Program opens doors

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For the past eight years, the Native Law Centre of Canada has been helping to open doors for Aboriginal youth by sending them to other countries.

Each year, the centre selects a handful of Aboriginal youth, aged 18 to 30, to take part in its Youth International Internship program, funded through the federal government's Youth Employment Strategy (YES) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).

The law centre offers the program because it meshes with it's overall aim of encouraging and supporting both Aboriginal law students and research in the area of Indigenous law, explained Wanda McCaslin, who co-ordinates the internship program.

"It really fits in well in terms of our focus on protection and maintenance of Aboriginal and treaty rights, because this really takes it in and pulls together both our interest in empowering our youth, and also taking a look at the international arena," McCaslin said.

Through the program, the centre selects the best candidates out of all the applications received, and matches them up with the needs of their overseas partners, located across the globe.

"We focus on development of Indigenous diplomacy, human rights and cultural policies. And then our young people will be able to go into this challenging environment and not only learn from the people that they're with, but also share their own culture and customs, traditions and practices. And they can then either springboard it into an international career overseas, or they can take that knowledge that they've garnered and shared and bring it back to their own home communities to share with their own people."

Although the law centre is running the program, the internships aren't restricted to Aboriginal law students, McCaslin said.

"We also take interdisciplinary students, people that have completed Native studies degrees or education degrees or commerce. It's across the board."

And the projects the interns have been involved in have also been across the board, she said, ranging from doing a development analysis of an education institution in New Zealand, to editing a legal report on Aboriginal issues, to doing research on protection of traditional knowledge for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

"We've got two lawyers in Fiji right now working on bench books, which is basically the development of the legal precedents that the Indigenous jurists of the 15 member countries will be looking to when it's time to sentence or come to resolution in a custody dispute. And we've got two of our young people over there working on developing that right now. So it's just really varied," she said.

"This is an opportunity for those young Indigenous people that want to get involved in diplomacy that they would never otherwise have. And by using that experience, they can then translate it into a career that they never would have broken into," McCaslin said.

"For example, the lawyers. Well, there's not very many international legal focused law firms on Aboriginal issues here in good old Saskatchewan. So by the experience that they're getting there overseas in Fiji, they're getting introduced to other international organizations that do focus on Indigenous issues at that level. Otherwise they would never have that sort of opportunity to be exposed to that."

McCaslin said there have been many success stories over the years where interns have used their time in the program as a springboard into a successful career. But, she cautioned, those successes will only come to interns who enter into the program with their eyes wide open.

"One of the biggest challenges that the young people find is that you really do need to be prepared to deal with the challenges of living overseas. Because you're going into other cultures, other languages and other modes and methods. And without being properly prepared to address those challenges, there are some pitfalls that people can and do fae. They have the culture shock. Their own cultural assumptions get questioned. It can get very uncomfortable for them, particularly if they're going into a foreign language situation," she said.

"So it's not something that somebody can decide, 'Well, I'm just going to do this' and off they go in two months. They really need to think about what they want to transform this into and can they adapt to another person's culture and bring that sort of sharing idea. For some interns, they may think, 'Well, I need to impose my way of doing things.' Well, that's going to fail and it will fail badly. So you really need to take more of a respectful, open, flexible sort of curious approach to be successful here."

For more information about the Native Law Centre of Canada's Youth International Internship, visit the centre's Web site at www.usask.ca/nativelaw.