Karen Pruden Shirley is a Métis woman, an Aboriginal Law lawyer, and a 2012 recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. Born and raised in a blue-collar neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and with deep roots in the Métis settlement at Red River, Pruden Shirley is the eldest of three siblings. While previously there had been no other professionals in her family, and even though neither of her parents had finished high school, she and both of her younger brothers would eventually go on to study law and become lawyers.
Indeed, her younger brothers' pursuit of legal studies was what originally prompted Pruden Shirley in 1982 to enroll in law school at the University of Manitoba. This was after she had studied education at university, been a schoolteacher, as well as become a wife and mother.
“Since my brothers had gone into law school, I figured I was easily as intelligent as they were,” Pruden Shirley laughs. “This was at a time when women were just starting to become more numerous in the field of law.”
During her first year of law school in Manitoba, Pruden Shirley had been sent as a student representative to a conference on Indian child welfare hosted in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was immediately drawn to the beauty of this city. Knowing that the University of British Columbia (“UBC”) had, by then, already built a first-class reputation for teaching Aboriginal law, the field of law she wished to practice herself, Pruden Shirley transferred to UBC in the fall of 1983 to complete the last two years of her law degree.
Pruden Shirley felt welcomed at UBC.
“At that point," she said, "there were few Aboriginal lawyers across the country."
However, by then, UBC had a critical mass of Aboriginal law students, some of whom she had already met when she successfully completed the Program of Legal Studies for Native People at the University Of Saskatchewan, Faculty of Law, in 1982. Comparing the three different law schools she had attended, Pruden Shirley highlights that, for the time, UBC’s curriculum contained a much greater emphasis on teaching and learning Aboriginal Law than did other Canadian universities.
"In addition," she went on, "it seemed as if the cutting-edge litigations on Aboriginal issues were coming mainly out of British Columbia. At UBC, we were able to study important BC cases like Calder and R. v. Guerin, and listen to the presentations of legal practitioners like Tom Berger, Marvin Storrow, and Jim Reynolds, people who were bringing these types of cases before the courts.”
Pruden Shirley recalls having a number of memorable professors during her time at UBC Law. In particular, she found Jurisprudence with Professor J.C. Smith to be an enlightening course. It was in this class that Pruden Shirley was first exposed to an in-depth study of the legal concepts of the patriarchal nature of European law in Canada, as well as concepts of matriarchal and matrilineal legal systems. She remembers being very impressed by the course textbook, David N. Weisstub’s The Western Idea of Law, and reading it avidly long into the nights. Pruden Shirley also commends UBC for bringing lawyers from the private bar into the classrooms and assemblies as speakers, so that she and her classmates had the chance to familiarize themselves with many aspects of the law including the most practical aspects.
Pruden Shirley recalled that, in the 1980s, there was a very small group of students actually interested in practicing Aboriginal Law. On one occasion, as a student, when asked what area of the law she wanted to practice, Pruden Shirley responded “Aboriginal Law”; whereupon, she was asked “Do you think you can make a living out of that?” Undeterred, Pruden Shirley would go on to form an Aboriginal law firm alongside fellow classmate Steven Point, currently a B.C. Provincial Court judge and, formerly, the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia.
“I had met Steven at the University of Saskatchewan's Native Law Centre. He and his wife were very kind to me and my family during our transition to British Columbia,” shares Pruden Shirley. “After Steven and I had each finished our respective articling years, we decided it would be a good idea for us to go into practice together.”
In 1986, the two of them with the support of their spouses, Gwen Point and Leo Shirley, co-founded the Chilliwack law firm of Point & Shirley, as the first law firm established by Aboriginal lawyers in British Columbia. Pruden Shirley practiced Aboriginal law, family and children's law, and residential conveyancing. Even while discovering the myriad challenges involved in operating one’s own law firm, Pruden Shirley found this opportunity to build a legal practice from scratch to be immensely rewarding. She continued to run the firm for an additional year after Point had left to take up a proffered position as a federal immigration adjudicator. Indeed, Pruden Shirley’s entrepreneurial spirit marked a bit of a milestone. She is the first Aboriginal woman to have commenced the private practice of law in British Columbia. In doing so, she had been encouraged by the courageous example of her good friend Judith Sayers. As the first Aboriginal woman in B.C. to be called to the bar, Sayers had gone immediately to the private practice of the law in Alberta.
In 1990, after three years of law practice as Point & Shirley (and one additional year as Shirley & Co.), Pruden Shirley had opportunities to converse with a senior lawyer at the Department of Justice Canada (“DOJ”), and became convinced that she could make more changes for Aboriginal people from inside the government rather than from outside of it. Indeed, Pruden Shirley was no stranger to working in the public service, having articled with the British Columbia Ministry of the Attorney General prior to starting her own law firm.
“I applied to article with the BC Ministry because I wanted to see how the Province of British Columbia looked at Aboriginal issues, so that I would be able to approach them as a lawyer from the opposite point of view,” explains Pruden Shirley. “After having been in private practice, one of the reasons I joined DOJ is because I felt I could now make a difference from being inside the government. For me, it has always been about Aboriginal law in all its shapes and forms. The law touches everybody, but it touches Aboriginal lives more intensely, in part because of the antiquated Indian Act.”
At DOJ, Pruden Shirley became a lawyer in the Aboriginal Law (Advisory Services) section. She began as a legal counsel, and attained a managerial position by 1996. Although she battled cancer and other health challenges after 2002, she continued to work and retired from DOJ in 2015 after taking a medical leave. Over her career of more than 22 years with DOJ, her team had grown from a unit of four lawyers with one support staff person in 1996 to a unit of fifteen lawyers with six or seven support staff people in 2013.
While at DOJ, the primary focus of Pruden Shirley’s work (and the work of her team) was on strengthening First Nations' economic development opportunities on reserve lands, including a number of large and complex development projects. She also led her team in providing federal legal support when First Nations, at their option, moved out from the Indian Act to assume authority over their reserve lands, with power to enact their own laws over the lands, the environment, and most resources. Pruden Shirley was also involved in a number of departmental extracurricular activities, including her work for two years as the Co-Chair of ACAP, the Department's national Advisory Committee on Aboriginal Peoples. She also sat on the national DOJ employment equity committee, and was very involved in mentoring law students and lawyers within the Department.
Having retired now, Pruden Shirley spends much of her time with her children and grandchildren, and she looks forward to travelling more with her husband. She also enjoys her work towards compiling her family's early history in western Canada, and she maintains a Facebook account to stay in touch with extended family members, friends and colleagues.
“I feel very grateful that I was able to go through law school at the time that I did, when I was able to stand on the shoulders of such giants in the field of Aboriginal law as Frank Calder, Joseph Gosnell, Louise Mandell, Tom Berger, and Marvin Storrow – and all of those dedicated people who came before us. We are now seeing a generational transition between those legal pioneers and those who will come forward now, like my daughter who recently graduated from UBC Law. I have great hopes for the future of Aboriginal people in British Columbia and, really, in all of Canada. I fully expect that the great work that has been done so far will keep progressing.”