Episode 10: Val Napoleon – Female Tricksters: The First Law Teachers

Val Napoleon is a professor, visual artist, and author from northeast British Columbia (the Treaty 8 part of the province) and a member of Saulteau First Nation. She’s also an adopted member of the Gitanyow (Gitksan) House of Luuxhon, Ganada (Frog) Clan. She has been published for writings and teachings about aboriginal legal issues, Indigenous law and legal theories, Indigenous feminism, governance, critical restorative justice, oral traditions, and Indigenous legal research methodologies.

Val talks about:

• The exciting new Indigenous law opportunities and projects at the University of Victoria
• Civility
• Intense democracy
• Various types of spaces for difficult conversations
• The value of Indigenous oral histories and stories

Resources

• Val’s University of Victoria website
• Val’s books: (please see her University of Victoria website for more publications)

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• Martha Nussbaum (not the exact article that Val refers to)
• “Indigenous Legal Traditions: Roots to Renaissance”
• Charles Taylor:
  • This blog post includes a video of Charles Taylor and a detailed summary of his points
  • This article is about him and democracy (not the exact talk that Val refers to, unfortunately)
• Louis Bird (not the exact article that Val refers to)
• Ten Canoes documentary 
• “Gender and Violence: Drawing on Indigenous Legal Resources” by Emily Snyder, Val Napoleon, and John Borrows
• Filmmaker Nettie Wild’s documentary “KONELINE”
• Former Chief Justice Lance Finch on the duty to learn
• Sally Engel Merry 
• John Borrows
• Indigenous Law Research Unit (you can contact them re: Val’s female trickster cards for sale!):
  • Email: ilru@uvic.ca
  • Website
• “An Inside Job: Engaging with Indigenous Legal Traditions through Stories” 2016 Special Issue, McGill Law Journal 725

• “Tsilhqot’in Law of Consent”, in Joshua Nichols, ed., 2015 48:3 UBC Law Review Special Issue on Tsilhqot’in Nation 871

• 2015 1:1 “Gathering the Threads: Indigenous Legal Methodology” Lakehead Law Journal 33

• 2015 48:1 “Gendered Violence: Resources from Indigenous Legal Orders” UBC Law Review 593

• “From Roots to Renaissance”, in Markus Dubber, ed., Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Val Napoleon – Quotes From The Episode

• (Anything uncertain is either replaced by ellipses or put in square brackets, and some quotes are shortened using ellipses  )

• [2:31] “One of the things that’s really important to human beings living together in a way that’s productive and constructive and, one of the things is civility. Basic civility. And what I mean by that is not just politeness in how we structure our interactions, but our understanding of ourselves and of others, as well as how we understand ourselves as citizens […]. And so the way that we understand ourselves in relation to others and the way that we learn to act on those understandings and responsibilities that arise out of those relationships. So basic civility: the willingness to stop and take the time and think about what that conflict is to make sure that we’re able to reason through conflict and problems in a way that’s principled and deliberate rather than reacting and rather than just acting on an emotional or personal kind of basis.”
  
  
• [3:46] “My understanding of the potential of law, including Indigenous law, is that one of the things that it offers are the basics of civility. How do we situate ourselves to one another, how do we understand obligations and rights and process in terms of what we do. How we solve problems.”
  
  
• [4:22] Julia: “Given that [civility etc.] is what you believe is fundamental, what do you see as the core challenge?” Val: “Anti-intellectualism. A resistance to the part of our, of who are are that’s capable of creating an imagination within which something different can happen. So part of the challenge I think is to, we can understand civility as a core legal principle, or we can understand the rebuilding of civility as a challenge that’s necessary to enable us to live together in a good way. So we focus on survival as one challenge to [public intellectualism]. Another challenge is the willingness to turn answers for our society and our responsibilities over to the market, as if the market is going to provide us with the kinds of answers that we need for governance, for the economy, for social responsibility, and for social justice.”
  
  
• [7:06] “I think that for Indigenous peoples, I think that we’re caught in some of the same pressures as others in that there’s often, usually, a need to take care of huge pressing social and economic concerns, and that displaces the time and ability to think beyond those things.”
  
  
• [10:01] “All human beings, all societies ,have had to deal with human violence and vulnerabilities, and there’s never been a time where a human society hasn’t needed law, including Indigenous societies.”
  
  
• [10:16] “People will have conflict and people will create problems [in] the messiness of collective human life, and people wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have ways of dealing with those problems when they arise.”
  
  
• [10:35] “Every society has to have a whole range of means to deal with the difficulties that we create in our lives, and […] we need ways to take care of one another through those difficulties and those conflicts.”
  
  
• [10:56] “The idea about law is that it allows us to be the best that we can be, but it also has to do the hard work of law because human beings are complicated.”  
  
  
• [12:02] “I heard Charles Taylor give a talk a number of years ago that talked about the need to rebuild democracy in a way that was meaningful, in a way that wasn’t just a representative democracy […], but rather more along the lines of intense democracy, so thinking differently about it, and he was arguing that actually we have a crisis in democracy around the world, and in order to rebuild democracy, he argues, we need to trust in one another, and the only way that we’re going to be able to develop that is if we have an imaginary, a repertoire, in which we can see ourselves solving problems in a way that isn’t violent. We have to be able to imagine that before we’re actually going to be able to do it.”
  
  
• [12:54] “From what I’ve seen in Indigenous communities where – and many of our communities are hugely conflicted, is when people have process that they see themselves being able to engage in, they will take those processes, but they have to be able to imagine themselves in it, and we need spaces within which people can have hard conversations about the kinds of difficulties that our communities are struggling with about agency and dignity, about gender, about human rights, about abuse of power, like all the different kinds of struggles that do exist. If we can’t start to talk about them, and if we can’t start to imagine something different, then we’re not going to make any changes.”
  
  
• [13:48] Gord: “I like this idea of imagination. Ow do you support people, or how do you teach them, how do you invite them into new imaginary spaces?” Val: “So historically, we had oral histories and stories that provided a public legal precedent. It’s a public memory of intellectual resources that could be drawn on.”
  
  
• [16:22] “My focus has been Indigenous law. Rather than looking at Indigenous law against Canadian law, the focus has been on Indigenous law so that what will be possible is a symmetrical relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples, and what I mean by that is something different than the asymmetrical colonial relationship in which it’s assumed that there’s a deficit on the part of Indigenous peoples.”
  
  
• [17:32] “What’s going to happen with the substantive rearticulation of Indigenous law and legal processes and legal institutions is the ability to approach a problem trans-systemically. WIth that term, I’m drawing on the work that goes on at McGill […] Basically it’s an approach where you articulate what the human problem is, you look at what the legal resources are from each legal order in order to solve that problem, and how do the legal principles apply to guide the process, so what’s possible is that people can work across legal orders to inform the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the rest of Canada.”
  
  
• [18:45] Julia: “I wanted to back up – it’s an on the ground kind of question around the need for spaces where people can have difficult conversations, and I’m just wondering what kind of spaces you see.” Val: “Oh fantastic. Okay. Many spaces of every kind. So one of my favourite experiences here was working up in Gitanyow and we were working with one of the Gitksan stories involving the kidnapping of a Haida chief, and that Haida chief died in captivity. […] One of the young women said ‘Wait a minute, I don’t get this […]’ and what happened was that other people in the room started to talk about why that was important, and basically they were teaching her Gitksan law through her asking of questions. That’s a space, right, that allows her to ask questions, that, and to have conversations around ways to think about things. […] There’s also space in the stories themselves. When we think about the stories, we think about the architecture of the stories and different kinds of stories and the functions that they fulfil insofar as human communities, individually and collectively.”
  
  
• [20:14] “There’s a Cree elder, his name is Louis Bird […] and he said that stories are for thinking, but if you take what he’s saying a little further and you think about what is it that happens when you engage in a story, you get into it. There’s an intellectual space which you can draw from what’s going on in the story and you can relate that to what’s going on in your life.”
  
  
• [22:19]: Julia: “The idea of engaging with stories almost as living entities was something that was different for me. […] I can’t say that my mind and my heart has gone to the places that I’m understanding, partly from your writing, partly from this conversation. […]” Val: “For the Cree, the stories are animate. They live.” Gord: “They have their own life.” Val: “They have their own life. And so the question is what do stories do when we’re not telling them? Do they live in villages, do they tell themselves to each other? […] It’s a very charming sort of idea.”
  
  
• [24:57]: “I want to make clear that Indigenous peoples are not any more violent than anyone else. If we look at the past as if it was perfect and we got along absolutely in harmonious ways, there are a couple of problems. One, there’s no resources to draw for today’s problems and struggles, and the other thing is that it actually conflates norms with behaviour and suggests that people just behave and didn’t have intellectual processes through which to negotiate and figure out problems. So there’s a number of those kinds of issues.”
  
  
• [25:51] “Where Indigenous law has been undermined […], where there are gaps, and where Canadian law has failed, those create spaces of violence. Spaces of lawlessness. And it’s not just in Canada that happens; that happens all over North America and in other parts of the world too. ”
  
  
• [28:25] “If you ask the oral histories and the stories different questions, you’ll learn different things. So you can ask stories about lands and resources, or you can ask about family, or you can ask about gendered violence, and you will learn different things from the oral histories.”
  
  
• [32:00] “We have to learn, we’re not going to solve all the problems in the world. We have to do the best that we can in every single circumstance, but we also have to live with the tensions that are a part of the world around us. The tensions provide a stabilizing force as well. As we try and balance and figure out what’s important and try to situate ourselves in making the best kinds of decisions that we can. We’re never going to be in an ideal circumstance where everything works well.”
  
  
• [33:44] “What we want to do as human beings more than anything else in the world is we want to create meaning for ourselves, we want to situate ourselves within meaning, we want to interpret things, and it’s that interpretation that’s so important. Like when I talk about the oral histories and stories being resources, it’s about their interpretation. Law doesn’t interpret itself; humans always interpret it.”
  
  
• [37:10] “We’re not going to learn very much if we’re just insisting on feeling comfortable, which is basically that with which we’re familiar already. Disruption and the decentering of our assumptions is often a necessary part of something new. Conflict in a peaceful world would mean conflict that’s dealt with productively. We’re going to still have conflict, and my hope is that it would be dealt with in a way that enabled supportive human dignity throughout the process, and legal agency on the part of people that were in the conflict and have the first interest in resolving it. We need to find ways to support people in that. There are so many people who don’t have the opportunity, and have never had the opportunity, to think of themselves as a whole human being, or to think of themselves as having any power in this life. So what are the ways that we can create those self-governing individuals, individually and collectively? That’s all part of citizenry, that’s all part of rebuilding that’s necessary.”
  
  
• [39:30] “I hope that people aren’t afraid of conflict. I hope that people embrace it where it happens.”
  
  
• [40:21] Host: “What do you think listeners could do differently tomorrow morning […] that would be helpful and make a difference?” Val: “I have a friend, her name is Nettie Wild. She’s a remarkable filmmaker. She did a film called KONELINE, which I recommend. And in it, she looked for the poetry in everybody. So that allowed her to tell their complicated, often contradictory tales. So, no one subsumed anyone else in the telling of those stories. So: looking for the poetry in each other would be a starting place.”
  
  
• [41:19] “I’m inspired by former Chief Justice of the Appeal Court Lance Finch, who said there’s not only a duty to consult insofar as Indigenous issues, there’s a duty to learn, and so I hope that we can get to a place where there’s legitimate mutuality in the struggles that we face, and that people can figure out what legitimate means to them.”
  
  
• [41:52] “We’ve got to imagine something better than capitalism and imperialism. We’ve got to rebuild Indigenous economies and there should be other ways to do that for other people too. I would encourage people to look at the world around them critically.” Julia: “[…] If that’s not a concept for someone, how do they start? What does that mean?” Val: “It means laying bare one’s own assumptions about things. Looking underneath, looking at the why. […] It’s stepping back from what we think we know about the world to looking at how come? What if? Loosening up the ways that our brains can get set. […] Sometimes it’s just asking the right question.”
  
  
• [43:38] “Discomfort is okay. Melancholy is okay. We can have other ideas about what it means to be okay in the world.”
  
  
• [44:11] “Rather than focusing on rights, we need to spend more time thinking about what kinds of relationships do we need in the world within which the rights matter, and human rights, so that there’s, that becomes part of how we understand the responsibilities within government. That has to be a foundation.”
  
  
• [44:31] “Sally Engle Merry does this wonderful work where she looks at violence against women around the world, and she looks at human rights. One of the things that she says is that whether people understand their problems as mattering to the world, and whether they understand themselves as right-bearing, as a rights holder, depends on their experiences with the legal institutions in the world around them, so police, courts, social work – all of the structures that are part of the legal ordering. If their experiences there are negative, they’re going to understand that their rights don’t matter […] and they’re not going to seek those avenues in order to solve problems.”
  
  
• [45:28] “All law can fail. So much depends on what our political vision is and what we understand is insofar as our responsibilities to one another and to the world.”
  
  
• [45:51] “So what I advocate is don’t idealize Indigenous law. It has to do the hard work of law, and we have to ask those questions about power and who matters and whose voices are being heard. We have to do that on an ongoing basis. My wonderful colleague John Borrows says, as Indigenous peoples, we’re beautiful and we’re messed up, as are the rest of the human population. So the work is ongoing.”
  
  
• [46:18] Gord: “I think one of the things that you’re helping, well you’ve certainly helped me be more aware of it, is the complexity and the rigour of Indigenous law as it exists, that it should be engaged in in a fully intellectual manner.”
  
  
• [46:38] Julia: “You also have some notoriety as a visual artist, and your work with introducing the feminine trickster, and I’m certainly curious about that work. […] And, do you sell it, and how do we find a way to it?” Val: “So I paint grandmother ravens, kookum/kokum ravens, and as you see, they’re feminine but they’re also feminist. They’re born of national and international feminism. And so many of the tricksters now are described as male, and there needs to be a female trickster in the world. They are the first law teachers. They teach us by slapping us upside the head when we start taking ourselves too seriously, they teach with fun, they can also be really mean. So they’re a way also of creating space, intellectual space, because they can do things that we can’t, and then we can think about, what is it that they’re doing and why. […] I don’t have anything for sale right now. I give lots away. We sell the cards – we make cards for the Indigenous Law Research Unit. This is the academic version of a bake sale – we sell cards for research money […] from the UVic [University of Victoria] bookstore, and you can also contact Yvette […] at the Indigenous Law Research Unit.”