Playing the role of an accused drug dealer Friday at a mock trial at the University of Toronto law school, 17-year-old Lakota Williams beat every charge but one; possession. Not bad for a high school student who came to Toronto last week from Thunder Bay, Ont., for a five-day taste of law school.
She was one of 35 native teenagers from across Canada who took part in the first Aboriginal Youth Summer Program hosted by the faculties of law at York University and the University of Toronto as a way to encourage more native teens to consider law as a career.
For Williams, who already knows she wants to be a lawyer, the program with tours of courtrooms and law forms, the mock trial and speakers on everything from Canadian and clan law to aboriginal rights, changed her focus from criminal law to aboriginal justice.
“We held a drum circle on campus and it was so powerful I was on the verge of tears,” she said. “It was like touching your roots, and we all played; no one was ashamed.”
The program is part of a growing bid by universities and colleges to reach out to aboriginal youth, who have among the lowest participation rates in higher education. The program was financed by the U of T law faculty and York’s Osgoode Hall as well as grants from the Law Foundation of Ontario and the Law School Admission Council.
But outreach can work, said U of T law dean Mayo Moran. “Aboriginal youth are hungry for opportunities to learn about the law and post-secondary options; we received double the number of applicants for available spaces.”
Osgoode Dean Lorne Sossin said he hoped that letting students meet aboriginal lawyers and students and even Ontario Court of Appeal Judge Harry LaForme can help students picture themselves in law.
LaForme, a member of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, didn’t sugar-coat their prospects; he admitted it was lonely being an aboriginal judge but noted that being part of an oppressed minority has made him sensitive to injustice facing others — and helped him craft the landmark ruling in 2002 that legalized same-sex marriage.
“If you enter law, you’re entering an environment that doesn’t always open its arms to us,” he warned students, “so you just have to surround yourself with who you are.”
Student Cassandra Zaugg-Bice isn’t sure about being a lawyer, although she signed up for the program to “help build an aboriginal pillar of justice.”
Not everyone came for the casework; Central Technical Institute student Raiden Snache came for the chance to “meet other native teens who are on their own journey.” He can’t quite see himself as a lawyer; “I think I’m more of an entrepreneur.”
But just by staying in high school and considering higher learning, these students are all future leaders, noted PhD law student Dawnis Kennedy, a teacher of traditional ways who played cultural den mother to the teens billeted in a U of T dorm.
“For a long time education was about educating Indians right out of their indigenous identity, and still we see nearly 60 per cent of aboriginal youth on reserves drop out of high school” she said. “But this program puts students at the heart of their own education; and every single youth who stays committed to their education is important.”
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Louise Brown
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