ZOOM LINK:

https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/93911818257

McGill Law Prof. Kirsten Anker will moderate a discussion with Shiri Pasternak of the Yellowhead Institute and Rayanna Seymour-Hourie of West Coast Environmental Law on the intersection of Indigenous legal traditions and ecological law.

Chair:

Kirsten Anker is Associate Professor at McGill Faculty of Law, where she teaches property, legal theory and Aboriginal law/Indigenous legal traditions. Her book Declarations of Interdependence: A Legal Pluralist Approach to Indigenous Rights explores various aspects of claiming Native/Aboriginal Title and she has written widely on the challenge to orthodox understandings of law posed by the recognition in Australia and Canada of the existence of Indigenous law.  Current projects include work on Indigenous legal traditions in formal legal education, non-static digital mapping in land claims, the privatisation of Indigenous consultation, and ecological jurisprudence.

Presenters:

Shiri Pasternak is Research Director at the Yellowhead Institute and Assistant Professor in Criminology at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (2017). Her current research involves studying Indigenous rights in the natural resource extraction economy. She is a Principal Investigator, with other scholars and community partners MiningWatch and the Indigenous Network in Economies and Trade, in a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant called, “Reconciling Sovereignties: New Techniques for ‘Authorizing’ Extraction on Indigenous Territories.”

Rayanna Seymour-Hourie is a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law. She is Anishinaabe (Ojibway) from Lake of the Woods in Treaty #3 Territory (Northwestern Ontario). She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 2015 from the University of Manitobaß and earned her Juris Doctor (law degree) from Robson Hall, University of Manitoba in 2018. She is now a Staff Lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, working with the RELAW (Revitalizing Indigenous Law for Land, Air and Water) program.  Rayanna’s work has focused on Anishinaabe Nibi Inaakonigewin (water laws), and how the laws and teachings that water carries can inform humans of their responsibilities to each other, the natural world and spiritual world.