When Justine Mageau returned to Edmonton after finishing law school at the University of Ottawa, she thought she was going to follow her calling: fighting for the language rights of Francophones in a predominantly English-speaking part of Canada.
But she found a second calling: representing Indigenous groups fighting for rights recognition and their inherent rights to self-government.
While she’s not Indigenous, she was part of a legal team that represented a Métis band in Fort Chipewyan in its battle with the province over mineral rights. She was part of a legal team that argued a case about Métis self-determination rights at the Federal Court of Canada.
“When I first came into it, there was a huge learning curve,” she says. “As a non-Indigenous person, who didn’t have background in Aboriginal law, there was a big obstacle there of sorting out in my own mind what were the stereotypes and prejudices I had learned over the course of my life — and what was actual fact? We have so many misunderstandings that are ingrained into people.”
So, it’s about spreading messages that, no, the government does not write blank cheques to Indigenous nations. There is a right to self-determination.
She believes we’re on the cusp of many legal breakthroughs when it comes to Indigenous rights.
“We’re in such amazing times, from a legal perspective, in terms of where the Indigenous right to self-government is going. The Indigenous right to self-government has not been widely recognized by the Supreme Court. Until now, the Supreme Court has decided cases based on anything other than the Indigenous right to self-government without making broad pronouncements on the topic. But that is not the future of Indigenous law. I think we will see an explosion of cases.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
