve got worth.
First year law is very challenging because it’s a whole new area of learning. It’s a tough way of learning. It’s not easy. And if you have some sense of inferiority and plus some of the stuff that comes from your First Nation background, you’re working at a disadvantage, unfortunately.
And I think what I’m really saying is, you need someone who is going to find the positives in these people and talk to them in a way that allows them to feel, oh, you know what, you’re right. I am okay in that area. I’m all right. And they just feel encouraged and they get through the week and get through the year. They’re onto the next and pretty soon they’re able to do this quite well.