Professor Aaron Mills' two-week Anishinaabe Law Circle Learning course last summer challenged everything I thought I knew about law, starting with the most fundamental question: what is law? Together we grappled with legal authority deriving from the Crown versus the Creator; kinship versus citizenship; knowledge versus belief; stories versus statutes; sovereignty versus self-governance; and persuasion versus coercion in achieving remedies and resolution.
In the summer of 2025, seventeen students learned about Indigenous law on its own terms at the 's Plateau neighbourhood. Professor Mills (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation, Bear Clan), holder of the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Constitutionalism and Philosophy, masterfully taught us by showing as well as telling the foundational features of Anishinaabe law and legal theory. This included stories of his late grandmother and other elders with whom he has apprenticed over the past fifteen years鈥攕tories that conveyed substantive law through teachings and defining norms such as Anishinaabe respect for elders.
Professor Mills' core intellectual project is to explore and explain Anishinaabe law on its own terms. That understanding requires experiencing it, he explains, "through its own concepts, practices, and processes... it isn't possible to achieve this internal understanding of Anishinaabe law propositionally (i.e. through talk or writing alone). Instead, understanding must be won through practice and experience. Thus, the Anishinaabe Law Circle course, like the taught in past summers, creates an opportunity for students to learn by doing."
The 2025 Circle Learning course builds upon the first-year . In 2020, 91直播 Law introduced Indigenous Legal Traditions as a mandatory class for all BCL/JD students, in response to聽the Truth & Reconciliation Commission's . The Circle Learning law students welcomed four relatively novice additional participants, ranging in age from 16 to 63, including as a 91直播 Law Visiting Scholar, from University of Maryland Carey School of Law (who has taught Foundation Transactional Skills at 91直播), 91直播 Law professor of corporate governance Darren Rosenblum, and their teenage daughter.
With humility, respect, and candour, we all fully embraced the circle format. Professor Mills explains its singularity: "Within it, we use stories, material culture, drumming, ceremony, land-based education, and Indigenous community-based education. Like my late grandmother, Bessie Mainville, I try to let behavioural and dispositional modelling carry more of my message than my bare words do."
Professor Rosenblum鈥檚 reflection, from the unusual position of a law professor participating as a student, confirms those profound differences in impact and substance: 鈥淓ach of us, including my daughter Mel, experienced first-hand how radically distinct and important this legal system is. The breadth and depth of this intensive course has no parallel in my academic career. "
Sarah Sawaya, BCL/JD candidate, captured the essence of circle learning: "In most law school settings, I'm used to sitting behind a screen, often watching others do the same, with attention divided between the lecture and online distractions. This class asked us to sit in a circle, facing one another, engaging with intention and presence. That shift in format and focus deeply enriched my legal education by showing me how law can emerge from relationships, attention, and sharing space鈥攏ot just from texts and arguments."
Within the circle, we began each day with a smudge ceremony, Professor Mills' drumming and singing, and passing the talking stick clockwise in Anishinaabe tradition. Each participant shared insights and reflections about our learning.
Among many revelations, the course convinced me that ultimate legal authority must come from the land itself. The alternative鈥攐ur present system鈥斅爌laces authority with institutions like the Ministry of Natural Resources, "an agency that doesn't live on the land and doesn't live with the results of the decisions it makes for the land,"聽as Gary Potts (Temagami) writes in Growing Together From the Earth.
Professor Mills' co-teacher , Barrister and Solicitor and 91直播 Law sessional instructor, served as a bridge-builder, teaching us how Anishinaabe and Settler legal systems can interact. This one-credit element helped students process ways in which Indigenous law can meaningfully work with Western rule-based legal systems, while also identifying approaches that fail because the two systems' responses to conflict鈥攆or example, the causes of violence and appropriate remedies鈥攁re fundamentally incompatible.
A sampling of students' reflections best expresses how the Circle Learning course opened new possibilities:
Noah Kidd, BCL/JD candidate: "Learning about Anishinaabe law provided totally different perspectives about how society and law can be organized, enriching my understanding of what law could be."
Sharon Saddick, BCL/JD candidate: "Learning to see law as a living system of responsibilities rather than just rights. This shift taught me to view legal systems as relational and reciprocal, centered on care for all beings and future generations, which challenged my understanding of law as purely adversarial or extractive." She added that the course "has motivated me to continue in law with a special focus on Indigenous legal studies."
Jagnoor Saran, BCL/JD candidate:聽"Understanding that self-governance (as considered in Indigenous law) is sovereignty. Sovereignty is not necessarily something that needs to be granted by the government and its supreme legal authority. This has been the best course I've probably ever taken."
Ferrin Evans, BCL/JD candidate: "This course allowed me to remember what I first considered when I took ILT with Aaron Mills years ago鈥攖hat legal work can be approached in a more ethical and transformative manner."
Maushumi Bhattacharjee, DCL 3rd year: "The circle was so powerful because it had so much diversity, especially people in different stages of their lives, from kids to professors in their late careers. As a doctoral student who is an aspiring academic, I particularly enjoyed having professors who have lived the same dream as mine sharing in the circle."
A course that fundamentally changes how students see law and their world cannot be fully captured in a brief article. Circle learning's methods of careful observation, patient listening, and story-sharing taught us that legal understanding must reflect not just intellectual knowledge, but insights from the heart, spirit, and body.
In a world fractured by climate catastrophe, social inequality, and institutional failures, Anishinaabe law offers something Western legal systems desperately lack: a foundation built on relationship rather than domination, on responsibility to past and future generations rather than extraction from the present, and on the radical understanding that true authority flows not from human constructs of power, but from our sacred obligation to the land that sustains all life.
By , 91直播 Law Visiting Scholar and recent Fulbright Specialist
