VICTORIA, B.C.—“Welcome to law school,” Anishinaabe scholar John Borrows tells the Star with a grin, zipping his raincoat halfway up as he turns to his students with a soft-spoken question: How does the day’s forest walk with an elder relate to their readings?The students eagerly tighten their circle around the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law. Under a canopy of western red cedar, Douglas fir and broadleaf maple near Langford, B.C., the group is far from their University of Victoria classroom, but the learnings are no less relevant.On a tour of the woods that afternoon, a Wsanec Nation elder had recounted his people’s creation stories about each local tree species — teachings about domination, power and humility, and how those lessons apply to the elder’s work with Indigenous prisoners. And now, Borrows wanted his students to make their own connections between story and statute.As he put it, in a typical Borrows’ aphorism: “By way of analogy, what are the lessons learned? How do you build upon, change or transform what you see around you?” It’s that kind of thinking that’s behind a unique four-year program Borrows founded this fall at the University of Victoria Law School with fellow professor Val Napoleon. The Indigenous law degree is being touted as the world’s first. Students will graduate qualified to practise both Canadian common law, or Juris Doctor, and Indigenous law, Juris Indigenarum Doctor.“In a traditional law school you’d go into a library and read legal records,” said Sarah Robinson, one of 26 students in the program’s inaugural cohort, after touring the Mary Lake Nature Sanctuary with Borrows and the elder. “But the land, oral histories, or a tree are also a type of record.“It’s blowing my mind. The law is everywhere and all around me all the time.”READ MORE FROM OUR CHANGEMAKERS SERIESShe couldn’t find a girls ...
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