424 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 76 PART 3 MAY 2018
2017 inductee into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New
Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and member of the Saulteau First
Nation (Treaty 8) in northeast B.C. Dr. Napoleon will serve as director
of the new program.
What is that vision? To do for the common law and Indigenous law what
the McGill program does for the civil law and the common law—namely,
teach both sets of traditions through intensive comparison between them so
that, at the end of four years rather than the J.D.’s three, students will graduate
with degrees in both the common law (J.D.) and Indigenous legal
orders (J.I.D.).
The J.D./J.I.D. will be, of course, substantially different from the McGill
program. The J.D./J.I.D. needs to respond to the historical and increasingly
dynamic relationship between Canadian law and Indigenous legal traditions.
It has to draw upon the multiplicity and diversity of Indigenous legal
traditions. It must train students to work with the forms through which
Indigenous law is expressed, transmitted and applied, which means that
much of the teaching will occur in communities, where the law is held and
used. Moreover, the program has to assist students in navigating through
worlds where authority and the knowledge of law is held by many groups
within society, often without a strong central authority to impose a definitive
interpretation.
The full exploration of those challenges will be the work of many years
as this program evolves. In this brief column, I will give some sense of
how we are beginning on that road: (1) the rationale for the program, (2) its
foundational structure and (3) how it relates to legal education at UVic Law
generally.
RATIONALE FOR THE PROGRAM
The J.D./J.I.D. is a project whose time has come.
For many years, Canadian law schools have focused on large and abstract
questions concerning whether Aboriginal title exists and the interpretation
of s. 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. Those questions are important. They
are, in significant measure, still with us. But we are moving into a new
world, one in which Indigenous peoples increasingly exercise substantial
jurisdiction and control over lands and resources. For that world, we are not
well prepared. Indigenous peoples naturally want to draw on their own
principles when creating, for example, robust child protection regimes, land
management structures, dispute settlement processes, business organizations
or environmental protections. We need to be training students, especially
our Indigenous students, in how to assist their peoples to work