Opening blessing by Marjorie Beaucage
Opening remarks by the organizers

Indigenous Leader, Cultural Worker, Community-based Video Activist

Marjorie Beaucage is a Two Spirit Franco-Metis  filmmaker, cultural worker and educator. Her work has been screened in bingo halls and at City Hall, from Northern Labrador to New York. She is a change agent, both in her own life and in the lives of those around her. At 70, during a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico in 2017, she reflected on a lifetime of art and activism and wrote about her life. While there, she experimented with Circus Arts and Spoken Word as new forms for sharing her life stories. 

In the early 1990‘s, Marjorie Beaucage was a co-founder of the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance. As a "Runner" she worked as cultural ambassador to negotiate self-governing partnerships and alliances with the Banff Centre for the Arts, V-Tape, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board, which resulted in the development of new Indigenous Arts programs. She also programmed the first Aboriginal Film Festival in Toronto, Reel Aboriginal, at Harbourfront Centre in 1992.

Beaucage has always challenged the status quo to make room for different ways of being; advocating for spaces for Indigenous Peoples to have their own voice, be visible in media, and explore storytelling traditions in contemporary ways. 

Currently her work focuses primarily on creating safe cultural spaces for Two Spirit.

Presentation

For First Peoples, the pathways to gendered violence are carved into a colonial landscape of dispossession from land, detribalization, and the outlawing and dispiriting of our Indigenous gender teachings. Indigenous bodies imprinted with colonial trauma are too often the focus of deficit-based and externally-conducted investigations that further a cycle of shaming, pathologizing, and interlocking body and land exploitation. Thus our relationships with the ancestral homelands and waterways that hold our gender worldviews need to be recentered in our discussions about​ violence. Sisters Rising, an Indigenous-led, community-based research study, located in Western Canada on the unceded territories of the Lkwungen and Wsanec nations, is focused on upholding Indigenous teachings for gender wellbeing and sovereignty. Sisters Rising hosts workshops with Elders, knowledge keepers and youth in Indigenous communities across western Canada. Our workshops use land- and water-based, arts-based materials to explore topics such as the colonial roots of violence, land- and water-based wellbeing and dignity, and Indigenous gender resurgence. Land-based materials help shift the focus away from externally-imposed colonial lenses, to restorying bodied dignity and relational kinship. In this presentation, project lead Sandrina de Finney will share artwork, stories and key project learnings, and discuss the ethics of practices of kinship making, rehoming, place interconnectedness, and self-determination that guide our work. These practices offer a much-needed ethical framework for Indigenous anti-settler violence movements.

	Sisters Rising website Sisters Rising is an Indigenous-led, community-based project that uses land- and arts-based approaches to honour Indigenous gender wellbeing and resurgence.
	Multi-media story on gender-based violence featuring words from Sisters Rising participants
	Arts-based forum on gender-land sovereignty -forum report

Associate Professor, Faculty of Human and Social Development, University of Victoria, Lekwungen and WSANEC homelands

Sandrina is a lead researcher with Sisters Rising: Honouring Indigenous Body and Land Sovereignty (sistersrising.uvic.ca), an Indigenous-led project supporting Indigenous responses to gendered and sexualized violence. Sisters Rising promotes intergenerational, youth-engaged, land- and water-based gender and sexual wellbeing frameworks that recenter Indigenous knowledges and practices of body-land sovereignty.

Presentation

Residential school stories are counter-stories. Counter-stories narrate stories that challenge the dominant national narrative (Foucault, 1980; Thomas, 2005; Tuhuwai Smith, 2012), and have thus been marginalized: sidelined and unheard---or, if heard and seen (since Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been highly instrumental in bringing residential school stories into the public realm of society, schools and classroom, accompanied by calls for reconciliation), not yet fully recognized as testimonials of survival that have reached the shore, made accessible as curriculum texts in the form of children’s and young adult literature. The existence---and now, increasing proliferation---of such counter-stories carry implications for a pedagogy of recognition and of reconciliation (Yoder & Strong-Wilson, 2017). A wave (as ‘reconciliation’ has all too quickly also become) can have the effect of carrying us further and further away from shore (Pinar, 2015; Strong-Wilson, 2020). Teachers typically come as implicated subjects---ones whose present lives are complexly imbricated in historical and ongoing legacies of injustice (Rothberg, 2019).

A Pedagogy of Reconciliation through ethical self-encounters with counter-stories

Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, McGill University

Teresa Strong-Wilson is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University and editor-in-chief of the McGill Journal of Education. She is interested in memory, literacy/ies, stories, teachers, curriculum studies, and social justice education. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, including Changing English, Educational Theory, Journal of Curriculum Studies, and Teachers and Teaching. She has co-/authored and/or co- edited several books on curriculum, teaching and change: Provoking Curriculum Encounters (Strong-Wilson, Ehret, Lewkowich & Chang-Kredl, 2020); The Emperor’s New Clothes?: Issues and Alternatives in Uses of the Portfolio in Teacher Education Programs (Sanford & Strong-Wilson; 2014), Productive Remembering and Social Agency (Strong-Wilson, Mitchell, Allnutt & Pithouse-Morgan; 2013), Envisioning New Technologies in Teacher Practice (Strong-Wilson et al., 2012), Memory and Pedagogy (Mitchell, Strong-Wilson, Pithouse & Allnutt; 2011), and Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers (Strong-Wilson; 2008). A forthcoming book (Routledge) focuses on teachers’ ethical self-encounters with counter-stories in the classroom.

Lecturer in Social diversity and Indigenous Education

Eun-Ji Amy Kim is a lecturer at Griffith University, School of Education and Professional Studies. Her current research interests include Indigenous Science Education ; Critical-Transdisciplinary Education and global citizenship education.

Presentation

Along with my students, I will take you through some of the sights and sounds of our classroom activities, using snippets of artwork, poetry, prose and photography. These activities are anchored to novels we read, including one that was highlighted in the Turtle Island Reads initiative. The presentation will also explore issues raised through our readings, such as multifaceted relationships with nature, concepts of adulthood and maturity and the role of elders. We examine the issues under the dual lenses of indigenous and settler societies. The presentation will conclude with feedback from the students about how their perceptions may have changed and how they think we can move forward to greater sharing and understanding, and how they think this will help our own society grow.

Novel connections: Using the arts to explore Indigenous history and environmental justice in Quebec classrooms.

Teacher at Vanguard School; Social Science representative for the Quebec Association of Independent Schools; freelance translator.

I keep my skills and knowledge up to date by attending conferences and by participating in Ministry of Education training sessions and committees and research projects affiliated with universities. Last year, I participated in a McGill-led research project that examined the use of drama to teach indigenous studies. In 2016, I participated in The Art Gallery of Ontario’s summer institute, where we met indigenous artists and curators. I have tried to incorporate what I learned to better teach my visually oriented, language disabled students. In addition to teaching history, I co-teach a few periods of English with Amanda Walbert, our English Department head, who is also trying to infuse the curriculum with more indigenous studies and readings.

Head of English Department at Vanguard School

Amanda Walbert completed her master’s degree in Education at McGill, where she designed a project focused on adapting high school history for special needs students. She has been teaching at Vanguard school for 11 years. As English Department Coordinator, she is committed to incorporating more Indigenous literature into the curriculum. Her background as both an English and a History teacher has enabled her to facilitate various interdisciplinary projects.

Presentation

Ben Loomer, Community Service Learning Coordinator at LEARN will share the conditions that allowed for a number of schools in the Community Learning Centre (CLC) network, to engage in Education for Reconciliation activities to align with the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) officially launched in 2008. Community Learning Centres (CLC) included a Community Development Agent working to support school-community partnerships. Some CLC schools participated because their school and community include a significant Indigenous population. Other CLC schools participated in response to recommendations from the TRC. Factors such as teacher leadership and the development of an Education for Reconciliation institute enabled Quebec teachers and students to engage in Education for Reconciliation activities and programs. This included The Blanket Exercise, Project of Hope and Shannon’s Dream.

Community Service Learning Coordinator/English

LEARN (Leading English Education and Resource Network) is a non-profit educational organization with a mandate to serve the English-speaking community of Quebec. LEARN partnered with organizations like “Project of Heart”, an inquiry based, hands-on, collaborative, inter-generational, artistic journey of seeking truth about the history of Aboriginal people in Canada. LEARN continues to support Education for Reconciliation in Quebec schools with a newsletter three times a year. LEARN values the opportunity to partner with McGill and other groups to increase the opportunity for teachers and students to engage in Education for Reconciliation.

Professor, Bishop's University

Avril Aitken is a settler scholar in the School of Education of Bishop’s University, located in Sherbrooke, Quebec at Nikitotegwasis, in traditional, unceded Abenaki territory. With a background in community-based, collaborative and participatory work, she seeks to better understand how future educators can be prepared to promote equitable, inclusive and sustainable communities through their teaching and professional lives. Her research takes up questions about subjectivity and the significance of psycho-social forces in the classroom. In her most recent inquiry she asks what it means to prepare teachers for equitable, just work in the face of the ongoing effects of colonialism, given institutional participation in this dynamic, and given the regulatory dimensions of teacher education.

Presentation

This presentation will focus on work we have done with pre- and in-service teachers connecting them Land through open-ended inquiry projects that opens up pedagogical practices in ways that can allow Indigenous and Western ways of knowing, being, and doing to circulate together in teaching and learning.

Associate Professor, School of Education, Bishop’s University

Dr. Wiseman’s work focuses on the manner in which Indigenous and Western ways of knowing, being, and doing might circulate together in STEM/STEAM teaching and learning (kindergarten through post-secondary education) by examining how interactions and interrelationships between policy, practitioners, and practice create, maintain, or collapse the possibilities for such circulation. While the research has a heavy theoretical component, it emerges from what educators do in classrooms and how those acts of doing, impact student learning and understandings. She is particularly interested in student-directed inquiry emerging from relationships with place and Land, the development of locally meaningful STEM/STEAM, unlearning colonialism, and the roles and obligations of educators in terms of redressing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, peoples, and communities in what is currently Canada.

Professor of Mathematics Education, St. Francis Xavier University

Dr. Lunney Borden is a Professor of mathematics education at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada and holds the John Jerome Paul Chair for Equity in Mathematics Education. Having taught 7-12 mathematics in a Mi’kmaw community, she credits her students and the community for helping her to think differently about mathematics teaching and learning. She is committed to research and outreach that focuses on decolonizing mathematics education through culturally based practices and experiences that are rooted in Indigenous languages and knowledge systems. Lisa teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in mathematics education and Indigenous education. She is a sought-after speaker on Indigenous mathematics education, working with mathematics educators across Canada as well as internationally.

Presentation

Decolonizing environmental education, this research emphasizes Indigenous philosophies of energy and the connectivity between energy, land, and water management and sustainability related to the interactions and inter-dependencies with health security, Indigenous environmental and cultural value protection. Indigenous knowledge-ways have much to offer in support of improved energy and water education in Indigenous communities, intercultural reconceptualization of research methodologies, environmental sustainability education, and educational programs which support Indigenous communities. Centering Indigenous energy philosophies in Indigenous education, this research goal is to generate and share knowledge about pipeline leak issues in northern Saskatchewan---both through scholarly methods and communications and other learning and teaching methods. Focusing on Indigenous relational ontology and relational accountability as part of an intersectional research framework, this presentation focuses on how to foster respect for difference, build relational accountabilities in research and allow for an ethical space to take shape.

Decolonizing Environmental Education from Indigenous Energy Philosophies

Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Regina

While the trans-Canadian pipeline project has brought income to some and wealth to the few, its impact on the environment and on the lives of many Indigenous groups is significantly missing from environmental education curriculum. Indigenous ability to hunt, trap, and fish has been severely curtailed and people are often too fearful of toxins to drink water and eat fish from waterways polluted by pipeline leaks. The situation has led some Indigenous spokespersons to talk in terms of a slow industrial genocide being perpetrated against them. The damages caused by the pipeline leaks have a much wider reach than climate change, and these impacts are often overlooked in Indigenous environmental education curriculum. The pipeline leaks in the Indigenous communities of northern Saskatchewan’s Treaty 6 region have been one of the most divisive issues in Canadian politics during the past decade. This research is poised to make a significant contribution to strengthen Indigenous philosophies of energy in environmental education and understandings of the interconnections between reconciliation, people and land.

Assistant Director of Undergraduate Teacher Education Programs, McGill University

Sheryl Smith-Gilman (PhD) is the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Teacher Education Programs in the Department of Integrated Studies in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. Her research focuses on teacher education and on early childhood pedagogy including attention to children’s development of cultural identity and meaning making through arts-based approaches. Dr. Smith-Gilman has served as an advisory member of Quebec’s Kindergarten Provincial Committee for Minority Language and continues to participate as an early childhood pedagogical consultant.

Presentation

The dire prediction is that 90% of the world’s 7000 languages will cease to exist by 2100. From the point of view of indigenous speakers, languages are important because they embody cultural heritage, they encode knowledge about the relationship between people and nature, and they provide a framework that defines an individual within a family or society. Thus, a high priority has been placed on the preservation of indigenous languages through ongoing research and language teaching. Already, important community-based work has been done, but there is an urgency to accelerate the work as the Elders and fluent speakers are passing on. This presentation will focus on how to support the cross-generational transfer of indigenous language and culture through the arts. I will discuss alternative ways of language learning such as how to workshop indigenous stories into plays, perform them, and teach others how to make and perform plays.

Watch the HLCS Theatre from Hakwush on Vimeo.

Assistant Professor, University of Victoria

In 2015 I received an invitation from the Hul’q’umi’num’ community on Vancouver Island to share my theatre techniques with them. The performances we have created have shown how heroic stories in dramatic form help language learners and how they bring Elders, teachers, and new learners together. The ultimate goal is to develop the language skills of language teachers and younger participants and to pass responsibility over to them. A horizontally-structured model has created an environment in which they can work collectively and establish connections that have supported them in their long-term mission of reclaiming the Hul’q’umi’num’ language. All participants bring a mutual love of the language and culture and the desire to see it flourish for the sake of future generations.

This gathering will give me the opportunity to learn more about indigenous education nation-wide and to build connections with community members and scholars working on similar topics.

Presentation

Historically, youth have been a driving force for social change, and at the center of nearly all social movements. In consideration of current environmental consequences, young people have the capacity to generate more sustainable means of living on this planet through land-based pedagogies that stem from local and cultural ways of knowing. Based on data collected from a Land-Based Pedagogy course with undergraduate students on Vancouver Island, this presentation seeks to advance understanding of the creative ways in which young people engage in their natural and local environments as a way to imagine and create cultural and global sustainability. To remain dynamic and critical in a constantly evolving global world, a culturally sustaining land-based pedagogy offers an inter-generational, place-based and cross-cultural vision that builds on the crucial work of the past that keeps pace with the changing lives and practices of youth today.

Professor, Vancouver Island University

Amanda C. Wager, PhD is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Community Research in Art, Culture & Education at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia, Canada. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Wager’s community research, teaching, and scholarship encompasses literacies, languages, and the arts with local youth, families, and communities. Her scholarship encompasses the fields of qualitative inquiry, participatory research methodologies, Indigenous and culturally sustaining pedagogies, multimodal and multilingual literacies, and arts/drama-in-education. Her community-engaged research in education is informed by 18 years of experience as a trilingual/literate/cultural (English/Spanish/Dutch) educator with children, youth, and adults in Canada, Peru, the Netherlands, and the United States. In recognition of Dr. Wager’s teaching, she was awarded the Killam Graduate Teaching Award at the University of British Columbia (UBC)

Presentation

In the wake of the Calls to Action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, educational institutions in Canada have rushed to respond to Calls through various policies and initiatives. However, in the rush to reconcile, some very urgent considerations have been passed over. This rush to reconcile facilitates an active disregardance of the colonial ideologies and logics that continue to trouble Indigenous-Canadian relations in Canada. Before we even discuss Reconciliation, we must begin a broad social and cultural reckoning process focused on unlearning colonialism. The main contention is that colonial ideology and related logics remain mostly uninterrogated in Canadian educational institutions and act as a blockage to meaningful Reconciliation. Reconciliation is only possible if we unlearn colonialism and proceed on different terms. In this session, I will share insights inspired by wisdom teachings of holism and ethical relationality that are grounded in principles of healing and balance.

The Pedagogy of the Fort (be sure to download the powerpoint file in order to hear the audio commentary)

Associate Professor, Indigenous philosophies, University of Alberta

Donald is Papaschase Cree and professor of Indigenous philosophies at the University of Alberta. He is current Vice President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education. His research commitments are guided by Plains Cree and Blackfoot wisdom insights and the ways in which those can have meaningfully influence on understandings of teaching and learning today. Donald is particularly interested in representations of Canadian national narratives and citizenship that typically inform curriculum documents and perpetuate the general misrecognition of Indigenous experience and memory.
In consideration of how educators might learn from not just about Indigenous wisdom traditions and unlearn colonialism, Donald has worked closely with a ceremonial Elder from Enoch Cree Nation to offer in-service and preservice teachers courses that guide participants to engage with the wisdom principles that helps them unlearn colonial logics and engage more fully with Indigenous wisdom insights as fellow human beings.

Sustainability Teacher, Concordia University

Peter Graham teaches sustainability related courses at Concordia University. He holds Masters degrees in Educational Studies and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences from Concordia and completed his PhD in Environmental Studies at Queen's University. His new book, ​Traces of (Un-) Sustainability (NY: Peter Lang), "a sweeping dance through the patterns of our history, our psychology, and how our environmental-parent relationship has led us to an unsustainable world" is scheduled for release next month.

Presentation

The Ecozoic represents a vision for the future founded on mutually enhancing relationships between human societies and the global community of life through the lens of social justice. Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) is a global partnership initially based at McGill University and the University of Vermont to work toward that vision by: (1) advancing transdisciplinary scholarship in select doctoral programs to educate and empower new leaders for the Ecozoic; (2) co-creating a global research-to-action network to heal and restore Earth’s life support systems and to define and foster a different mode of inhabiting the Earth, respectful of life’s myriad ways of knowing and being; and (3) mobilizing and focusing higher education resources and communication on mitigating multi-faceted, human-induced, planetary declines in life support capacity.

L4E builds upon the success of Economics for the Anthropocene (E4A), a graduate research and training partnership that includes 25 institutions, 80 collaborators, and approx. 40 graduate student fellows. L4E is a new broader conceptualization which continues to support joint courses, lectures, research projects, and service on doctoral committees as we work towards establishing a "global campus" that brings together an expanded community to envision, educate, and implement new, just, and existing pathways towards the Ecozoic. To realize this vision, L4E is establishing a network of universities, civil society organizations and individual experts. We aim to focus on implementing, communicating and advocating for paradigm shift outcomes through internships, action-research projects, long-term partnerships and strategic communications.

Leadership for the Ecozoic

Professor McGill School of Environment & Geography Department, Project Director, E4A/L4E

Peter G. Brown is appointed in the School of Environment, and the Departments of Geography and Natural Resource Sciences at McGill. He holds a BA from Haverford College; an MA from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in the philosophy of religion; and a PhD from Columbia University in philosophy. His career has concentrated on the practical uses of philosophy to think critically about the goals of society. Since the 1980s this work has centered on the deterioration of Earth’s life support capacity and the thought systems that facilitate and legitimate this decline.

Professor Brown has authored/co-edited books including Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government in America, The Commonwealth of Life: Economics for a Flourishing Earth, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy, Water Ethics: Foundational Readings for Students and Professionals, Ethics for Economics in the Anthropocene (in the Teilhard Series), Ecological Economics for the Anthropocene: An Emerging Paradigm. He has taught at St. John’s College, the University of Maryland (where he founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, the School of Public Policy, and the School’s Environmental Program), and Princeton University.

Professor Brown is involved in tree farming and conservation efforts in Maryland, Maine, and Quebec--in all three locations his land is under permanent conservation easements (“servitudes”); totaling nearly 1000 acres. He is a Certified Quebec Forest Producer; was named “Tree Farmer of the Year” in Garrett County, Maryland; has served as the “Steward” of Walker Pond in Hancock County, Maine; and helped to found major conservation initiatives in Maryland and Quebec. In 2012 he established a brook trout sanctuary on a threatened stretch of the upper Savage River in the mountains in Maryland, in cooperation with Trout Unlimited and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. His property in Quebec contains healthy examples of species at risk such as elm, butternut, and American beech; and offers protection to four rare species of salamanders. He is a dual Citizen of Canada and the United States; a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the Club of Rome, and a member of the Harmony with Nature Initiative of the Secretary General of the United Nations, in 2017 he received the Herman Daly Award for advancing the discipline of ecological economics.

Associate Project Director, E4A/L4E

Dina Spigelski is a dietitian who has taught at St. Francis Xavier and McGill Universities. Her research and teaching focus has been on climate justice, foodsystems and Indigenous Peoples. She was Project Coordinator of the “Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems for Health” program at the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) at McGill University. She co-edited two books that described project results and were published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN.

Presentation

This presentation examines the collaborative, land-based devising process I engaged in with a group of undergraduate students at the University of Regina. Our process led to the performance of Food for Thought at the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies’ conference held on Treaty 4 territory, the traditional land of the Nêhiyawak, Anishnabeg, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota and homeland of the Métis people. Drawing on Indigenous understandings of land-based knowledge (Wildcat, McDonald, Irlbacher-Fox & Coulthard, 2014) and affect theory (Sedgwick, 2002) I will describe how we were able to aesthetically intervene and collectively respond to the absurdities of living at a time of ecological collapse. Furthermore, I will explain how our process emerged from a pedagogy that centers relationship and required confronting and re-examining our subjectivities in relation to each other, to elders, to all living beings surrounding us, and the land on which our teaching and learning took place.

Assistant Professor (Drama Education) in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina

Sara Schroeter is an Assistant Professor (Drama Education) in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, where she teaches drama, arts, and anti-racist education classes in French and English. For twenty years, she has worked as an informal educator with community and non-governmental organizations and as a drama facilitator in schools in Regina, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Dakar, Senegal. Her research focuses on using drama, a multimodal literacy, to examine differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality in multiracial schools. Her work exploring youth counternarratives and the complexities of enacting social justice pedagogies in light of colonial experiences and racilization has been published in Race, Ethnicity and Education, The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, the Canadian Journal of Education, and Social Justice. Winner of the 2014 Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award at the University of British Columbia, Sara’s teaching has been recognized for its excellence and innovation.

Presentation

A cursory reading of the TRC calls to action aimed at legal education might lead one to think that doctrinal or conceptual work would be sufficient to un-settle legal education in the right way and to add the right kind of Indigenous legal content. But as much scholarship has shown, doctrinal or conceptual categories, such as sovereignty or terra nullius, are grounded in ways of seeing, ways of reading, or literacies in short. I want to explore how reconciliation pedagogies require an un-settling of existing literacies in legal education. This will bring me to explore such things as the way legal grammars are tied to grammars and, e.g., the construction of curricula and the prominence of nouns in course titles, and how one cannot respond to the calls as a legal educator without for example thinking of museums as sites of legal education as well.

Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University

In addition to writing a report to the TRC on critical constitutional law and a book chapter analyzing the discourse of recognition and reconciliation in Canadian constitutional law, I have also been involved in a project on Genres of Critique which used at is entry point reconciliation and transitional justice in the South African context. I have also been quite involved in a series of workshops or conferences on the theme of legal education and legal pedagogy specifically. In all of the above work, I have tried to see whether and how law can un-stated, i.e. separated from the political and legal form that is the state, and whether and how jurists can be un-disciplined. In short, I am interested in un-settling and de-colonizing law and legal education.

Presentation

Spurred on by the TRC calls to action specifically directed to law schools, a growing range of initiatives to include Indigenous law and legal traditions in law school curricula can be understood via three geographical metaphors -- making space for Indigenous law within the Canadian state, approaching the tenets of Indigenous law as valuable ways of thinking or a path that all might follow, and as law emerging from specific ecological places on Turtle Island. This paper will argue that while all of these approaches lead to the need for critical reflection on the practices of state law, reconciliation requires a grounding of that law through the ecological jurisprudence and leadership of Indigenous peoples.

Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University

Since 2004, Professor Anker has both made significant contributions to the academic literature on legal pluralism as it concerns settler-colonial states (Canada and Australia, in particular) and has been a key driver of pedagogical innovation around the inclusion of Indigenous legal traditions in McGill’s transsystemic legal education programme.