Legal issues analyzed by former Mohawk law prof

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REVIEW

Journeying forward, dreaming First Nations independence

By Patricia Monture-Angus

Fernwood Publishing

163 pages

If you ever tried to make sense out of the cases concerning the evolution of Indigenous rights law in Canada and then decided it was a lot more complicated than it needed to be, Mohawk author Patricia Monture-Angus would agree. Her latest book is an exploration of the reasons why.

Although Journeying Forward, dreaming First Nations independence is clearly the work of a former law professor - in that it quickly settles into a style that leaves the reader feeling like a judge reading a submission made by a very clever lawyer - it is still an accessible and informative read. That's not to say the book isn't 163 pages of hard work - it is.

In the book's introduction, Monture-Angus explains why, in 1994, she walked away from a job as a law professor - and walked away from the law at the same time - to teach Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan and live on her husband's home territory, the Thunderchild First Nation just northeast of Lloydminster. Her husband is Saskatchewan Sage columnist Denis Okanee-Angus.

"Before I left the law school in Ottawa to join the Native Studies Department at the University of Saskatchewan, I survived for five years as a law teacher," she wrote. "Leaving law schools behind was not an accident but a conscious choice. This followed my realization that law contains no answers but is in fact a very large and very real part of the problem Aboriginal people continue to face. Law is one of the instruments through which colonialism continues to flow."

The message repeated and expanded upon throughout the text is that the Canadian legal system is booby-trapped when it comes to dealing effectively with the legal issues surrounding Indigenous independence - a word the author prefers to self government or sovereignty - because it relies on precedent. Monture-Angus argues that Canada's relationship with Indigenous peoples began with racist assumptions of superiority on the part of the colonizers and moves very, very slowly from that point to the present day.

When racist, intolerant court decisions are cited as legal precedents by lawyers in support of their arguments in current cases, there is a good chance that relying on those precedents will lead to more racist, intolerant decisions, she argues, and only a fundamental review of legal procedures will allow the system to function in a just manner for Indigenous peoples.

"Constitutional scholars and lawyers (Aboriginal and Canadian) in conjunction with Aboriginal peoples must articulate their understanding of what the status quo is before anything new can be constructed," she wrote. "To try to address the present-day manifestations of the historical oppression as singular, distinct and individualized, without a clear understanding of colonial causation and the subsequent multiplication of forms of social disorder, is to offer only a superficial opportunity for change and wellness to occur in Aboriginal communities."

The author believes that having the legal establishment face the wrongs of the past is not a mere exercise in finger-pointing or blame assignment by Aboriginal people because those wrongs will continue to have an influence until they are completely understood and dealt with.

"The need for historical honesty is not a need to blame others for the present-day realities, but a plea for the opportunity to deal with all the layers and multiplications of oppression that permeate Aboriginal lives and Aboriginal communities today," she wrote.

Monture-Angus points to the St. Catherines Milling case, an 1888 decision dealing with a dispute between the federal government and the province of Ontario, as a prime example of a case that was clearly wrong-headed (reflecting the racism and Euro-centrism that existed unchallenged in its day) which influenced successive cases for more than 100 years. Many Aboriginal defendants ad accuseds spend gigantic amounts of time and money in the courts undoing the harm of the St. Catherines ruling, Monture-Angus believes. That money and time, she argues, is being spent by the victims of an oppressive regime that has fooled itself into thinking it is benevolent.

The book is far-ranging in that it deals with everything from the co-optation of Indigenous leadership to the fallacies that colonial attitudes create, and includes a very complete analysis of the history of Indigenous rights cases that is written in a language that a non-lawyer with an interest in legal matters will find refreshingly easy to read.

"That's really what I set out to do," Monture-Angus told Saskatchewan Sage during a phone interview on Feb. 9. "I wanted Indian people in general to have access to it. I didn't want to write just for lawyers who have no idea what it's like to live in our communities."

Back in Thunderchild after an extensive, coast-to-coast book tour, Monture-Angus said she hasn't yet encountered any really angry responses to a book which she admits she expected would ruffle feathers in many quarters.