The mood of the place at the time
We weren’t entirely welcomed by the main law student population yet I think. There was a bit of animosity there for sure. But we were a fairly close-knit group. And I think the biggest thing I remember being different was that the Native students, we used to work together, and it was quite competitive back then. People would go to the library and hide certain books or tear pages out of books. We would tend to have a couple people in class and a couple people in the library already doing that work before that. So I mean in a lot of places we were at a disadvantage. Especially students coming out of commerce and business and so on, they had a comfort level with the way a lot of things worked, the property and mortgages, that our students, we had no idea. These were not things we’d grown up around. So that was quite different.
It was so much tougher in a lot of ways for the Native law students because we didn’t come from a place of privilege, we didn’t have the same kinds of resources. A lot of the concepts were very, very foreign, [like] the idea that you’re supposed to park your own ethics at the door.
They used to celebrate Douglas Days. We took issue with it and set up a table. And we didn’t take issue with it to say, “Don’t do it,” but we did take issue with it to say, “This isn’t complete. This wasn’t wild, unoccupied territories. Here’s what was going on.” And again, we got mixed reactions. The law students’ association was always, always, always controlled by a small group of rich white boys whose fathers were big donors and worked in downtown firms, and they had fancy cars and they had parking spots in the lot and their own little room. And that was since forever. Well, in my second year, we decided to run one of our students for law student association president, and by then a lot of people had been getting fed up with this. So we went around and spoke with the Asian students’ association and the gay and lesbian and whatever other groups were around, and everybody jumped in, and we won it. And they were just shocked. The dean included. He just couldn’t cope with that. He was just broken. And I’m sure his phone’s ringing from these sponsors saying, “How could you let this happen?” And the next September, [our law student association president] was away at an Indigenous blockade. And the Dean of the Law school had to stand up there at the opening address and say, “Well, typically we have the president of the law students’ association address you, but she’s unavailable.” So that’s sort of the context, the mood of the place at the time. But there was lots good going on. Delgamuukw first level came down. The legal writing instructor and the guy who ran the moots was going down the hallway literally waving it, “See? Told you there’s no such thing as Aboriginal title. See, see?”
[…]
Delgamuukw was just coming on at that time, and a fellow in the year ahead of me was called back by the elders to work on the case. He was a Native law student here. And the students did a lot of the research leading into that because it was so expensive.
“It’s worth it even if I lose the year”
During my third year, I was in Alberta the whole time and just back and forth for exams and a few things. I went to Alberta for a summer job, and at the summer job, there were two other of our Native law students. And we realized pretty quickly that it was a bit of a sham. It was funded by the Department of Indian Affairs and Indian Oil and Gas Canada, and it was really almost walking the chiefs down. All these chiefs were on the board of directors, but they were really getting sort of walked down the chute. The executive director was very close with the departmental people. And so we figured this out early on and didn’t know what to do, so we went to the practice advisor at the law society in Alberta, and said, “Here’s what’s going on.” We laid our case out, and he says, “You’ve got to go to the board. You got to tell him you’re going to do it and why. You got to resign, offer your resignation and the reasons. Tell him you’re going to board and disclose what you’ve got so he can respond or not.” So we had no jobs.
Then one of the chiefs hired me. His wife was a lawyer. They took me for dinner and they said, “Oh, you got no job. You want one?” And that law firm was arguing the case against C-31, automatically giving band membership back. An awful lot of people had enfranchised out and taken their portion out when the band was very, very poor and struggled along. And then years later, it hit oil and had been very prudent in the management of it and were now quite wealthy, and these people all wanted back in. And they’re saying, “Not on our backs.” And those communities up there, a number of the other communities weren’t as wealthy, but they’re very fragile. They were small and they had—you know, Cree was still the first language, they followed all the old practices, spiritual practices and hunting and all that. And they potentially had the risk of hundreds of people coming in who had been city-raised and had no substantial connection and will outcompete them for the very limited resources there are. So they’re saying, “Canada, you’re putting back an historic wrong, but you can’t kill the victim who’s surviving.”
But it wasn’t necessarily seen that way. Oh, it was attacked quite a lot by Native women’s groups and other women’s groups, seeing it as going after, discriminating against women. So it was quite political, too. But it was a Supreme Court of Canada case. So to get to work through that and see the internal machinations, I thought, “It’s worth it even if I lose the year.”
The Red Rag
[The engineering students] published a newsletter called The Red Rag, which was a pretty raunchy kind of a thing. And they published one that had a whole bunch of material, really, really hateful stuff about First Nations and First Nations women in particular, and that was one of their focuses. It was quite misogynistic and racist. And I think they broke into—it might have been the law school, or several buildings on campus, and they stuffed all the Native students’ mailboxes with it.
So we got together and thought about it. This would have been during my third year, because I was working at the law firm at the time. So I said, “Well, let’s go after them.” So we took them to student court with a human rights complaint. But we did it [at the university] first, because human rights is probably going to say, “You should exhaust internal remedies.” And we asked for the engineering students’ association to be decertified and the students’ association to be. But we weren’t gravitating toward punitive measures as much as, although certainly there [were] going to be penalties, consequences. These guys needed to get some education. They should put on a potlatch, they should do a formal apology, after they had sort of learned what was wrong with this.
And we had to formulate how we were going to make the claim. And hate literature was not decided yet. [The] Zundel and Keegstra [cases] were just in the trial and court of appeal levels, so we had to put it all together. And we got help from some faculty members and some sympathetic folks in the judiciary. And what we put together to define what should be prohibited speech, especially in an academic text, ended up being pretty close to what ultimately the Supreme Court of Canada defined.
It was a big, big thing. It was all over the news. And we were ultimately successful in that. And they did suspend the engineering faculty association. They put them under supervision for a year. And students got permanent notations on their records. Some of them aren’t the least bit sorry. Others got it and then kind of did step forward. And they had to introduce a mandatory course in awareness, cultural awareness and First Nations awareness and sensitivity.
The whole package is in the library. We submitted it at the end with all the filings and pleadings and research documents and everything.
I mean, in some ways, we really struggled to learn concepts that were really second nature to the other students. In other ways, we had to hit the ground running and just do this stuff now.
Uppity
I mean, life was challenging, the same as everyday life. The idea of a First Nations person being so uppity as to want to become a lawyer and things—you got a little extra flack for that sometimes. It wasn’t uncommon when I was at the law school, or at the law firm to get a call that we had someone in the remand, [and] could I go see him, because I lived close. So I’d go on over there. The client’s all dressed up from a wedding, [and] they’d try and let him go after the interview and keep me there. Or you’re going into court and you’d go up to the Crown attorney and he starts going [but] he’s talking about the wrong case, and [you’d] say, “I’m counsel for so-and-so.” “Oh, well, you? Oh.” Yeah. Why? Because I got a ponytail?