JOHN BORROWS ON MAKING CHANGE

“There is a renaissance, resurgence or revitalization of Indigenous law and it’s showing itself in many different ways. This degree is just one of those,” Borrows says.

To what trait do you attribute your success?

I love to learn, and I think that’s a big part of it. I’m just curious. My mom loves to learn. She left home at age 13 because she was going to get sent off to residential school; she ended up working in hotels or picking tobacco. She would have loved to learn, but she saw her brother and sisters get scooped away and felt bad she couldn’t protect her younger siblings from that. My grandpa was in Detroit Tuberculosis Sanitarium for 10 years; in there, he read Kant, Plato, Socrates, Mills and brought a love of learning back to her. She read voraciously. I think I inherited that from them.

When/where are you most creative?

When I’m back on those lands I grew up with. I’m often reminded of the people who taught me in those places. And the Niagara Escarpment is beautiful, so you have Niagara Falls, you can look up at the cliffs and think that 440 million years ago this land was at the equator and it was a shallow sea like you’d find at the Great Barrier Reef. It makes you think, “The world is alive, it has this sense of growth and need. And we’re somehow a really small part of that.” I feel so inspired in those places.

How do you overcome a fear of change?

Whenever I do something, I know there’s going to be different ways of seeing it or working through it. There’s times when people call you out — rightly, for things you’ve done wrong — and you have to learn from that. There’s other times when it’s for nothing you’ve done wrong, it hurts. But when you’re part of something bigger, it’s not about you. What’s so good about building communities is to find ways to share it around — because no one person can know it all or be a target.

What’s the best way to be heard?

It’s partially about finding what your own strengths, voice and power are. What are your lessons learned? How can you build, change or transform what you see around you. Often the toughest challenge for my students is to have a sense of confidence that they can make a difference; the world is a pretty grim place sometimes, there’s lots stacked against people who are vulnerable. But it’s not necessarily the case things will always have to be grim.

What has been your biggest hurdle?

The biggest hurdle is that people sometimes don’t see law as a human endeavour; we tend to assign it to institutions as if they’re faceless and automatic. “That’s for Parliament to deal with,” or “That’s for the courts,” or “That’s for professionals like lawyers.’ They’re important and need to be there, but we lose our imagination or our democratic engagement if we think law is something that only parliaments, courts or lawyers do.

For me the biggest challenge is philosophical: to get people to understand that law is something we can participate in, develop, critique and change. It’s not easy to do that because law is about disagreement as much as it is about consensus. Finding ways to participate while dis- agreeing is the challenge.

Who is your hero?

My mother, Jean. She inculcated a lot of this stuff in me. And professionally, a guy named Albie Sachs, a judge in South Africa before apartheid ended. He was subject to violence, a car bomb blew off his arm, but he helped to draft and redesign post-apartheid South Africa. He went back to the country and sat on its court. He went through a lot of opposition, but he was resilient, kept working with people and had big ideas.

What do you hope is your legacy?

It really is the case that it’s all these young people I’ve worked with for over 25 years who are so inspiring. Year after year after year they ask good questions, challenging and doing amazing things in the world themselves.

In Anishinaabe law, we do have obligations to respect our elders. What I’m trying to do is channel all the best that they’ve given me, and of course, there were lots of challenges too, but I want to pass along the good as best I can. Now my daughter (Lindsay Keegitah Borrows) is a lawyer, and just had a book published with UBC Press, called Otter’s Journey through Indigenous Language and Law.

What’s next for you?

At the University of Victoria, we are doing a lot of land-based education to take law students to communities to understand how people are relating to their particular landscapes.

And I’m so excited about our new Indigenous Law degree — I think it is the world’s first. Other schools do great things and we’ve worked with them, but to actually teach Indigenous people’s own law on its own is pretty unique.

There is a renaissance, resurgence or revitalization of Indigenous law and it’s showing itself in many different ways. This degree is just one of those.

Also, (UVic law professor) Jim Tully and I are publishing a book called Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings, with Michael Asch (University of Toronto Press).