We're at a really exciting time in Canada with the TRC recommendations and the missing and murdered indigenous women's inquiry. Recently the Federation of Law Societies of Canada asked a question about what a competent lawyer needs to know today about indigenous law, because the reality insofar as land issues is that when we look at the environmental landscape and the economic landscape, indigenous peoples are a part of Canada, and Canada is multi-juridical.
How do we relate and solve human problems and conflicts across legal orders, and what are the different kinds of skills that people need to have in order to be able to do that? That's what we're grappling with, those nitty-gritty kinds of things that are the human problems of law, which law has to be equipped to solve.
We've met, as I mentioned, with the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and with other law societies across the country. We've been looking at the different evaluative requirements that law societies have in the planning of their curricula, and we're imagining drawing on the trans-systemic methodology of teaching from McGill that looks at civil law and common law, and we'll take an adaptive but similar approach.
We could have, for instance, Anishnabek constitutional law and Canadian constitutional law. We could have Tsimshian or Gitxan property law and Canadian property law, or Dene criminal law. We're looking at which courses would be taught trans-systemically in the first year and all the courses imagined over a four-year term. The plan includes field schools as well as class time so that students don't lose their connection with their regions and their communities.