Judge took advice from indigenous elders before making decisions
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Alfred Scow had a lifetime of firsts. He was the first indigenous person to graduate from law school in B.C., the first called to the bar in B.C. and the first to be appointed a provincial court judge.
As a judge, he did something unusual: he didn’t mind talking about his two grandfathers who spent time in jail.
They were imprisoned in the 1920s for taking part in a potlatch, an integral part of the culture of the Northwest Coast First Nations people that was illegal from 1885 to 1951. Scow didn’t know their full story but said that they would have been set free if they had agreed to give up their ceremonial regalia.
He liked the defiance toward laws that Aboriginal Peoples considered unjust and unfair.
“When I learned about it, I thought it was a very courageous thing for them to do,” Scow told a Vancouver Sun reporter in 1992.
Scow was the eldest of 16 children born to William Scow, chief of the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis, one of the tribes comprising the Kwakwaka’wakw of northern Vancouver Island.
His father and his mother, Alice, believed in the importance of education for their children. Born in Alert Bay, he went to St. Michael’s Indian Residential School before being sent to school in Richmond and then high school in Kitsilano.
“I said, ‘I want to become a lawyer,’ so when I made that statement, I had to do it,” Scow said in 2010.
Scow told a story about his first court case as a lawyer. An indigenous man from near Alert Bay was charged with armed robbery after being positively identified by a grocery store clerk. While a conviction seemed guaranteed, Scow thought the man was innocent.
He found a witness, a woman who was with the man at the time he was supposed to have committed the crime. But the woman, also indigenous and from Alert Bay, was too scared of the court system to testify.
“It was intimidating for me when I went to law school,” Scow said. “I had no idea what would happen. But by the time I finished law school, I was no longer intimidated.”
Scow convinced her to testify. When his client was acquitted, word of Scow’s success spread. His career took off.
Later, during the 23 years he spent as a judge, he said he often listened to the advice of elders before making a decision.
“Our (native people’s) approach in many ways to anti-social behaviour has been different in the sense we’ve emphasized bringing about harmony in the community,” he said.
“If someone couldn’t comply, they were banished from the community until the time the elders thought they should come back.”