Revitalizing aboriginal law

"My original plan was to go to the States to make lots of money after I finished law school," laughs Martha Montour, BA 83. That's not quite how her career turned out.

Montour is a Mohawk from Kahnawake, the First Nations reserve near Montreal. While pursuing her law degree at McGill University in the '80s, she was offered a summer job working with the justice coordinator for the Mohawk Council, and her community began to exert its pull. Then came 1990 -- and the Oka Crisis: Kahnawake Mohawks shut down the road running through the community to protest the plan by the town of Oka, Que., to build a golf course on Mohawk land, sparking a two-and-a-half month standoff with the Sûreté du Québec. "I had almost been sucked into the normal lawyer rat race, but I refused to leave the community during the crisis and that slowed my pace down," she says. "It forced me to really examine what I wanted to do: make a lot of money or help people?"

Martha Montour near her law offices in Kahnawake, Que. Montour was part of the O'Reilly & associates' legal team that won George Weldon Adams's landmark 1996 case before the Supreme Court of Canada. Adams, a Mohawk from the Akwesasne reserve, had been convicted of contravening a Quebec fisheries act regulation when he was caught fishing without a permit. The supreme court put aside the conviction because the regulation interfered with Adams's aboriginal rights. |
Photo by Ryan Blau/PBLPhotography

Law seems a long way from Montour's Concordia BA in community nursing specialization. But there are links. While in the nursing program, she was influenced by classmates from Bahrain who were eager to continue to graduate school and then bring their knowledge home. "I guess they infected me," Montour says.

After McGill, she articled with Montreal-based, aboriginal law specialists O'Reilly & Associates and was admitted to the Bar in both Quebec and New York State. Since 1990 Montour has run her own practice in Kahnawake and remains associated with O'Reilly & Associates. The federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development and the Assembly of First Nations have sought her insights on matrimonial property on Native reserves.

Montour now focuses on family, civil and commercial mediation, something especially significant for aboriginal communities. "Traditional Aboriginal justice systems were based on mediation," she points out. An elder, or somebody respected by both sides, would help disputing parties come to a solution. Today, Montour fulfills that role. "I know most community members," she says. "And most of them trust me."

In closely knit aboriginal communities, mediators perform a critical role. "If one person gets thrown out of the house, does it divide the whole municipality? Such disputes can create a real fissure between families, and this wound never really heals," she says. "With mediation, separations and divorces can be resolved peacefully, so families do not end up like the Hatfields and McCoys and their children can continue their relationships with both parents and their extended families." Still, it can be challenging to convince community members. "I sometimes have to remind people that mediation is our traditional approach," says Montour. "And I'm trying to revitalize it."