OTTAWA—Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett says she is considering ways to incorporate indigenous law, often based on collaborative analysis of stories and other traditional knowledge, into the national inquiry on missing and murdered aboriginal women.

The Native Women’s Association of Canada and the Feminist Alliance for International Action published a list of recommendations for the upcoming national inquiry that argued mainstream Canadian law had failed to adequately address the problem of violence against indigenous women.

“Missing and murdered indigenous women are a consequence of state lawlessness created by Canadian law’s inability to deal with the ongoing aftermath of colonialism and its attendant violence. These spaces of lawlessness are also the result of the denial of indigenous laws and legal orders since the arrival of settlers,” says the report based on discussions at a symposium on the inquiry that took place at the University of Ottawa last month.

“The inquiry must not perpetuate the undermining and erasure of indigenous laws and legal orders, but rather must seek to practically support indigenous lawfulness and engagement with indigenous legal orders,” says the report published last week.

Val Napoleon, director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit at the University of Victoria, has been working with a team to help communities rediscover and rebuild their traditional laws and learn how to apply them in the current context.

“Indigenous law hasn’t gone anywhere in Canada, but it has been undermined and it’s been damaged. The work is about rebuilding the conditions of lawfulness in our societies and it’s a long process, obviously, because there have been a lot of changes in our society,” Napoleon said in an interview Saturday.

“I’m not talking about going back to some ideal state. I’m talking about indigenous societies as having legal orders, as having law, as having aspirations of safety and fairness and inclusion as part of those legal orders and we have always struggled, as every other society has, with problems of human being living together. Our societies were no more peaceful or no more violent than any others and we had systems of law to deal with that,” said Napoleon.

Much of indigenous law involves examining oral histories and traditional stories woven into the cultures of indigenous communities to learn what they have to say about obligations to one another, how to solve problems and what should be done when those laws are broken.

That includes thinking about these stories critically and challenging their conclusions when they perpetuate sexism, homophobia and other power imbalances, especially important in the context of gendered violence.

“Where indigenous laws were sexist in the past, we have to change them,” said Napoleon.

Bennett said she supports the recommendation and that a group of experts will be gathering in the near future to discuss how it can be put into practice.

“There are a number of experts in indigenous law and indigenous knowledge who, in trying to describe a commission that would be unique . . . are going to come together, hopefully next month, to see how we can be as creative and innovative as we can incorporating indigenous law and indigenous knowledge into the process,” Bennett said in an interview Friday.

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One way to incorporate indigenous law into the inquiry, as recommended by the report, would be to establish “indigenous law lodges,” which would involve setting aside a physical space at the inquiry to allow for this rebuilding — and how it applies to gendered violence — to take place.

“Those are the kinds of things that we are very interested in,” said Bennett, who also said she also heard people speak about justice circles, restorative justice and other approaches during the pre-inquiry consultations that wrapped up last week.