Wet’suwet’ten, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Indigenous and Colonial Law - Patti Doyle Bedwell

Patti Doyle Bedwell is a Lawyer, writer, and the first Mi’Kmaq woman to earn tenure at Dalhousie University, as well as being Dalhousie Law School’s first teacher of Mi’kmaq ancestry. She is past director of the Schulich School of Law’s Indigenous Black and Mi’kmaq Initiative, and is now a faculty member in the College of Continuing Education. She served as the Chair of the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women for ten years. She has worked closely with Mi’kmaq communities, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, Women and the Law, and with the United Nations on Women and Aboriginal rights. Patti has taught Indigenous People and International Human rights, Indigenous Peoples and Natural Resources, Constitutional Law, Public Law, and Aboriginal Peoples and the Law.

Students prepared for this interview by reading “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” by Sherene Razack and by watching the film Kanehsatake: 270 years of Resistance, directed by Alanis Obomsawin. Students in this class typically create our interview guides based on their readings, but the timeslot when they would normally have done so for this interview overlapped with the National Student Walkout for Wet’suwet’ten. Consequently, we cancelled class, and I was left to my own device.