Eavesdropping: A Raven Meeting at the Graveyard to Discuss Indigenous Law
Channel: Schulich Law
Date: 2019-03-04

Presented as a part of the Horace E. Read Memorial Lecture Series by Val Napoleon.

The rebuilding and restatement of Indigenous law generates so many questions. Some questions are delicious and rich, others fraught and uncomfortable, some are tentative and exploratory, and still others are hard-edged and declaratory. What if we could listen in on a conversation that took up some of these delicious, but complicated questions? 

There are six Indigenous women buried at the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria – Haida, Cree, Metis, Anishinaabe, Nisga’a, and Secwepemc. All were married into the founding families of Victoria and were politically and socially important for a too brief period of time. When I look at the graveyard, imagine their spirits today as taking the forms of Grandmother Ravens, contemporary tricksters. Say, we could listen to these Grandmother Ravens having a heart-to-heart, or a mind-to-mind talk about Indigenous law. What might we learn?