Tansi Nîtôtemtik,
Photo retrieved from: <https://reporter.mcgill.ca/nominations-needed-for-new-dean-of-law/>
(UPDATE ~ 4 February 2019) McGill University's Faculty of Law has provided the following comment regarding the article below:
The McGill Faculty of Law’s efforts to respond to Call 28 are ongoing and the Faculty does not hold out any part of the integration workshop as fully satisfying the call to action. We look forward to sharing additional details concerning the Faculty’s response in the near future.
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ReconciliAction YEG has decided to continue our posts from last week on Canadian law schools’ responses to the TRC’s Call to Action # 28. We will cover five more law schools this week, starting today with McGill University’s Faculty of Law.
As was noted in a 2018 blog post, McGill has dedicated one week of its “mandatory first-year Integration Workshop” to teaching students about Indigenous laws and legal traditions.[1] McGill’s description of its Integration Workshop says:
This course aims to help you identify, articulate, and call into question some of your preconceptions about law and justice so that you may experience law as historically and culturally located. It aims to help you find law where you least expect it but also to appreciate law differently where you most expect to find it… This course is a foundational one in that it encourages you, in the trans-systemic spirit, to think carefully and critically about the language you not only speak, but also inherit and inhabit.[2]
This description does not explicitly mention dedicating one week of the Integration Workshop to Indigenous laws and legal traditions, but it does seem to address intercultural competency as described in the 28th Call to Action. Despite the fact that the one-week Indigenous law component of the mandatory Integration Workshop is not mentioned in the course description and the 2017 McGill Tribune article that this post is partially based on does not mention the Indigenous law component recurring annually, this post assumes that it will recur annually.
The one week Indigenous laws and legal traditions component addresses both Indigenous laws and legal traditions and intercultural competency. However, there are other components of the 28th Call to Action that are not addressed in McGill’s Integration Workshop, such as Aboriginal peoples and the law, the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, and Aboriginal-Crown relations.
Other required courses, like property and criminal law, incorporate elements of the above components into their learning.[3] However, it appears that not all the components of Call to Action # 28 are covered in mandatory courses at McGill University’s Faculty of Law. Further, Call to Action # 28 states that all of the topics it lists should be delivered through a single, mandatory course. Currently, there is no single required course at McGill University that requires all students to learn all of the listed topics in Call to Action # 28.
In conclusion, McGill University’s response to Call to Action # 28 is insufficient.
Until next time,
Team ReconciliAction YEG
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[1] Cherry Wu, “McGill Introduces Intensive Course on Indigenous Law” McGill Tribune (January 17, 2017), online: <http://www.mcgilltribune.com/news/mcgill-faculty-of-law-introduces-intensive-course-on-indigenous-law-097235/>
[2] “Current Courses”, McGill University Faculty of Law - Student Affairs Office (2018-2019), online: <https://www.mcgill.ca/law-studies/courses/current#1LRequired>
[3] Supra, note 1.
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