INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES
‘We’re going to need a huge shift in understanding’: Mohawk law professor
Every day, Bev Jacobs wanted to quit. But she’s not a quitter. Jacobs, a Mohawk from the Six Nations of the Grand River, an Indigenous reserve near Brantford, stuck it out at the University of Windsor’s law school. She graduated in 1994. This month, she returned as a professor, part of the university’s drive to hire more Indigenous faculty. It has been some journey. Jacobs was a 24-year-old legal secretary when two things happened that changed the direction of her life. Her mother, whose goal was to go to Mohawk College, graduated with a diploma in native community care.
“Her wish was to ensure our people were well,” Jacobs remembered.
But she died of cancer that year.
Then tension between a group of Mohawk people and the town of Oka, Que., over disputed land erupted into a 78-day standoff between protesters, police and the army.
“That was like a wake-up call regarding the rights of our people, rights to land, to our sovereignty and self-determination,” said Jacobs.
She decided to become a lawyer. It wasn’t easy. Jacobs was a single mother. Sometimes, she had to bring her eight-year-old daughter, Ashley, to class with her. Mostly, Ashley sat and did art. Sometimes, she did cartwheels. She befriended the professors, including then dean of law Jeff Berryman.
There were few other Indigenous law students, so Jacobs founded the Aboriginal Law Students Society for support. Many non-Indigenous students joined. They wanted to support students like Jacobs and learn more.
“We became really good friends,” said Jacobs. “It was a really good way to educate the rest of the law school.”
But the most difficult part was learning how Canada had used law as “a tool of assimilation,” how the British North America Act controlled Indigenous people and their land, made them “wards of the Crown, inferior people who needed to be taken care,” as Jacobs put it.
“I wanted to quit every day,” she said.
She credits Berryman and other professors with being open to her perspective.
“We had a lot of interesting conversations,” Berryman remembered.
Jacobs told him what it’s like for an Aboriginal person in Canada, not to mention being a single mother in law school.
“They were testing all the orthodoxies. They were raising their perception of the law, which was a new experience for me,” Berryman said of Jacobs and other Indigenous students.
“She was a very compelling individual in terms of her life story and what brought her to law school and how she got there,” he said of Jacobs. “It was clear she had a great deal of courage and stamina to deal with the issues she had in her life.”
It was only later that Jacobs fully realized the extent of those issues. But the way Berryman saw it, she craved knowledge, and she had found her way in the law.
She’s reflective and quiet-spoken, yet self-assured. She’s sharp, with a way of turning an argument around, said Berryman. You get the impression she’s relentless.
“You could see Bev was going to assume a leadership role in the Indigenous community,” he said.
After she graduated, Jacobs completed a master’s degree in law at the University of Saskatchewan and started Bear Clan Consulting. She became the lead researcher in Amnesty International’s groundbreaking report in 2004, No More Stolen Sisters, on missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada.
She travelled the country listening to families talk about their missing and murdered mothers, daughters, nieces, aunts and cousins. They also talked about being in residential schools or being caught up in the controversial Aboriginal child welfare system. It was story after story, “layers of trauma,” Jacobs called it.
They were different families and different circumstances. But “it was all rooted in colonial law — the Indian Act, the British North America Act, child welfare legislation,” she said. “I was starting to understand how colonialism affected us.”
She called the federal Indian Act “the most racist, sexist piece of legislation in the world.”
But the worst part was the terrible loss of hundreds of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Amnesty’s report called it “racialized and sexualized violence.”
It was then that Jacobs realized that she was still healing, too. She had been molested by her grandfather, the faithkeeper in her community, responsible for traditional teachings and ceremonies. She had survived numerous violent relationships. Her daughter was only five when she saw her mother almost killed.
And there was the impact of residential schools in her own family. Her grandmother was placed in a residential school in Brantford, where she was prohibited from speaking Mohawk. She couldn’t teach her daughter, Jacobs’ mother. So Jacobs never learned, either.
Stolen Sisters confirmed Jacobs’ need to act.
“My task was to educate people about all these issues, not only Indigenous people but all people, to understand the impacts,” she said.
She was elected president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada in 2004 and fought for money to research and document missing and murdered Indigenous women. The NWAC also began vigils for the victims.
Jacobs received a Governor General’s Award in 2008 for her work for the missing and murdered women and advancing Aboriginal women’s rights.
She was also asked to the House of Commons the same year to hear prime minister Stephen Harper’s historic apology to Aboriginal people for forcing them into residential schools to assimilate them.
“It was like facing an abuser,” Jacobs said.
She credited Harper for his apology. Then she asked him, “What is it that this government is going to do in the future to help our people?”
The same year, as she travelled the country helping other families, her 21-year-old pregnant cousin was killed at Six Nations. A Mohawk man went to prison for eight years.
“It was the most horrific ordeal,” she said quietly. She didn’t run for re-election. Again, she said, “I had to heal.” Despite studying and working across Canada, Jacobs, now 52 and a grandmother, always returns to the modest red-brick ranch house where she grew up, raised her daughter and has cared for her four grandchildren. It’s on a quiet rural road in Six Nations. It’s filled with Indigenous art. Her partner, Patrick Sandy, is a Mohawk ironworker and artist. They’ve known each other since Grade 5. Her daughter and much of her extended family live on the reserve, too. Jacobs practises law part time in the village of Ohsweken and attends traditional ceremonies.
“This is my home,” she said, “where I feel most safe.”
Six Nations is an Iroquois confederacy formed by Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga and Tuscarora. Many of them fought for the British during the American Revolution. When the British lost, the Haldimand Treaty granted them land along the Grand River. About 12,200 people live on the 46,000-acre, largely rural, reserve.
Jacobs will teach a course on access to justice this fall at the University of Windsor. Then she’ll defend her dissertation for her PhD in Indigenous law, health and research methodologies at the University of Calgary in December. She’ll return to Windsor to teach a course on First Nations women and the law next winter.
She wants her students to understand the difference between Canada’s “Eurocentric” law and Indigenous law. Canadians need to learn about their Indigenous people, she said. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made many promises to Aboriginal people, but almost two years after his election, “it’s not any different,” she said, citing the government’s approval of two major pipelines despite opposition from Indigenous people.
“Everyone should be educated about Indigenous people,” she said. “We’re going to need a huge shift in understanding Indigenous people and where we’re at today,” she said.
It was clear she had a great deal of courage and stamina to deal with the issues she had in her life.