Halifax

Aki-noomaagewin (Earth's Teachings): Stories of the Fall, Indigenous Law and Reconciliation

MacKay Lecture Series, Part II

7:00pm
Thursday October 18 2012

Professor John Borrows (Kegedonce) who works and writes between and across humanist and Indigenous knowledge-practices. He is one of Canada’s most highly regarded Constitutional Law experts, and much more.  Dr. Borrows’ writing, scholarship, and speaking is a living conversation between the oral history, story, pictographic, and dreaming practices of the Anishnabek, and the practices of western academic scholarship, from constitutional and case law analysis, discourse studies, to philosophical reflection.  In many ways, his scholarship is an enactment, a “physical philosophy” of Indigenous peoples’ reconciliation of their legal traditions, with those of Canada, and in turn with Creation.  Dr. Borrows’ lecture will open audiences to this practice of reconciliation, as exampled in his 2010 paired volumes Drawing out the Law:  A Spirit’s Guide, and Canada’s Indigenous Constitution. It is precisely his gentle, yet formidable capacity to move between an Indigenous practice of knowledge and a conventional scholarly one, that gives Dr. Borrows the quiet authority to draw us all into the unfolding livable possibilities of reconciliation between peoples, with the animated things of nature, with the richness of our differences.

Speaker Bio:  
Dr. Borrows is Anishinabek / Ojibway and a member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario.  Author of numerous articles and books, his Recovering Canada; The Resurgence of Indigenous Law, received the Donald Smiley Award for the best book in Canadian Political Science. Professor Borrows is a recipient an Aboriginal Achievement Award in Law and Justice as well as innumerable gifts of honour from Indigenous communities in Canada and around the world, a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation, and a Fellow of the Academy of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada. 

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