Profound Lessons from Indigenous Law: John Borrows

Summary: Interview with John Borrows, one of Canada's most prolific and celebrated legal scholars and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota. Borrows, who is Anishinaabe and a member of the Cape Croker First Nation in Ontario's Bruce Peninsula, has written and spoken widely on aboriginal legal rights and traditions, treaties and land claims, and religion and the law. He points out that the treaties are two-way agreements that affect the rights of both indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians - and they were meant to guide the relationships between the two groups forever. They granted rights to people on both sides, but they imposed obligations too. And those obligations and rights can help us live peacefully with each other and with nature. In this Green Interview, Borrows offers a bracing vision of what law really is, where it finds its roots and its authority, and how aboriginal law fits into the Canadian legal fabric.