Canadian Lawyer - sample

22 M A Y 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m ree lawyer Harold Johnson is far from stupid, but when he was younger, working as a logger and a miner across Northwestern Canada, he had to prove it. "There was a story going around that if you drove a haul truck you were stupid, so to prove I wasn't stupid I quit the mines to go to university and picked the hardest thing they had," he says. He graduated with his JD from the Uni- versity of Saskatchewan in 1995, but that wasn't good enough. There's another story, he says, that if you're an "Indian" they just give you bach- elor's degrees — you don't earn them. To prove that he hadn't received his law degree just because he was aboriginal, Johnson took the next logical step in 1996. "I went to Harvard and got my Master's Degree in the law," he says, adding he got into the law "by default." At the time, he knew someone who had gone there — now he knows of four aboriginal people from Saskatchewan who attended the prestigious American university — so it was a natural choice for him. Perhaps an unintended consequence, he adds, was that "for 20 years I was stuck being a lawyer." Johnson grew up in a small commu- nity of trappers and fishers, so he says he knew he could be one of those. But then someone from his community came back from abroad and "brought back stories so I knew I could go into the military because I heard his stories," Johnson says. He joined the Canadian Navy at 17, and when he returned to his small town in Northern Saskatchewan, "my older brothers had been loggers and miners so I heard from them about logging and mining" and so, until law school, he worked in those jobs with them. Following his degree from Harvard, he returned to Saskatchewan and after com- pleting his articling, Johnson worked for five years at the Canadian Union of Public Employees as in-house counsel, practising exclusively labour law in Regina. He then moved back again to his hometown of La Ronge, Sask. and worked in research for a couple of years, then opened a private prac- tice until the recession of 2008. Johnson saw there was an opening as a Crown prosecu- tor and opted for the guaranteed salary in an uncertain time. Was he tempted to stay in the United States after he graduated? "I thought about staying," Johnson admits. "But I love being home too much." Home is important to him, and Johnson worked hard to maintain some traditional aspects of his heritage, including living and — when time, weather and fur prices per- mit — working his family's trap line. "There's definitely that balance between the two worlds," he says, but he manages to maintain it. "I live 50 miles away from my office, on my trap line, so most days that road is a really nice drive. It's sort of a back C R O S S E X A M I N E D PROVIDED BY HAROLD JOHNSON A passionate call to action Harold Johnson's new book examines the history of alcohol and indigenous people By Mallory Hendry C

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