downloading the PDF - Robson Hall Faculty of Law

Here at Robson Hall, unlike most North American
law schools, we use two classroom strategies. We
offer all students a separate, second-and-third
year First Nations-Metis curriculum, taught by
Professors Wendy Whitecloud, Brenda Gunn and
David Milward. We also encourage an integration
of Aboriginal law perspectives and content into
other courses, beginning with all five first-year
classes (Property, Contracts, Torts, Criminal and
Constitutional). The former approach includes
at least four discreet courses, where the focus
remains largely on the Constitution Act 1982, s. 35(1),
less so on Canadian (Indian Act) and provincial
government laws and treaties, as well as on
international human rights law and conventions. I
can only describe how I integrate actual Aboriginal
law research topics into my two courses: Canadian
Legal History, and Comparative Law.
First years are hammered for eight months into a
narrow, get-it-in-writing, text-based focus on law
that is rooted in appellate case judgments and
statutes, the more recent the better. So it is a leap
for them to be asked to think about law in broader,
even anthropological terms, to locate it as oral, not
just literal, rooted in memory, transmitted from one
generation to the next by female and male elders
---without falling afoul of rules against hearsay
evidence. We need to remind ourselves that oral law
origins are what has constituted English customary
law and French coutumes for centuries. That is what
still – and always will – shape how we make rule-oflaw
happen daily in our lives: present order based
on unwritten past experience. Making law literal
simply means changing the medium, writing down
(or up) those procedures, rights, wrongs and rules
that are known and accepted as inherited “truths”,
as “common sense,” as “just”. Whether oral or literal,
the law is why we pay our debts, drive and stop
with respect for others, possess things, trade them,
nurture families, punish violence.
Each Winter semester, about thirty law students
and several adventurous undergraduates, enroll
in my Canadian Legal History seminar, which
is Robson Hall’s only course cross-listed for the
university. I believe that we learn best by doing,
not just by forced listening and note-making;
so their first research-writing assignment is to
re-construct one targeted aspect of Aboriginal
law out of the seventy-one printed volumes of
the Jesuit Relations. These are reports sent back
to France between the 1620s and 1740s mainly
from the St. Lawrence River valley settlements,
over-flowing with descriptions of flora and
fauna, but more importantly of encounters with
Algonquin and Iroquois peoples. Face-to-face,
French to Aboriginal, the clash of cultures is
recorded over a century, for matters of religion,
diet, governance, trade, and both procedural
and substantive laws. Each student chooses one
legal topic – theft, status of children, boundaries,
witnesses, promises – and is limited to four
pages to describe and analyze what these French
Roman Catholic priests reported, literally and
between the lines, about Indigenous rules-of-law
on point. This exercise ends any student’s lack of
awareness: the Aboriginal law existed then and
there for these Christian invaders, as it still does
for us in this primary evidence.
79 ROBSON HALL ALUMNI REPORT