Thoughts on Time (“the time of european colonization”)

Rebecca Johnson Uncategorized , , ,
Richard A Pilling with his oxen in Cardston's Golden Jubilee in 1937.

As part of an ongoing research project, I have been spending time this year thinking about family histories and business. In particular, I have been thinking about the ways family histories about business might be provide space to visible larger cultural (colonial or imperial) stories about “the economy.”

As context, in my own family of origin (one whose ancestors came to North America from England in the 1800, largely as part of a wave of settlers), stories about business have been told in particular ways.

Though raised in a family which was top heavy on schoolteachers, as a child, I heard stories of my ancestors as largely being ones about pioneers and farmers. These stories were held in place also with images, like this one of my great-grandfather Richard A. Pilling, with his team of oxen at the 1937 Cardston Golden Jubilee. I do recall listening to fragments of stories about oil wells, and about a rockwool plant, where rock being turned into insulation. But I was, as a child, largely uninterested in these particular stories. I liked the stories of adventure, sports, or jokes and pranks. Put otherwise, I simply did not attend to the deeper texture of family stories about “business.”

And if “business” showed up in some of the stories, I certainly did not understand these stories as ones that implicated us (or me) in histories of colonization. They were simply stories about family. Of course, my blindness on this front is rather odd, given that the memoir of one of my relatives is explicitly titled, Christoper Layton: Colonizer, Statesman, Leader. Odd that I could see the title of the book on the shelf, and also somehow not think about the meaning of the word “colonizer” in the title.

In any event, as part of my current research project, I have been reading more on the business fragments in my own family history, and particularly those parts of the story linked to my grandfather Doral Pilling’s involvement in early oil and gas exploration in Alberta. This is the story of the Moose Dome oil well (which continued to produce gas well into the 21st century). But I have been reading about the early years of the story, and the ways that my grandfather sought to finance the work at the well. At one point in time, much of the financing for the Moose Dome oil well was provided by a man named Noah Timmins. Noah Timmins (yes, the town of Timmins is named after him), was the President of the Holliger Gold Mine, which was part of the “Porcupine Gold Rush“. At one point, this mine was the largest gold mine in the British Empire (says the wikipedia site). So, I could see that there were some linkages to explore between gold extraction in the east and oil extraction in the west. Put otherwise, I could see that my Grandfather’s story of discovery was linked with other complicated stories of extraction.

In both cases, my grandfather’s ‘discovery’ of oil, Hollinger’s ‘discovery’ of gold, there were silences about more foundational questions related to land ownership and colonial assertions re land. Certainly, neither my Grandfather, nor Noah Timmins were negotiating with Indigneous peoples. Where were the Indigenous peoples in these stories of discovery and extraction? What I really was struck with here was a line on the wiki page for the city of Timmins:

“Archaeological evidence indicates that the area has been inhabited for at least 6,500 years. The first inhabitants were nomadic peoples of the Shield Archaic culture. The area was inhabited primarily by the Cree and Ojibwe peoples up until the time of European colonization.”

It is this last phrase that has caught my attention. What is, I found myself wondering about “the time of European colonization.” The wiki cite did include a couple of footnotes here. One links to the City of Timmins, and its attempts to grapple with (or at least start to identify) some of the complexities of the work ahead re both land acknowledgements, and a better grappling with history. The other points to on Ontario Heritage site dealing with Plaques, and acknowledges the need to different ways of acknowleding the past. So, to be clear, I am not really taking issue with the way the City of Timmins is thinking about their place in the fabric of Canadian society. I appreciated that the City was engaging with that history. Rather, I found myself wanting to think more about the power/possibility in taking up the temporal imagination captured here. What does it mean to think about “a time” of European colonization? What might the start (or end?) dates of this time period actually be? And according to whose experience of that time?

I found myself reflecting on Mark Rifkin’s book, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Duke, 2017). Great book, full of great questions. In particular, he invites us to think ab out the politics of how time is described and experienced. He also argues for “the importance of attending to Native conceptualizations, articulations, and impressions of time that do not easily fit within a framework explicitly or implicitly oriented around settler needs, claims, and norms— a pluralization of time that facilitates Indigenous peoples’ expressions of self- determination.”(p.4)

I was left thinking about how the idea of ‘the time of colonization’ does different kinds of work in the imagination (and in particular, in the imagination as it plays out in my own family history). It is as if this phrase creates a rupture: an acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples in the past, and then a ‘time’ of rupture (the time of colonization) that leaves us in a present that is free both of indigenous peoples AND colonization. We are oriented towards the past in a specific kind of way, invited to think about the relationships between indigneous and settler peoples in specific ways (as in, located in moments of specific encounter in ‘the past’)

On the Timmins page, the History section suggests a number of different ways to think about when ‘the time of colonization’ began. One option is captured in a sentence that read: “The first Europeans to make contact with the local Indigenous peoples were French explores in the late 1600s.” Ok. I notice here the language of ‘contact’. It does suggest different worlds bumping up against eachother (ie. we make contact with alien species…). what happens if the language becomes, “the first europeans to visit”. Is there something in the language of ‘contact’ rather than ‘visit’ that moves us in the direction of a colonial imaginary? Is there something about this moment of ‘contact’ that transforms an encounter into ‘the time of colonization’? And further, what contact are we talking about? It is a big country. Are there some contacts that matter more than others?

Another possibility is that ‘the time of colonization’ is marked less by ‘contact’ than it is marked by certain forms of trade? So maybe ‘the time of colonization’ is about the establishment of a trading post? or a fort? But does any kind of building make a contact or economic exchange one that inaugurates a time of colonization? If so, then we might pay attention to the moment at which a fort becomes permanent? Though on the Timmins webpage, we are told that the original HBC fort ends up closing. So… how could it be that a failed trading post becomes “the time of colonization’?

Another possibility is that it is less those institutuional sites than it is the stream of settlers that then followed in the wake? If so, what are the numbers of settlers whose arrival moves us away from specific dates of encounter such that we have entered “the time of colonization”?

The difficulty with finding precise dates for the beginning of this time is matched by ambiguity in establishing the end of this time. When does ‘the time of colonization’ end? Is it with the establishment of a treaty? But that doesn’t work in contexts (such as in BC) where there are no treaties in place. And in any event, treaty making is something that has very long histories, and is part of the modern relationships between european states as well. One would have to have a very specific idea of treaty to determine that treaties are nececessarily part of colonization.

More to be thought about, and certainly I could be accused of making too much of the phrase “the time of European colonization”, but i find it useful for thinking about my own project, and about ways I might begin to rethink the ways such temporal imaginations might be interrogated in our collective rethinkings of histories of economy, and of family business, and the ways that those stories could use concrete attention in the present, as we begin thinking about the structures of economy that will better serve our collective work of stewarding more sustainable and just collective futures…

Witnessing cultural work on a rainy day

Rebecca Johnson Indigenous Laws, Pegadogy, Witnessing

December 16, 2025. A rainy day in what has been a rainy week here in Victoria, BC. We are in a so-called ‘atmospheric river’, which I experience really as just winter weather here on the Island. And really, it is not full time rain. It is just that it is sporadic and uneven: sometimes a light mist, sometimes a deluge, or the rain blowing sideways, and then the emergence of some blue sky. It is not really predicatable. The only prediction is that it helps to have an umbrella, or waterproof gear.

Standing infront of the Large Gathering Space, looking out towards the ring road, on a rainy morning

Since coming to the West Coast (or the ‘wet coast’ as some say), I have been learning how to moderate my grumpiness about the rain. Rain is, afterall, a regular presence here. I recall how my mind slipped sideways listening to Rob (YELḰATŦE) Clifford share the W̱SÁNEĆ story about their first ancestor, SȽEMEW̱, who came to the Earth in this territory in the form of rain.1 Since then, I have tried to remind myself not to complain about the watery skys: on a rainy day, we are simply having the gift of a visit from a loved one. It helps me to remember that there are many ways to both experience and learn from the rain.

I was reflecting on how the world around us can be a teacher as I was walking into the law school this morning. After several years of teaching in a construction zone, it has been quite something to be inhabiting the new space; the completed Indigenous Law wing officially opened on October 8, 2025. I have still not gotten over the feeling of calm and spaciousness I feel walking into and around the building. I find myself breathing deeply, filling my lungs, slowing my breath, and settling into a slower pace. I have also been thinking about how the new wing was designed so that the building would be not simply ‘a place’ in which we learn, but also ‘a teacher.’ That was one of the goals of construction, and I suppose we are all slowly stepping into what it actually means to learn how to see Indigenous legality around us?

Example. I woke up this morning to an email from Ruth Young (the Director of Indigenous Initatives at the Law School) letting us know that Mary Ann Thomas (an Elder from the Esquimalt Nation) had visited the new wing early in the morning to do some work. This work involved blessing the doors to the large gathering space. The doors, carved by Coast Salish artist Dylan Thomas (Qwul’thilum), were also to be marked with tamulth (a red powder made from crushed rock).

Facing the large gathering space, noticing that someone has moved the couch in front of the door

This important work, we were told, was done in a small and intimate way (those who passed by as it happened were able to join if they wanted). Dean Kodar, Della Preston, Asad Kiyani and Ruth Young witnessed the work, and Tara Williamson was asked by Mary Ann Thomas to ‘be her hands’ to help with the higher sections of the doorway that she count not reach. The email told us that we might notice deep red powder dusted and streaked on parts of the door, and asked us not to wipe it off: “It is powerful medicine and reminds us of our work to maintain and care for these spaces moving forward.”

And so, my first stop on arrival at the school was to head over to the large gathering space to connect myself to the work that had been done. With the rain and clouds outside, the hallway space was darker than usual. A couch had been moved in front of the door to the large gathering space. That is what most caught my attention. Without the email, I would not likely have noticed anything else, but with with my attention focused, I could indeed see the traces of red powder on the door. I spent some time standing there, trying to make note of places that the powder lingered, and connecting myself to the moment, feeling grateful for having received Ruth’s note.

The email also reminded us that this work began earlier in the construction phase when Mary Ann Thomas and Tristan Lowenberger (from Facilities Management) “had first marked all the entrances to the old and new parts of the building with tamulth to let the ancestors know where the passageways were and so that also knew we would be the caretakers of the building.” I was reminded of an earlier email we received from Dean Freya Kodar in the summer before the building opened, that let us know in more detail about the cultural work that had been done around the building, focusing on land, trees and plants, and ancestors. She said:

“We also want to let you know that prior to the construction of the new wing, cultural work led by local knowledge keepers and Elders and guided by the Office of the Vice-President Indigenous, helped to ground the work in Coast Salish protocol. May Sam, her son Scott and her daughter Josie first blessed the land where the construction would be taking place. Doug LaFortune and Kathy Horne then came to bless the trees that would be felled and the plant life that would be disturbed. Most recently, Mary Ann Thomas led another blessing by marking the footprint of the building and all the doorways to inform the ancestors where the passageways are and that the new wing for the Faculty of Law at UVic would now stand there. As we continue to work with Songhees Nation and Esquimalt Nation to determine a Lekwungen name for the new wing, cultural work has continued – and our intention is to continue to engage with Songhees Nation and Esquimalt Nation to ensure we are upholding our responsibilities on their territories, as well as any obligations that may come with a future Lekwungen name.”

While I did not have a rich understanding of all the layers of meaning, or the processes associated with the morning’s work, it was also clear to me that I didn’t need to know all those details in order to engage with the work that had been done. What was important for all us working in the law school to know, was that the work of grounding the building in Coast Salish protocol was continuing.

Clearly, for people from within the Coast Salish world, this cultural work — these protocols — would be embedded deep histories, and have many rich layers of meaning. At this point, it would be enough for me to know that there was an important protocol, that it had been done in collaboration, in a public way, with attention to the conditions of lawfulness in both the Coast Salish, and common law traditions. The email made this clear to us.

The law school under construction: a time of disturbance and creation!

I also really appreciated reading that Mary Ann Thomas had explicitly asked Ruth Young to share the information with us at the law school. None of this was ‘secret’ or ‘confidential’. Nor was it something inaccessible to non-Salish people. Both emails went to “law-building”, as it was information important to all of us who have responsibilities to the building: faculty, staff, library, and those who help maintain the building and clean the spaces in it. Indeed, there was full ‘transparency’ around the event. We were told when it happened, where it happened, who was involved in the protocol, why it had been done, and who was there to witness it.

I found myself thinking about citational practices, and questions of legitimacy, validity, authority and memory. Not only were we being able to learn about the protocols that had been followed, we were also invited to understand that this work was now part of our shared experience. We too needed to see that this protocol was done ‘in a good way’, which means done in an open and public way. Questions about when, where, who and why have to be both known and remembered. In response to questions from people about how the law school had engaged with Coast Salish legality, we would be in a position to answer, and to say what had been done, and who was present. The work was witnessed, and shared, and done in a lawful way. It could be remembered.

Tamulth touching the eyes…inviting us to see further?

I paused here, thinking about the importance of this. The protocol involving the tamulth powder on the door had the feel (to me) of sacred work. I was raised in a tradition that developed separate spheres for thinking about the sacred and the secular. The public/secular/legal spaces have been understood to be distinct from the interior spaces of faith/religion/spirituality. I was not raised in a tradition that had protocols designed around obligations people had to land, the trees, animals, and spirits who were in the space. But the Salish peoples here do have such protocols. I could see why it would matter (and I mean that in all the ways ‘mattering’ might be used) for me to acknowledge these Salish lifeways, and to understand them as part of the fabric of that legal order. And, important to see myself as connected to it, even where it differs from the legal order that I grew up in. It is part of the legal order of this place, and living in this place means taking it seriously — acknowledging that being in this space means taking on responsibilities. At the very minimum, it means learning to see the different legal ways of seeing the world, of interacting with the world, can co-exist (and thrive) in the same space.

And so, a rainy morning returned me to the question of how one might learn law in this building of ours, how one might learn to read the space in many ways, how doors, and red powder, and email communications might open space to continue thinking about lawfulness, protocols, and collaborative work. All this is an invitation to take on a sense of responsibility not only to people, but also to the land, to the trees and plants, to the animal life in the forest beside the school, to the spirits of ancestors who walked these lands over millenia. Whatever I think about the deeper ontological questions (ie who we are in the world, what the world ‘is’), this work invites me (and perhaps all of us in the law school, Salish and non-Salish alike) to see myself in a much deeper temporal structure. It asks me to consider that my ‘time’ in this space may coexist with those who had come before, and that there were ways for me to attempt to acknowledge their being, and their needs. It asks me to think about how those beings might be invited into relationship with me. This invites me to ask how I might learn to listen over time, see over time, consider across time, and take steps to speak in other languages, or at the very least, to acknowledge those forms of lawfulness in others.

photo credits: Rebecca Johnson

  1. This story is strongly connected to place, as SȽEMEW̱ came to the W̱SÁNEĆ at SNIDȻEȽ (Tod Inlet), their first village site. You can read more about current work by W̱SÁNEĆ youth to revitalize connections to this site here: https://wsanec.com/w%CC%B1sanec-youth-revitalize-the-first-w%CC%B1sanec-village-site-with-s%E1%B9%89id%C8%BCe%C6%9A-mural-project/… ↩︎

Indigenous Intellectual Property: Stick(er)ing to the Question

Rebecca Johnson Uncategorized , , , ,

[Note: originally published on the family blog at: https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2025/11/indigenous-intellectual-property-or.html]

November 5th, I got to spend a couple of hours with the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada (IPIC), who held a “Book Club” event, using our book “Indigenous Intellectual Property” as the point of conversation. They had a great set up. The four of us co-authors (Val, me, Deb, and Richard) were allowed 2 minutes each (what?! two minutes only?!) to give a brief summary of what we were hoping to do in each chapter. After that, they split us up into 4 breakout rooms (16 minutes each time), so we could circulate through the smaller groups in a more intimate way, chatting about the kinds of questions and thoughts folks had. I certainly came away from it with another whole host of questions. Amongst them, I started thinking about the need we have in this particular time to avoid providing “ANSWERS”, and instead create space and time for more extended conversations with eachother about the “QUESTIONS” that come up, and the ordinary/mundane spaces in our life that might help us see how many “PATHWAYS FOR THINKING” are around us.

After the event was over, I found myself looking at the piles of stickers and sticker books that I have on the desk around me: decorative, functional, tracking, art…. I like stickers, and like attaching them to things.

[Here is the point that, in person, I would start singing Lionel Ritchie’s song “Stuck on You” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVqR2PwX428. Or maybe the earlier Elvis Presley hit? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NIc3b_jcIo.]

Could I use the stickers to think about some of the Intellectual Property questions that had come up in the day’s conversation? 

Why not? 

I decided to spend a few minutes focusing just on the stickers with images on them … the ART stickers.

One might start with the cluster of ‘named’ stickers: little gatherings of stickers by Picasso, da Vinci, Monet and Kahlo.

One might then start with the Frida Kahlo stickers. In the world of art stickerbooks, it is more difficult to find women artists, for all the reasons one might imagine. So, lets just celebrate that someone printed these (thanks Dover Publications).

The inside cover tells us a bit more about Freida as an artist (ie tortured, married, communist, jewish mexican indian).

There are any number of questions one might ask here about biography, identity, relationality, etc.

There are others, related to copyright or IP. The interior cover gives us some info.

This is a “new work” (take a look at the bibliographical note).  The copyright is held by Dover over this little book of stickers, NOT over the content of the book. And thus, the ISBN points us to ‘the work’ (the sticker book).

And then what do we have as far as content? 16 stickers. Each one repeats Kahlo’s last name, and gives us the title of the work. I don’t get a date for the work, nor a more extended conversation, but name and title are clearly reproduced with each, so i do not have to remember a title after I peel the sticker off.

The back cover of “the work” gives us a bit more storytelling to contextualize the paintings. In addition to a bit about HER (on the inside cover), that back cover tells us a bit more about the art she produced, and how to experience it! This is work, we are told, is full of “anguish and passion”; it “smoulders!” We are also told (in case we didn’t know) that she was once eclipsed by her more famous partner (is this part of what helps us engage with her work?). Or we can see that in purchasing the sticker book we are helping her achieve more widespread recognition? This then might be one of the purposes of the book itself (as a work of stickers): to engage with art, and see something of the works of Frida Kahlo. Her paintings, we are told, might add to a personal collection, or ‘add instant interest’ to letters or other flat surfaces. I do love that (thinking about ways to add interest to flat surfaces!)

The sticker book also contains some warnings: “not intended for children under 4.” It is not clear to me if the warning (which is about INTENTION) is made to protect children (who might chew on or choke on the stickers?). Given that that book tells us that the paper and ink are acid free, I presume that a consumer of fine books such as these could probably eat the pages (literally) without digestive damage. And it seems to me that if it is about a choking hazard, people over 4 may be equally susceptible to getting a snack stuck in their windpipe on the way down. Or maybe the concern is with the content of the reproductions? Maybe there is just too much anquish and passion (and painterly nudity) in these reproductions, and children under 4 should be looking at different images? Hard to say. But certainly, as readers, we are told about the publisher’s intentions regarding the use of these stickers.

I turned next to a different sticker book, one that did not foreground any specific artist, but instead turned to a collection of artists, or a style of art?   This was “Inuit Art from Cape Dorset”.

Some other more slippery questions occured to me here.  First thing to note is that we have moved away from a single artist (Freida, Picasso, Monet, etc), to a style identified by a People: Inuit from Cape Dorset. It is also known as Kingait (or ‘High Mountains’).

The backcover again tells us a bit about the purpose of the book. This time it appears to target kids (a publication series explicitly named ‘pomegranate kids’. 

We have three main take aways (in tems of purpose): 1. learn and craft, 2. self expression (personalize your crafts or journals), and 3. enjoyment.

What, then, is there to learn? The inside cover starts the learning process, delivering a paragraph sized bite of info. We do get a map of north america with a dot to geolocate us. Note, there are no ‘political borders’ here, either to separate US/Canada, nor to indicate the relative size of Nunavut. I did wonder about the work done by phrases like “way up in Northern Canada”, “little hamlet”, “tradition”, “harsh environment”, “dependent on animals” (which tend to lean not precisely to terra nullius, but do paint a certain kind of picture). 

 Also, I found myself wondering why there was a decision to use the phrase “people known as Inuit” that than just saying “home to Inuit.”  Is that just a function of targetting young people?  There is also not much history here.  The paragraph suggests that in the 1960s the Inuit simply starting making art to share? [there is a larger story about dispossession that explains how and why people turned to art as a way to survive the damage produced to their economy, but that story is not part of this sticker book for kids].  And maybe that is not the best story to share in this context in any event (one might ask whether a celebration of the art and images is best situated alongside some of the damaging forces of colonial pressure, or rather along the vector of strengths, which have always been around adaptability, innovation and resilience?

But…. this is, afterall, just a brief moment of education in a book of stickers, so one might cut a bit of slack (while still generating some interesting questions). The intro does point us towards the beautiful prints that have been prized around the world!

One can then flip through the book to look at the images/stickers that are offered.

When I start thinking more about this book, it was clear that there were some distinct differences from, for example, the Freida Kahlo book.  Primarily, there are no descriptive ‘labels’. What we have a these interesting images of animals, but none have names, and none are attributed to any particular artists. So, are these just images produced by ‘people known as Inuit’, or are there actually specific artists involved? And in any case, how is a sticker lover to know what artists in particular interest them?

Were specific artists being invisibilized in this process?  I flipped to the last page, thinking about this problem.   The book DOES give some attribution. Here we have a list of 17 artists (both dead and alive). Better.  But as readers, we have no mechanism (unless we are already ‘in the know’) to express an opinion about specific prints or specific artists. 

And there is a further qualifier, which left me with another question. The text tells us that the stickers are derived from prints by a specifically listed number of Inuit artists. As a reader (sticker user?), it is not it clear what it is meant by “derived from”. Does that mean just clipping an image out of the context of a larger print? Or taking inspiration from? Or altering? Or working in the style of?  

Here, I found myself thinking of artist Michael Snow suing the Eaton’s Centre when they tied christmas ribbons around the necks of the geese in his sculptural installation there. https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/virtual-museum/snow-v-eaton-centre-ltd-1982-70-cpr-2d-105. So I just don’t really know what the story is in this case.  But I remained curious about the ways that these stickers aren’t identified in any ways that would help me know as a reader 1. which images were produced by which artists, or 2. the conditions under which those artists are or are not compensated for the ‘reproduction’ (derivation).  

We are also told that the book is designed by Carey Hall. My assumption is that this is a way of acknowledging the work of the graphic designer, who would have done the design structure.   But they will not have been the person who decided what went into the book itself, or they would hold the copyright.    

The ‘publication’ info at the bottom of the page gives us a bit more info. There is a copyright notation to “Dorset Fine Arts.” So in both the case of the Frieda Kahlo book, and this one, the copyright is held by a corporate person.   I do find it interesting to think about copyright as held by a corporate entity, rather than by an individual. I wondered more about this company (presuming that they had taken care of those questions in the production of the book).  

With this in mind, I went to look up Dorset Fine Arts, to get addtional context. 

So, their webpage tell us that they were set up in Toronto in 1978, and are “the wholesale marketing division of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative.” Fabulous!   I love the history of the co-op form and its power in the North.  And immediately, I found myself feeling just a bit less worried about the decisions made in the design of the book.  And this is part of the story told by Dorset Fine Arts about themselves:

The Co-operative is in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut and is unique among the Arctic Co-operatives for its focus on the arts and artists of the community. Dorset Fine Arts was established to develop and serve the market for Inuit fine art produced by the artist members of the Co-operative. 

OK.  Interesting!  With this in mind, I returned to my questions about the title (which points to an area, rather than focusing on the work of a particular artist), as well as the decision to cluster a group of images without attributing to a specific artist.   Rather than seeing this as a way of erasing artists, I could see how this book might do the work of curating an appetite for Inuit fine art from the co-op, without leaning into  a culture of “auteurs” or a “star” focus.   In this context, it seems a bit more like the artists are both sharing their names, but celebrating their work in a way that holds up the whole community.  In this context, I feel less worried that the book undermines principles of ‘authorship’, and can see this decision as one that is supporting the idea of a collective of images and ways of seeing.  

So once again, it seems that the decision to derive stickers from prints in this way enables Dorset Fine Arts to create the sticker book as “a work” with a different focus and goal, which is not simply to introduce someone to a particular artist, but rather to a community of artists, which then might lead to the decision to support the community by coming to appreciate the style in this broader way, which might lead to more economic support the the community of artists, or to valueing Inuit art more generally.  While I initially wondered about/worried about this sticker book (that is, had the artists been consulted? was their work recognized? were they compensated in the reproduction of these images), my worries were allayed in thinking more about the artists as involved in those questions through their participation as members of the cooperative (which is was not visible to me until i looked behind the corporate form of the copyright holder).  Again, those are presumptions.   But I like being able to at least look at those sticker books to start asking questions about the images, their reproduction and transformation into different forms. 

So, at the end of the day, what to say?   I love stickers.  I love being reminded that there are any number of questions that ordinary life opens up for thinking about the production and reproduction of images.  

Taking Note(book): Real Indians and Real Whites

Rebecca Johnson Uncategorized , , , ,

(originally posted on family blog at: https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2025/10/taking-notebook-real-indians-and-real.html)

I was at a workshop last week, a gathering of Secwepemc folks continuing their work on the standing up of the Secwepemc legal order.  It was so nourishing to spend time with stories (stseptékwlls), and language.  At the end of the gathering, I was gifted a package that included this little book.  At first, I thought it was an old copy of an actual Bobbsey Twins book.   I had serious flashback to being here at the lake in the summer, and going to the Salmon Arm public library to work my way through the Bobbsey Twins, Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew! (the goal being to read through every book in the series).  

I was suprised that it was coil bound, and then when I opened it, to see someone else’s name in it, and crossed out!  This made me even more excited (since i love things second hand). Ooohh… the thrill of imagining the other hands that had once held this book!

And then, as I tried to flip through, I realized that it was a (commercially produced) notebook.  I got the joke!  Some smart person had pulled together a notebook structured like a Bobbsey Twins book to send someone down memory lane. What a perfect idea! 

There is little in the world that I love more than a notebook, and this one was interlaced with random pages from the original text, leaving you with fragments of the original story separating clusters of paper for writing.   Lovely! And so, I started flipping through, wondering about which pages had been chosen.  The beginning started (as books so often do), with a Chapter Index.  My eyes slid down, coming to a stop on Chapter 12: “Real Indians”. Sigh.  Just a bit of an icky feeling in the pit of my stomach, thinking about both my love of the books as a child, and my absolutely lack of remembrance of ‘real indians’ featuring in the story.   So… I headed out to the interweb to see if I could find the text. Yes indeed, the chapter was there:

Basically, the boys head off for a small adventure in the woods, noting that “they say the Indians had reservations out here not many years ago”.  The boys looks at rocks, imagining them as arrow heads, or hatchets, become scared of noises at night (imaging them as approaching indians?), and follow the sound of a cowbell home.   That is it.  

Real Indians?  Nope.  Indians imagined as part of a vanished past, a matter of childhood imagination.  This children’s book was published in the US in 1950.  In Canada, the Potlach ban ends in 1951.  In both cases (book and potlach ban) there is a large cultural/legal practice of erasure and ellision.  What to say.

Of course, I really appreciated the additional little joke Racelle had added for me with this gift…. its reminder of the work that continues to lie ahead of us, as we do the work of untangling past narratives.  And then my mind skitters sideways to think about the relationship between “Real Indians” and “Real Whites.” 


In 1910 (40 years before this Bobbsey Twins chapter), an alliance of Chiefs from the Secwépemc, Nlaka’pamux, and Syilx Nations sent a letter to Sir Wilfred Laurier (then the Prime Minister of Canada), to remind him of his obligation to respect the lands, rights, and title of the Indian peoples. In it they use the phrase “Real Whites” to decribe the first white people who came to their territory in respectful ways, building respectful relations (mostly french fur traders), and to differentiate them from the later whites (mostly anglo settlers in gold rush), who came with violence and theft.  Here is a passage of that Memorial: 

The Shuswap Nation Tribal Council (SNTC) has a pamplet with some background context plus the rest of the text of the memorial.   

I find my mind returning to the Memorial often, thinking about how it invites us (me?) to situate and conduct ourselves (particularly in Secwpemec territory during the year) as one of the ‘Real Whites’… to do no harm, and be a good guest.  Anyways…. What a great notebook, and a great reminder of the need to remember to look back as well as forward, and to reconsider the multiple ways that the past can remind us of both things we love, and of things that continue to need our attention and rethinking.


There is of course more to think about, with this little notebook, and its scattering of pages.   For example, this fragment that gets at the young girl who leaves school to work, as her father is out at sea (some gender and working class stuff in here).

… or this one, taking up the propensity of “college boys” to engage in (toxic masculine) patterns of bullying. 

Indicators about gender, and power, and violence laid out in children’s literature as reminders for us all?

Religion, Culture and Gender: or, what popped up at the Servatius Pop-Up

Rebecca Johnson Feminism, Indigenous Laws, law, Pegadogy, Witnessing

Here at UVic Law, we held a recent ‘pop up conversation’ on Servatius vs. Alberni School District No 70, a case that raised questions about freedom of religion, and the incorporation of Indigenous cultural practices into the school system. The case invites conversation in a number of contexts. For those of you interested in following the threads the case opens, here is a cluster of resources.

First, here are PDF version of the trial and appeal decisions:

Here is the Trial decision: https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/22/04/2022BCCA0421.htm

Here is the Trial decision on COSTS; https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/20/04/2020BCSC0424cor1.htm

Here is the decision of the BC Court of Appeal: https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/22/04/2022BCCA0421.htm

In the context of a pop-up conversation (which we held on 30 Jan 2023), we often assume the audience will not have had time to fully engage with (or perhaps even read) the case. And thus, we (I?) prepared a handout, to give a visual summary of the facts, the process, and some of the issues. Here is a copy of the handout we used.

servatius-handoutDownload

While we did not record the conversation, there were a number of very interesting pathways taken up by colleagues here. It may be that they will share those notes later (or that I will summarize them later), but at this point, I note that the case offered space to think about religious freedom, religious oppression, colonial histories, the TRC, constitutuional law, the law/culture divide, administrative law and process, litigation strategies, evidence, children, pedagogy, performativity, costs, professional conduct, legal creativity, and more.

In the video below, I comment on one of the unexpected (and gendered) moments that emerged during the conversation. What I offer here are my ‘the morning after’ thoughts (that is, reflections that are still sorting themselves out in the context of 24 hours of ruminating). It is offered here in the spirit of sharing thoughts on the ways difficult conversations might emerge in all the everyday spaces around us, and the ways these difficult moments might be taken up as pathways for further conversation and exploration!

Click on the link for a 25 minute conversation about gender in the pop-up event.

https://echo360.ca/media/71bbcf85-6911-41a6-af88-50ecedf34298/public

Below are the slides from the conversation

servatius-and-genderDownload

Fear-based Policy and the Institutionalizing of Injustice: Engaging with R v. S.F. [2003] O.J. No 92

Rebecca Johnson Criminal Law, law, Teaching Resources

And now, for something completely different? Or rather, now for something linked more explicitly to my day job teaching in a law school! 🙂

For those of us working in or around criminal justice, there is no avoiding the data that Indigenous people, and people of colour more generally are over-surveilled, over-detained and over-searched in ways that contribute to the massive and mass overincarceration rates seen in the Canadian criminal justice system. In any first year criminal law class, this has to be the backdrop for questions about the Charter’s guarantee of the right to be free from arbitary arrest and detention, and unreasonable search and seizure.

And yet, it remains a challenge to grapple with the ways in which racism often inflects the contexts in which detentions and searches occur. One challenge is that, in the classroom, when taking up specific cases involving search and seizure and the Charter, one is pressed by the common law case method in the direction of an ‘individualizing’ focus. When analyzing individual cases, and asking about race, we are pressed to focus of questions of fact or of ‘proof, on the decision-making of the individual police officer, or the decision-making of the individual who was detained or searched. [For more on this, a great resource is Constance Backhouse, Reckoning with Racism: Police, Judges and the “RDS” Case (UBC Press, 2022)]

But this close focus on individuals makes it difficult to get at how structural and institutional racism works in/on/through us. It is very difficult to get at the very concrete structures of our society that generate, amplify, and escalate patterns of colonial and racial injustice.

That brings me to R. v. SF, a 2003 Ontario case concerning the ‘routine’ strip search of two young women by the Toronto Police Service. This case, though nearly 20 years old, and ostensibly silent on questions about race, is nonetheless a great vehicle for exploring the ways that supposedly neutral policy instruments can be the vehicle through which ‘fear’ (all too often of the racialized, indigenous, disabilized ‘other’) can operate to create institutionalized structures of injustice.

In this blog post, I am sharing a few resources about this case that I used in my first year crim class this year, because I think the case can foster important conversations that could be occuring not just in the law school classroom, but also around the kitchen table, or the coffee shop. I think there are reasons for non-law-school folks to feel empowered to read legal cases, and start conversations about what those cases might have to teach us (which is not just about ‘legal rules’, or ‘outcomes’ but also about how public conversations around law can be more complicated and more engaged).

One of the big reasons I think this case in particular deserves to be part of a broader conversation is it offers a very concrete example of how something as supposedly minor as a policy instrument can play a hugely important part in sustaining patterns of injustice, even if each individual involved is acting in good faith (and in the hopes of contributing to a safe and healthy community). I suggest we look at this case as a model for thinking. It lets us walk alongside a judge who is really grappling with the problem of institututional or structural problems (and not just focused on individual failures).  A case like this can provide some insight into the kinds of structural responses one might take to a problem that is also structural in some meaningful sense.  I think such questions are crucial as we (as a society) attempt to take up the ways in which structured patterns of racism or colonialism or sexism or abilism are woven into into the institutions and policies of daily living. Seeing them in this context, might help us better see them operating in those spaces (and generate ideas about how to actively disrupt and dismantle those structures of thinking and practice).

FIRST: As a bit of an introduction both the the case, and ways to read a legal case, you can click on the link below to watch a 7 minute video (which I did for students in the first semester of law school). The video just sets up an introduction for the different ways one might read a 25 page judicial opinion like this R v. S.F. (that is, there are many ways to read a case, and people should feel free to just plunge in and try out different approaches).

https://echo360.ca/media/f486a1a9-5778-4821-9cbc-8e2f621f238f/public

SECOND: The second resource is an hour long video (link below), which is aimed at those who are prepared to spend some time in a more extended video walk through of the case.  Yes, you can probably read the case itself on your own in less time than I do here. What I am offering here is something more like an extended conversation about the reasons in this case, how the judge sets up the problem and walks through it, with random commentary on my side at various points (like the Statler and Waldorf , the old guys in the Muppets TV show, heckling and jeering from their balcony seats?).  And of course, the point is not really to come to a particular conclusion (that is, you can certainly disagree with my analysis!), but is just an example of the ways that a person might engage with a case like this one.

 

https://echo360.ca/media/b1b1ff19-b963-41c1-9f71-46bc9cb42f87/public

THIRD: For those who want to go to the case ‘cold’, or to take a look at the case yourself, here is a link to the ‘unmarked’ copy of decision (which is 25 pages long).  R v. SF (2003).

ss-sfDownload

FOURTH: In link below, I share with you what my copy of the SF text looked like ‘post-reading’. People read cases in different ways, and have different levels of comfort about marking things up. I will admit that my own learning style has elements of visual lean in it, so it really helps me to write on my text while reading.  As you will see below, both colour, and doodles show up in ways that do help me to organize as I go. That is not a style that works for everyone (and indeed some friends have referred to me as a defacer of texts) but I offer it simply for those who want to compare notes (or look more closely at the text I reference in the second video).

ss-r-v-sf-rj-annotations

In closing, for those who are interested in followup, a report of Ontario’s Office of the Independent Police Review Directorate (OIPRD) concluded that in 2019, many police officers were still not complying with the guidelines set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in Golden.  In short, the “fear” that the judge noted in SF too often remained stronger than the directives given to the police by the highest court of the land. The Report showed the Toronto Police Service to be particularly egregious, making significant overuse of strip search powers: where most large police forces by 2019 were searching 1% or less of arrestees, the TPS strip searched between 37-43% of arrestees, depending on year studied.  Of the 54,675 strip searches they conducted between 2014 and 2016, they discovered evidence in only 2.5 to 2.7% of searches.  Against this, consider the impact on the people searched. If you want to briefly browse through this report (looking also at how the report is both set up and organized), check out this link: Gerry McNeilly, “Breaking the Golden Rule: A Review of Police Strip Searches in Ontario” (March 2019)”

Some “Business Associations” materials (LaRue meets Big River First Nation)

Rebecca Johnson business, law, Pegadogy ,

At the end of this post, such as it is, you will find a small gathering of resources from my Business Associations class at UVic. One of the challenges in the Business Associations context is how to teach in ways that connect to the broad context in which economic work is situated (ie. not only in corporate boardrooms, but also in small businesses, local cooperative movements, and community-innovations). Another of the challenges for all law schools at this point is how to develop teaching resources that engage with Indigenous law, and Indigenous legal orders. In this point, I offer a few materials at the intersection of these two questions in the context of “LaRue Investments” and “Big River First Nation v Agency Chiefs Tribal Council Inc“. 2020 SKQB 273.

big-river-first-nation-2020skqb273Download

Let me back up to say that, over the years, I have drawn on some of the challenges that have emerged in the context of the family-owned closely-held corporation (LaRue Investments Ltd) that is the owner of the Shuswap lands that have been such an important part of the growing up experience of so many in my extended family.

“The Lake” (as we call it) is at the centre of important identity-forming moments for so many of my siblings and cousins. It has also been at the centre of a series of family conflicts that have resulted in nearly 20 years of litigation, involving schisms between people. And so (given that much of the documentation is public), I have sometimes used moments of family history in the classroom, as a way of walking students through a ‘small-scale-but-story-rich’ case study to explore how the concepts we study in the statutory materials have application in many different locations. It is also a way of making visible that the phrase ‘business is business’, often hides another refrain, which is ‘business is personal’!

By this, I mean that an understanding of the affective and emotional dimensions of economic problems can be really important for solicitors. Indeed, it can be just as important as it is for lawyers doing family law, or wills and estates. But it can be a challenge figuring out how to “teach” emotion and affect in the context of the business associations classroom. Getting personal by using the family business has been one strategy.

For many years, I was also able to have the students think about how to work with a client by bringing my mother to class. She was the corporate memory for LaRue, and had worked with many different lawyers over the years. She was well positioned to talk to the students about challenges that had arisen, and about the things that she had done well, as well as about the mistakes that she had made. Quite a gift! One of the gifts was a mistake. Let’s call this mistake “Removing a Director from the Registry”. The short version would be this: Arta believed that one of the Directors was not eligible to be a Director, so she went and filled out the Notice of Change of Directors form and submitted it to the Corporate Registry. The questions raised by the mistake were:

  • What is the appropriate process for removing a director?
  • What was the legal effect of submitting a form saying a director had been removed?
  • Might this action be called “oppression”?
  • What remedy would fix the harm?

NOTE: There are many longer versions of this event (which happened in 2003). If you want to follow the longer story, you can check out the history section of the LaRue Investments Ltd website. You will find there a set of video interviews in which Arta talks about the longer versions of this story.

In the classroom, I give the students all the background on this saga. It allows us to look at all the ways directors can be replaced, as well as at the relationships between Directors, and Officers. It lets us see that it is actually very simple to fix some mistakes (eg. all you have to do is submit a new Notice of Directors…no big deal). One can also see that the bigger problem might lie in the ongoing relationships between the parties, and not so much in the legal documentation.

So lets’s add in an Indigenous Law piece. It is the case of Big River First Nation and Agency Chiefs Tribal Council Inc. The case comes out of the Non-Profit Sector, but gets at the same question as above: what happens when group A tries to remove someone from group B as a director?

What makes the case doubly interesting is that the Judge here refers not only to Canadian law (working with Saskatchewan law dealing with non-profit corporations), but also to Cree law.

Click on the link below for an 8 minute video I prepared about this case for students in my 2020 version of Law 315: Business Associations

https://echo360.ca/media/e28ce6f9-fbc4-4a5e-9a33-69e6d9e5d7e2/public

If you need a bit more backstory on the legal pieces before jumping into the ‘classrooom link’, here are a few more resources. First, here is a summary of the case from CanLII.

https://canliiconnects.org/fr/r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9/73312

Here is a blogpost about the case by (former law student) Miny Atwal.

https://indigenouseconomies.wixsite.com/main/post/big-river-first-nation-v-agency-of-chiefs-tribal-council-inc-2020-skqb-273

The link below will connect to a PDF version of some of my annotations on the case.

26-big-river-first-nationDownload

I will be so very interested to hear what others make of the case, and how these two stories together might facilitate some of the important conversations we need as we begin struggling towards ways of working through the complicated business of problem solving!

The Social Life of (Northern) Stories: Reflections on Oral and Aural Culture

Rebecca Johnson Indigenous Laws, Opera

Strange bedfellows being what they are in these COVID-19 times….. back in March 2020, I spent the second week of isolation with Julie Cruikshank (the scholar) and Richard Wagner (the composer, not the Supreme Court Justice).  It left me reflecting on stories and storytelling, and what it means to more actively draw the power of oral and aural culture into the business of living.

MET_RingEncore_PosterAs part of their response to the COVID crisis, the Met Opera put out a free streaming service:  a different opera every night at 7:30.  It was no surprise to see Wagner show up.   Over the course of 4 nights, one could see their 2011-2012 staging of The Ring Cycle (set design by Quebec artist Robert Lepage). Like everyone else, I was familiar with some classic pieces (The Ride of the Valkyries does pull up both scenes from Apocalypse Now, and The Blues Brothers in my imagination).

But my own music school love affair with Wagner had been through Tristan und Isolde, and not really through the Ring Cycle.   It is hard to find the time for such an extended engagement with Opera.   But then came quarantine.  So I settled in to watch it with some gratitude, but largely searching for distraction: looking for something that would give my mind a bit of a rest from thinking about the other things that were at the front of my mind: politics, protests, blockades, and plagues (and particularly the heartbreaking resonances to the past, and the role of plagues in the history of Canadian colonization.)

Surely Opera would give my mind a rest? Closed captioning enabled, laptop in front of me, and the music washing over the room.

I, of course, should have remembered that origin stories generally involve a return to questions of law, violence, jurisdiction and justice.   The big picture questions were likely to arise.   And so they did.  Not too long into the opera, I was listening to the Giants argue with Odin about the injustice in his rupture of the agreement they had reached about their building of Valhalla.   There it was.  The words that were also being uttered by Indigenous peoples to the State across the country:

20200324_204919

Uh?   Is this really Giants talking to Odin?   Or a message sent to Canadian Parliament?!

We need reminders from Giants about ‘the honour of the Crown’?!

20200324_204913

 

So where is Julie Cruikshank in this story?

20200327_100950

I have been really enjoying her book The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). As you might imagine from the title, her focus is on the continuing social significance of stories — how storytelling continues to shape the ways we experience and belong to the world. And for a person such as myself (one raised in the tradition of storytellers, and speech arts competitions), there is such pleasure in thinking about aurality….whether in listening to poetry, stories, or songs.

And so, as I listened to the lush music (of a very politically contentious composer), I found myself thinking about some passages from Cruikshank. As she says:

Meaning does not inhere in events but involves weaving those events into stories that are meaningful at the time. … people invoke the past to talk about the present and the present to talk about the past.

Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories (2000) at 2-3.

I do love that quote. And it reminds me of all the reasons why it matters that we keep drawing story into the ways that we talk about the past and the present. So many ways to think about how our cultural inheritances (whatever those might be) can be drawn into the present to think about ways to respond to our current situations (including those thorny questions about what it means for us today to honour the treaties that we are part of, as well as honouring the reality of the treaties that are not yet in place. Lots of work to do, and more things for me to think about.

[EDITOR NOTE:  I drafted this post in March of 2020, and only finally got around to finishing it.   So what date do I give to such a piece of writing?   Adventures in temporality!]

“Where Happiness Dwells: A History of the Dane-Zaa First Nations” (a video summary)

Rebecca Johnson Uncategorized , ,

For the last several years, UVic Law has run a summer intensive course in Indigenous Law Research, Method and Practice. Each year, the course has been situated in the context of a different legal order. In past summers, different cohorts have engaged with Tsilqot’in, Secwepemc, Cree, and Gitxsan law. This summer, the students are engaging with Dane-zaa Law, and are reading the book Where Happiness Dwells as a primer and introduction.

Written by embedded anthropologists Robin Ridington & Gillian Riddington in collaboration with Elders of the Dane-zaa First Nations, this book is, as promised, “A History of the Dane-zaa First Nation.” The book draws on multiple voices, sources, resources, modes of engagement and forms of encounter.

I first saw this book when it was published in 2013 (when Val Napoleon suggested that I read it). At the time, I recall a set of mixed feelings in response. I was very impressed, but also a bit overwhelmed. It was, in many ways, my first exposure to a book of this sort.

By ‘of this sort’, I mean a truly comprehensive engagement with a specific Indigenous legal order, written from within that legal order, and with attention to language, gender, kinship, cosmology, spirituality, economy, politics, dispute resolution, conflicts, inter-societal engagement and more

By 2017, two more books of this kind had been published: Neil Sterritt’s, Mapping My Way Home: A Gitxsan History, and Ron Ignace and Marianne Ignace’s, Secwépemc People, Land and Laws. All three of these books belong of the bookshelf of every person living in British Columbia.

But back in 2013, with Where Happiness Dwells, I was having my first exposure to such a rich and layered text. Just about everything in the book carried some level of unfamiliarity to me (not surprising since histories such as these were certainly not part of Canadian history as taught in the educational curriculum of my secondary schooling). As I said, it felt a bit overwhelming.

Really great books are, I sometimes think, a bit like places: the more you visit with them, the more you come to see and love in them. And this book is a great book! I should thus not have been surprised at how much I have enjoyed returning to this book eight years later for a second engagement.

Now, it may simply be the case that when one has to teach with a book, one reads it with quite different eyes. Certainly, knowing that I was slotted to teach this course (with Val Napoleon and Hadley Friedland) did incentivize the reading.

Certainly, I can affirm that when reading it the second time, my pens were marking and highlighting up the text in ways that might give a librarian a stomach ache.

But there is more. I found myself appreciating how the book encourages one to think about the business of teaching and learning and Indigenous Laws, and the place of stories and storytelling in that teaching. It also invited reflection on the work of both telling and listening to stories.

I appreciated, for example, how the book not only provided multiple versions of the same origin story by Charlie Yahey, but also shared his insights about how to work with and understand such stories.

I also loved the opportunity to look more closely at stories themselves, and different genres of story telling. So too, a gift to be able to read about intersociety collaborations and conflicts through from the early days of the fur trade through to the present. It was also a gift to have men, women and children all appear in the stories and story telling.

These extensive interactions with story, song, dream and conflict also left me wondering about not only about the work I might do in the classroom, but also about my engagements with my young ‘niblings’ (Gillian Calder’s gender neutral term for ‘nieces and nephews). It got me thinking about the ways all of us (at home, with friends, in our social networks) talk to each other about laws and their place in our lives and conversations.

In the clip below, I share (with students from the summer course) some ideas about the structure of the book, and the gift of each chapter.

Rebecca gives a summary of the book