Canadian Lawyer 4Students

54 AUGUST 2016 C A N A D I A N L a w y e r 4STUDENTS " ties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations. is will require skills-based training in intercultural com- petency, confl ict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism. A country in denial Rebecca Johnson remembers getting her students to raise their hands if they had ever watched a series of John Wayne western movies she referenced. e University of Victoria law professor no- ticed that one of the students, who was about her age, kept raising her hand every time the question was asked. Soon, the indigenous woman from the Yukon raised her hand more than 20 times. Johnson says she uses the method to show her students about how culture teaches who are the cowboys and who are the Indians, how law is brought to empty spaces. "I'm a bit freaked out by this because that's a lot of westerns for anyone to see," says Johnson. "I said, 'Val, what the heck's up? How can you possibly have seen so many westerns?'" "So Val says, 'Oh, because I went to residential school when I was young and every Saturday we got to watch movies. Every Satur- day they showed us a western. So I would say I'm cheering for the cowboys and my younger brother would say I'm cheering for the Indians. So I thought, I better cheer for the Indians to support my younger brother.'" Johnson describes the discussion as a powerful, life-changing moment. "It was like someone had taken their fi st and punched through into the back of my guts and ripped my spine forward and threw it out," Johnson says, describing the reaction to her student's story. "I had this visceral response to it. What? Someone my age was in resi- dential school? In my mind, they were a thing of the early 1900s." Canada's last Indian residential school closed in 1996. e reality weighed heavy on Johnson. "When you really hit one of these moments where you can see a huge rupture in the story you believed, there's a whole bunch of responses. For sure I went through a period of denial, went through a period of anger, went through a period of grief for sure. You just kind of have to do a lot of work to fi gure out how you move forward through the kind of learning that comes when you start to do this work," she says. "As Canada, the country, there's a lot of that kind of work that has to be done because you can't quite easily say to yourself 'I come from a country that has practiced cultural geno- cide' without having to do some very serious rethinking of your assumptions and fi gure out what you're going to do in the face of the knowledge you have." Johnson graduated from the University of Alberta's law program in 1991 and was called to the Alberta Bar a year later. She then clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada before getting her Masters and PhD in law at the University of Michigan. She says like most Canadians she had assumptions that indigenous peoples were part of the past, adding that all of the myths and stereotypes were part of her upbringing. roughout her extensive academic journey, she was not taught anything about Canada's indigenous history. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I'm from Calgary. We went to the Stampede growing up. My mother would take us to the Indian drummers, so I would see native dancing. I knew every road in Calgary with the name of a people," says Johnson. "Like most Canadians, my education in this ground was abysmal, was absolutely abysmal." It wasn't until 1996, while teaching law studies at the University of New Brunswick, that Johnson met an indigenous man named Gkisedtanamoogk who was locked in a legal challenge with Can- ada. He wanted to travel freely between the Canada and United States border without a passport, citing the Jay Treaty as his legal right to go back and forth as he pleased. " ere's this feeling that I think people have, let's call it betrayal or denial at the beginning. is can't be, what? ere's something called a Jay Treaty. e Jay Treaty says the people of Wampanoag have the right of free passage and not to be constrained by any bor- ders between the U.S. and Canada. How was I not taught that when I took constitutional law?" e case forced the law professor to read the Indian Act for the I THINK THIS LAW SCHOOL OF OTHER LAW SCHOOLS HAVE, THE LEVEL OF ABORIGINAL LAW AND HAVE TRIED TO INCREASE AMONG THEIR STUDENTS AND FACULTY." OVER TIME, AND A LOT INCORPORATED A LOT OF CLASSES IN INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING BETH BILSON, UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN

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