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CROSS EXAMINED 'Doing something right' B.C. judge takes a holistic approach in work on First Nations Court. BY JEREMY HAINSWORTH had been in since being called to the bar in 1988. Buller Bennett, who sits in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam, is a member of Saskatchewan's Mistawasis First Nation. She received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Victoria before going on to study law there as well. Sitting in the calm of the chambers lounge in Port Coquitlam, Buller Bennett says she began to look at the law as a career when she realized she had gone as far as she could toiling for a large corporation. "I got as far as I could without a post- graduate degree of some sort. I went to law school thinking I would be a solicitor — contracts, wills, that sort of thing. In my first year of law school, like everyone else, I had a criminal law course and the professor made it all come alive for me, and I knew that's where I belonged — in a courtroom," she says. Now, she's one of the few female Judge Marion Buller Bennett is British Columbia's first female First Nations judge. First Nations judges who've sat on the bench across the country. Others she cites are Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.'s first provincial representative for children and youth on leave from the Saskatchewan Provincial Court; retired justice Rose Boyko of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice; Justice D. Terry Vyse of the Ontario Court of Justice; and Justice Jennifer Power of the Supreme Court of B.C. Buller Bennett says it's important to hanging of Chief Ahan for his part in the Chilcotin War of 1864. Now, once a month, the First Nations Court sits at New Westminster with Judge Marion A lmost 150 years ago, British Columbia judge Matthew Begbie sitting in New Westminster or- dered the execution by Buller Bennett presiding in the court- house outside which stands a statue of Begbie puffi ng on his pipe. "It's like we're doing it under his nose," she chuckles. Buller Bennett is B.C.'s first female First Nations judge, having been appointed to the Provincial Court bench in 1994. She left the civil and criminal law practice she 24 JAN UARY 2011 www. CANADIAN Lawye rmag.com have First Nations judges on the bench "to reflect our culture and what our society is." And, in pursuing that, the stepmother of three and grandmother of one has served as both a director and president of Canada's Indigenous Bar Association. "It helped me get to know aboriginal lawyers across the country and the issues they are dealing with," she explains. "I got to know case law." DON MACkINNON